People, Personas, and Politics 30 – ‘Why is News an Industry?’
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): People, Personas, and Politics
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/18
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Rick Rosner: You had another question.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I did, a few. The news, you mentioned a little while ago, has become industry. So much of news…
RR: …hold on, hold on, hold on, we should discuss why it wasn’t an industry for a long time. We should discuss why it wasn’t an industry for a long time because the news business was a business. You are in the news to make a ton of money, which make sense. Even a town as small as Albuquerque when it was 80,000, 100,000, or 150,000 people, had a morning and evening newspaper, Denver when I was growing up had a couple newspapers.
Plus, there was a Boulder newspaper. New York probably had 30 newspapers simultaneously at various points in its history. They made money through the crappy forms of “yellow” journalism. That was the term for shitty sensationalistic journalism. It was called yellow journalism based on a comic strip called “The Yellow Kid” because used to buy newspaper based on what comic strips they had.
SDJ: [Laughing].
RR: “The Yellow Kid” was the kid in a night shirt with a buck tooth. He was yellow. SDJ: [Laughing].
RR: It showed the newspaper was full colour. So people wanted to buy it, “Look! Our newspaper is in full color.” And if the newspaper got distributed, then great. In the late 40s, the first national T.V. networks went on around 1948 in America. At the time, the U.S. government has always owned the air waves. The frequency bands on which T.V. used to be broadcast. Now, most T.V. is not broadcast T.V. There are broadcast networks: ABC, NBC, CBS. But even those networks, most people get stuff through cable. In 1948, everything travelled via radio wavs to people’s T.V. antennas down from the roof into the T.V.s. The government owned the frequencies. They owned the radio and T.V. bands. The government said, “We will lease you these bands at super cheap rates because you are going to provide a public service.”
One thing they did was daily news casts in order to get these deals on broadcast bands. So the T.V. shows would do 15 minute nightly news shows, which became 30 minute news shows.
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