Broadcast Television

From unraveling the confusion surrounding digital TV to revealing the inner workings of Nielsen ratings Broadcast Television: A Complete Guide to the Industry takes an impartial and in-depth look at the business of commercial television. Unlike many books addressing this topic, the purpose of this primer is not to support a partisan opinion about what is right or wrong with television but rather to provide objective information from which the reader can make his or her own judgments. To that end the organization and presentation style is also unique in that the industry is explained as a dynamic and interdependent system of technology, economics, and regulation. This systems approach to learning helps the reader understand better the interwoven parts of television business. As a concise and highly focused overview of the business of commercial television, Broadcast Television: A Complete Guide to the Industry can serve as a stand-alone text or as a supplement to other course readings addressing an array of topics involving television today.

This book reports findings from a major, multidisciplinary study of the impact of broadcast television on the remote island community of St. Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean. Broadcast television was introduced to the island for the first time in March 1995. This introduction represented a major event on the island, whose only televisual experience had been through video. In the years leading up to the introduction of TV, the researchers who wrote this book collected data by observing the island's young children in classroom settings, and during free-play. In addition to these observations they asked the children's teachers to rate their students' behavior, and invited the children to explain to them what leisure time activities they engaged in. With the data they were able to amass on these key variables they have assembled and coded the results into baseline measures central to the study. Once TV had arrived, they collected data annually on the key dependent measures to determine if the introduction of broadcast TV had any discernible influence on the behavior of the children.

This newest edition of Broadcast Journalism continues its long tradition of covering the basics of broadcasting from gathering news sources, interviewing, putting together a programme, news writing, reporting, editing, working in the studio, conducting live reports, and more. Two new authors have joined forces in this new edition to present behind the scenes perspectives on multimedia broadcast news, where it is heading, and how you get there. Technology is meshing global and local news. Constant interactivity between on-the-scene reporting and nearly instantaneous broadcasting to the world has changed the very nature of how broadcast journalists must think, act, write and report on a 24/7 basis. This new edition takes up this digital workflow and convergence. Students of broadcast journalism and professors alike will find that the sixth edition of Broadcast Journalism is completely up-to-date. Includes new photos, quotations, and coverage of convergent journalism, podcasting, multimedia journalism, citizen journalism, and more!

The collision of new technologies, changing business strategies, and innovative storytelling that produced a new golden age of TV. Cable television channels were once the backwater of American television, programming recent and not-so-recent movies and reruns of network shows. Then came La Femme Nikita, OZ, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and The Walking Dead. And then, just as “prestige cable” became a category, came House of Cards and Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video, and other Internet distributors of television content. What happened? In We Now Disrupt This Broadcast, Amanda Lotz chronicles the collision of new technologies, changing business strategies, and innovative storytelling that produced an era termed “peak TV.” Lotz explains that changes in the business of television expanded the creative possibilities of television. She describes the costly infrastructure rebuilding undertaken by cable service providers in the late 1990s and the struggles of cable channels to produce (and pay for) original, scripted programming in order to stand out from the competition. These new programs defied television conventions and made viewers adjust their expectations of what television could be. Le Femme Nikita offered cable's first antihero, Mad Men cost more than advertisers paid, The Walking Dead became the first mass cable hit, and Game of Thrones was the first global television blockbuster. Internet streaming didn't kill cable, Lotz tells us. Rather, it revolutionized how we watch television. Cable and network television quickly established their own streaming portals. Meanwhile, cable service providers had quietly transformed themselves into Internet providers, able to profit from both prestige cable and streaming services. Far from being dead, television continues to transform.