Independent Radio News (New Zealand)

Independent Radio News or IRN as it was more commonly known was a news service played on most independently owned and operated radio stations in New Zealand during the 1980s and 1990's. The majority of New Zealand radio stations not owned by Radio New Zealand used this news and sport service usually followed by the station's own local news and weather forecast.

In 1996 Radio New Zealand sold their commercial operation and The Radio Network was formed, at the time The Radio Network purchased IRN. The Radio Network branded the news service on their own stations as "Radio Network News" while the news service continued to be called IRN on stations not owned by The Radio Network despite the news coming from the same place. Radio New Zealand continued to operate their own news service on Radio New Zealand National and Radio New Zealand Concert, the two non-commercial stations that were not sold.

By 2000 a large number of radio stations had been taken over by RadioWorks and as a result RadioWorks didn't like the idea of paying for a news service operated by its main competitor and chose to start their own news service. After CanWest purchased RadioWorks the news service became known as the Global News Service (Global is the same name as Television network in Canada operated by CanWest), after 2005 this became known as Radio Live News. [cite book|title=The Great New Zealand Radio Experiment|author=Morris William Shanahan, Karen Neill|pages=175|date=2005|id=ISBN 0170124800|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=rEq27qhOdDwC&pg=PA175&dq=%22Independent+Radio+News%22&sig=CTFxBLwzmjsBVIjikcoR0_WlUFA|accessdate=2008-01-08}]

Today IRN is simply known better as the Newstalk ZB news service. Most TRN stations such as Classic Hits FM, Radio Hauraki and Coast will mention the news comes from Newstalk ZB but each station has its own newsreader. The Newstalk ZB news service is also used on stations not owned by The Radio Network or MediaWorks NZ but some stations not owned by The Radio Network or MediaWorks NZ will use the Radio Live News service.

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