Technically, Portland doesn't have any "News" radio stations. The only bona fide News station in the entire Pacific Northwest is KOMO, Seattle, which broadcasts news and other service elements (weather, traffic, sports and business headlines, etc.) around the clock. News stations don't exist outside of the top 15 or so metro areas as they are very expensive to program, requiring large amounts of new content to be produced on a constant, 24-hour basis. The closest thing we have in Portland are "News/Talk" stations, which combine a morning and sometimes an afternoon all-news programming block of several hours' duration, with long-form talk shows taking up the rest of the broadcast day. KEX, KXL and KPAM are the city's only three News/Talk stations. At such stations, continuous coverage of truly major news events is supposed to pre-empt talk shows, but in practice this doesn't happen as often as it should, especially nowadays. More often than not such stations just don't have the personnel for this anymore. Then we have purely "Talk" stations, which do no news block at all, although the politically oriented ones are very likely to have brief top-and-bottom-of-the-hour newscasts. KPOJ and KCMD are politically-oriented Talk stations. KUIK in Hillboro is another.

What undoubtedly confuses some people is the slogan that both KEX and KXL use, namely "News Radio." This is mere puffery of the same sort as KGW calling itself "News Channel 8." By contrast, KPAM labels itself more accurately as "News Talk Radio."