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The article discusses how changes in local media ownership have largely led to a decline in radio news. There are about a dozen radio stations that serve Stevens Point today, but none offers local radio news. Local news on commercial radio, has been on a steady path of decline caused by the trends and events that started some 20 years ago and peaked with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Commercial radio is no longer a reliable source of local information, even during times of breaking news and major emergency, according to David Rubin, dean of Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University in New York. Rubin knew what a radio station dedicated to local news would do: The news crew would report to work en masse regardless of prearranged shifts and schedules; the station's disaster coverage plan would be implemented and reporters would be dispatched to gather information at key sites; local officials would be in the studio taking questions from anxious callers; commercials would be suspended. The decline of local radio news most greatly affects its historic stronghold: small-town and rural U.S., where television coverage was not universal and people depended on the ubiquitous radio for everything from tornado warnings to agricultural alerts. Commercial stations committed to cost reductions turned to another source of programming in the 1980s and 1990s that was cheaper than local news: the so-called news/talk format. At one end of the spectrum, news/talk shows include programs such as National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation, which provides serious programming. Local commercial radio news is following a pattern first seen in the local newspaper industry as circulations started declining 30 years ago, largely because of the industry's failure to attract younger readers for whom local news is not a top priority.