WORLD returns to the airwaves

I mentioned back in July that WORLD Radio Executive Editor Paul Butler had a major new ­initiative on the horizon that deserved its own ­column to introduce properly.

Before I get to it, here’s a brief history of WORLD Radio: It all began more than a decade ago as a single weekend radio program on SRN, the Salem Radio Network. That early iteration of The World and Everything in It ran on hundreds of stations, mostly on Saturdays, which was not a day many people listened to the radio.

I’ll shorten the history lesson considerably and say that eventually we stopped distributing The World and Everything in It via broadcast altogether, and the program is now our daily podcast. A key element, as regular listeners know, is the opening newscast—a five-to-seven-minuteish rundown of current news, with some deeper reporting on one or two stories.

This brings me to WORLD’s new initiative. In partnership with two radio networks, Moody Radio and Faith Radio, which together represent more than 1,500 outlets around the world, WORLD will provide top-of-the-hour newscasts produced jointly by our WORLD Radio team, led by Paul Butler, and our News team, led by Lynde Langdon. As of this writing, we’ve been on-air for about five weeks, and the ­station count is closing in on 200.

This won’t simply be our current newscast repeated over and over every day. Broadcasters need crisp, three-minute (exact, not ish) newscasts, and those need updating throughout the day.

Our teams will produce multiple newscasts for each of the networks’ key “dayparts,” so their listeners will hear updated reporting throughout the day, ­produced by WORLD. Our goals for these newscasts: to serve those stations’ ­listeners by delivering Biblically objective reporting on issues that are important to them, and to introduce those listeners to WORLD’s other content, so we ­eventually can serve them as members of our own audience.

With this initiative, hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of radio ­listeners will now be able to hear Biblically objective reporting multiple times per day. We thank God for this opportunity to share WORLD’s work.