Media and Publishing

▪ 2007

Introduction

The Frankfurt Book Fair enjoyed a record number of exhibitors, and the distribution of free newspapers surged. TV broadcasters experimented with ways of engaging their audience via the Internet; mobile TV grew; magazine publishers promoted digital editions; and the popularity of e-books appeared to be on the rise.

Television

Industry Trends.

      In 2006 the television industry found itself in the uncomfortable position of being redefined by an array of new media technologies and the habits they created in consumers. It was a distressingly familiar situation. Only a few years earlier, the major American television broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox—had had to make room for a vast new assortment of cable news, entertainment, and sports channels. Then a new generation of digital video recorders (DVRs) threatened to move viewers beyond the grasp of competitive scheduling and—more important—the advertisers who kept the industry afloat. The attack on the primacy of TV had been taken up by the seemingly limitless Internet, particularly the ever-more-sophisticated computers and handheld devices that made downloading, trading, and watching entire TV shows as easy as pointing and clicking.

      Although the new video technologies threatened the TV industry's traditional ways, they also opened unforeseen horizons for creativity and commerce. By the end of the 2005–06 TV season, most of the networks were allowing Internet surfers to view recently aired episodes of their most popular shows on the networks' own Web sites, often for free. Other episodes were offered for sale (usually for no more than $2 an episode), either on the broadcast network's Web site or via Apple Computer's online iTunes store. After the end of the season, producers of NBC's sitcom The Office and ABC's hit adventure/mystery program Lost launched a small network of Web sites that wove show clips, unaired video, and freshly written material into Internet-only presentations that served both to keep fan enthusiasm high during the off-season and as a platform for selling DVDs and other show merchandise.

      Most network TV executives had come to accept that their industry had to change—and change quickly—in order to keep its place as the preeminent medium for news and entertainment. To ignore the upstart media would mean commercial death. If TV companies turned the new technology to their favour, however, they might not only survive but enter a new era of prosperity.

      The changes were coming slowly and often against the networks' instincts. When a viewer uploaded Lazy Sunday, a rap video parody from NBC's Saturday Night Live to the YouTube free video-clip Web site, NBC's outrage at the copyright infringement was eased only after its executives realized that the appearance of the video online had given the fading comedy show a new burst of attention. Within months the network struck a deal to add more NBC clips to YouTube's free online library. When the pilot for Nobody's Watching—a sitcom that first had been commissioned by NBC and then was rejected by the WB network—leaked onto YouTube and began racking up impressive numbers of viewers, NBC again capitalized on the phenomenon by snapping up the rights to the program. Still unsure whether the show could cross over to a mainstream audience, the network created its own Nobody's Watching Web site, set its cast and crew to work making more Internet-only episodes, and thereby transformed the new medium into a low-cost tryout vehicle.

      Other industry changes only made TV production more expensive or threatened to dry up traditional revenue streams. Sales at the annual TV upfront advertising sales derby in May deflated by 2% from the previous year, in part because of Madison Avenue's fear that DVR- and Internet-equipped viewers would no longer sit still long enough to watch their commercials. Broadcasters experimented with new forms of promotion; ads were turned into elaborate multipart capsule dramas (called content wraps) that played between the real shows, or companies were charged to place their products into the shows themselves. Meanwhile, production costs for new programs skyrocketed to new heights, while the traditional back-end revenue streams—network repeats, sales on VHS or DVD, and worldwide syndication—no longer seemed quite as guaranteed as they once had.

Organization and Regulation.

      Eager to economize, the owners of the American television industry's two youngest and smallest networks, the WB and UPN, opted to merge their once fiercely competitive organizations into a single network known as the CW. The new network debuted in September with a fall season that offered its forebearers' strongest shows along with a few new contenders. American television networks faced an aggressive stance from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission over content standards. In June the maximum fine that the agency could impose for over-the-air violations of decency standards by broadcasters was increased 10-fold to $325,000.

       Australian Communications Minister Helen Coonan announced an overhaul of media ownership laws. The changes would end restrictions on foreign companies' controlling more than 15% of a television company or more than 25% of a newspaper publisher, and they relaxed cross-media bans within the same city or regional market. Coonan also unveiled Channel A, a free-to-air service, and Channel B, a mobile-TV service, which were to be auctioned separately in 2007.

      The British government increased the annual TV license fee paid by every British TV owner to £131.50 (about $229) on April 1. The BBC was requesting above-inflation annual increases in order to broaden digital TV and Internet services. Canada's Heritage Minister Bev Oda planned a review of the mandate for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) as a public broadcaster. The CBC had come under criticism for increasing its non-Canadian content and for allowing its programming to follow the lead of commercial broadcasters. Control of Canada's Thomson Corp., 70% owned by the Thomson family, passed in 2006 from patriarch Kenneth (Thomson, Kenneth Roy ) upon his death to his eldest son, David, who had been chairman since 2002. (See Obituaries.) Thomson's Toronto-based Woodbridge Co. held 40% in Bell Globemedia, owner of the Globe and Mail newspaper and of CTV, which was Canada's largest commercial television network.

       Mexico's Federal Competition Commission prevented Mexican media giant Televisa from purchasing 50% of cable-TV and Internet provider Televisión Internacional. Mexico's second largest media company, TV Azteca, engaged American Hispanic broadcaster Telemundo in a legal dispute over Nostromo, a production company that was working on Telemundo's reality show Quinceañera.

       Germany's biggest commercial broadcaster, ProSiebenSat.1 Media, which in 2005 had been the target of a failed takeover by publishing house Axel Springer, agreed in December to be bought by private equity firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Permira. Private equity groups also purchased two of Taiwan's top cable-TV operators; U.S.-based Carlyle Group bought Eastern Multimedia, and South Korea's MBK Partners bought China Network Systems. Cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder sold one-half of his share of TV broadcaster Central European Media Enterprises to private investors Apax Partners France, and CanWest and British company ITV sold Ireland's TV3 network to private equity firm Doughty Hanson.

      Walt Disney bought UTV Software Communications' Hungama, an Indian children's cable and satellite TV channel that broadcast in Hindi. India's 2006 National Readership Survey found that print media were being overrun by satellite TV, which had 230 million viewers and more than 200 channels.

Programming.

 The larger American television networks shored up their schedules—and financial bottom lines—with inexpensive yet reliably popular unscripted reality or game shows. Following the programming trend, NBC chief Jeff Zucker announced in October that between 8 PM and 9 PM his network would air reality shows exclusively almost every night of the week. Most of the unscripted shows were critically reviled, but each network had at least one that was a major hit with viewers. CBS's Survivor remained in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings after more than seven years. ABC's Dancing with the Stars and NBC's Deal or No Deal found devoted audiences, and the CW's America's Next Top Model earned some of the new network's highest ratings. None, however, could touch Fox's pop-music pageant, American Idol, which was TV's most popular show in 2006. American Idol drew an average of 31 million viewers to its Tuesday-night broadcasts and only slightly fewer to the show's Wednesday-night results segment. Other hit shows, including the remaining three in Nielsen's season-long top five—CBS's CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and ABC's pair of sex-laced dramas, Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy—were lucky to attract more than 20 million viewers in any given week.

      The year's top Emmy Awards were handed to a number of network hits. Fox's terrorist-fighting serial 24 was named the year's best drama, and its star, Kiefer Sutherland, took home the trophy for best dramatic actor. Mariska Hargitay, star of NBC's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit was named the year's best dramatic actress. NBC's The Office won for best comedy, and the award for best comic actress went to former Seinfeld star Julia Louis-Dreyfus for her work in The New Adventures of Old Christine. Tony Shalhoub (Shalhoub, Tony ) (see Biographies), who won the trophy for best comic actor with his starring role in USA's detective show, Monk, was the sole cable series to win an Emmy in a major category.

      Two of the three major network evening news shows went through another topsy-turvy year. At ABC the year began with a team of strikingly young coanchors, Bob Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas, sharing the anchor desk of World News Tonight. The arrangement ended in late January when Woodruff was grievously wounded by a roadside bomb while on assignment in Iraq. Vargas continued as the anchor until May, when she stepped down to take maternity leave, and ABC veteran Charles Gibson was named the show's sole anchor. CBS searched for a permanent replacement for longtime anchor Dan Rather (who had left the CBS Evening News under a cloud in March 2005) but did not consider interim anchor Bob Schieffer, a veteran nearing his 70th birthday. Instead, network chairman Leslie Moonves raided NBC's Today for its popular coanchor, Katie Couric, and made her the first woman to be the sole anchor of a major network evening news show. Better known for her popularity and on-air warmth than for her hard-news acumen, Couric won mixed reviews for her CBS debut on September 5. Ratings for the show increased temporarily, but within a few weeks the show fell back into third place, trailing by a wide margin NBC's Brian Williams and his top-ranked Evening News.

      Cable news channels, led by Fox News and its main rival CNN, continued to be dominated by opinion-driven talk shows, such as Fox News's consistently top-rated O'Reilly Factor with pugnacious conservative Bill O'Reilly. Comedy Central's pair of satiric news shows, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, featuring Stephen Colbert (Colbert, Stephen ) (see Biographies), lampooned politicians and media figures from every part of the spectrum and won plaudits for their wit and intelligence. Meanwhile, the network news teams tried to match the 24/7 capabilities of cable news by creating Web sites that they could update around the clock and use to provide viewers access to unedited interviews and longer, more detailed worldwide reports.

      The 2006 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup, held in Germany, averaged 93 million viewers per match and was broadcast live in 54 global markets. (See Sports and Games: Sidebar (FIFA World Cup 2006 ).) FIFA's TV-rights partner Infront provided coverage in virtually every country in the world. According to Infront, 41% of the cumulative audience was female, and some regions were estimated to have achieved a 90% market share. Video streaming was used to show matches in some countries when the time of the match was inconvenient for viewing live. Meanwhile, French cable network OLN saw a steep ratings decline for the 2006 Tour de France following the retirement of seven-time winner Lance Armstrong after the 2005 tour. The decline was exacerbated by the absence from the race of several of the top 2006 contenders because of a drug- doping scandal. (See Sports and Games: Cycling .)

      Twenty-five-year-old MTV, which reached 481.5 million households in 179 countries, inaugurated the Overdrive broadband video channel and the Flux video-sharing Web site. MTV's Logo channel and Stolichnaya vodka co-produced a commercial-free documentary series about gay life in the U.S. called Be Real. A Mexican soap opera launched the Latin pop band RBD, whose popularity crossed over to non-Latinos in the U.S., Canada, and Asia. RBD's three women and three men were actors in the megahit telenovela Rebelde, in which they played teenagers who decide to start a band.

 In Britain satellite broadcaster BSkyB unveiled a version of Current TV, the user-generated content channel jointly produced by former U.S. vice president Al Gore and entrepreneur Joel Hyatt. British ITVPlay joined the lucrative quiz phone-in business with its game shows Quizmania and The Mint. Turner Broadcasting reviewed classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons shown on Britain's Boomerang channel and, after a broadcasting watchdog group received complaints, voluntarily edited scenes in which smoking was depicted. Heavy alcohol consumption among young people was the target of the British government's shock TV commercials “Know Your Limits.”

       Hong Kong's Television Entertainment Licensing Authority allowed TVB to show Hollywood's Academy Awards ceremony live, for the first time, because Taiwanese director Ang Lee and his movie Brokeback Mountain were nominees. China's TV and radio hosts were ordered by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) to use putonghua (modern standard Chinese) and avoid mainland regional dialects or Hong Kong and Taiwanese accents. SARFT also banned foreign cartoons on Chinese TV from 5 PM to 8 PM in order to give way to homegrown animation characters. In other government actions, Thailand's new military leaders censored Thai cable-TV reports concerning the foreign media's coverage of the coup that overthrew Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and the Bulgarian media council revoked BBC's broadcast license for allegedly having ceased all Bulgarian-language broadcasts.

Technology.

      The International Telecommunications Union announced a pact between more than 100 countries across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to switch from analog to digital audio and television broadcasting by mid-2015. During the period of transition, digital broadcasting would need to be introduced in ways that would not interfere with existing analog broadcasting.

      Technological projects for providing mobile-TV service were undertaken in a number of countries. The French Agency for Industrial Innovation backed the Unlimited Mobile TV system, which was spearheaded by Alcatel and designed to make TV available on cellular (mobile) telephones through a combination of satellite coverage and terrestrial cellular networks. Alcatel signed up Samsung Electronics to develop mobile phones that would receive the satellite TV broadcasts. Germany's pilot cell phone TV project, which used the Digital Video Broadcast Handheld (DVB-H) standard, was launched during the 2006 World Cup by cell phone operators E-Plus, O2, T-Mobile, and Vodafone. DVB-H technology enabled German TV and radio to broadcast over 16 channels. Telecom Italia Media increased investments in digital terrestrial TV to €58.6 million (about $75 million) to improve channels La7 and MTV, which broadcast to cell phones by using DVB-H technology. The first commercial DVB-H mobile-TV service for the Asian Pacific region was launched by Finland's Nokia and Vietnam's Multimedia Corp. in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Korea's mobile-TV standard, Terrestrial Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, was introduced to China and India to allow the broadcast of digital-TV programs via conventional terrestrial transmitters to cell phones, personal digital assistants, and laptop computers.

      Distribution systems were also being developed for TV delivery via the Internet. On its ZVUE Web site, Canada's Handheld Entertainment made available about 3,500 downloadable video segments from CBC/Radio-Canada, including popular TV shows and online video selections. German public service networks ARD and ZDF teamed up with T-Com to offer 100 channels of Internet Protocol TV via a transmission system called very-high-speed digital subscriber line. Mainstream TV distributors such as Liberty Global's UPC—Europe's biggest cable operator—began to show traditional programs mixed with user-generated content on personal video channels integrated into the Internet TV system. Yahoo! and Australia's Seven Network inaugurated Yahoo!7 to integrate media and online technologies, including live TV delivery over the Internet.

      The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission approved U.S.-based HDNet for distributing high-definition (HD) television programming in Canada. Spain created the HD Forum to help bring together manufacturers, content providers, and other parties involved in high-definition technologies. High-definition next-generation DVD players, which read either Blu-ray discs or HD DVDs, required the enhanced image resolution of HDTV. Among the largest new HDTV units marketed during the year were a Sharp 165-cm (65-in) LCD TV, a Panasonic 262-cm (103-in) plasma-screen TV, and a Samsung 142-cm (56-in) rear-projection TV with a technology called digital light processing. This technology was based on a semiconductor chip that held an array of a large number of movable microscopic mirrors.

Radio

 In 2006 Howard Stern, long the most prominent personality in American morning radio, completed his switch to Sirius Satellite Radio. Stern, who had long complained about being censored under the rules governing terrestrial radio, made a point of underscoring satellite radio's freedom. Other high-profile media personalities also embraced satellite radio. TV talk-show host Oprah Winfrey agreed to headline a channel on XM Satellite Radio called Oprah & Friends, which included programs by regular contributors to The Oprah Winfrey Show and the magazine O. Sirius and XM offered hundreds of uncensored music and talk-show channels, most of them commercial-free, and by the middle of the year more than 11 million listeners had purchased the hardware and subscriptions that allowed them to listen to satellite-radio transmissions.

      Radio listeners were being drawn away from the AM/FM bands not only by satellite radio but also by Internet music sites and portable digital music players (such as Apple's iPod), which could play music or downloadable podcasts of news and information. In the United States even faithful listeners spent 14% less time listening to their radios than they had a decade earlier. As the value of radio stations diminished, even the industry's biggest players—including Clear Channel, owner of more than 1,100 stations—were either selling off radio properties or talking openly about doing so. Nevertheless, the industry worked actively to regain its position with consumers and the marketplace in general. A potential area of growth was radio-station Internet sites, which typically offered video- and music-on-demand features. A study by Credit Suisse of the 12 leading Web-radio sites noted a substantial 33.5% growth in Internet radio listeners, of which 65.5% were young (18–49 years old) and 57.9% were men.

      Some stations experimented with less-rigid music formats, and others took advantage of technology for digital radio broadcasting. In the United States some companies launched HD Radio stations. HD Radio—a system developed by iBiquity Digital—made it possible to transmit a digital signal together with a radio station's regular analog signal, and it offered superior sound to the listeners who were willing to pay for HD Radio digital receivers. The HD Digital Radio Alliance, a consortium of major radio companies, announced that by the end of the year, more than 1,000 stations were broadcasting in HD Radio.

      Digital radio was also expanding in other countries. Belgium-based TDPradio, the brainchild of program manager Daniël Versmissen, celebrated its third year as the first and only dance radio station that broadcast worldwide in Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM), an open digital standard for worldwide radio broadcasting in shortwave and other radio bands. Radio Romania International commenced using DRM assisted by WRN, a London-based provider for the transmission of digital radio and television. To celebrate its 70th birthday, Radio Prague, the international service of Czech Radio, launched digital broadcasting in English and German for central and southeastern Europe. Radio Australia, the international arm of the Australian Broadcasting Corp., launched digital radio service in Singapore and broadcast in English and in Mandarin Chinese. It also established a studio for students at the Australian International School campus in Singapore to make broadcasts via digital radio over an education channel, the Airducation Broadcasting Channel. A new digital channel announced by TBS Radio was to be the first in Japan to concentrate on classical music. Together with the music, it would simultaneously transmit data that included the names of composers and performers of the pieces being aired.

      In other developments, Syrian Prime Minister Muhammad Naji al-Otari licensed Arnus Brothers & Partners to establish Syria's first private commercial radio station, which was named Version FM Middle East. The premier also authorized Harith Group & Partners to establish a second private commercial radio, called Sahm FM. Turkish Radio Delta FM began to broadcast a program called Voice of Azerbaijan. Presenter Fidan Guliyeva said that the two-hour program aimed to “voice the truth on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.” BBC Kyrgyz and BBC Uzbek expanded World Service's FM broadcasts in Kyrgyzstan, and BBC World Service for the first time launched a marketing campaign in six cities in Afghanistan to promote its Pashto- and Dari-language broadcasts. BBC's Third Programme, which became known as Radio 3, celebrated the 60th anniversary of its establishment.

Peter Ames Carlin; Ramona Monette Sargan Flores

Newspapers

      Despite lingering declines in circulation and advertising revenues in some regions of the world, the newspaper industry in 2006 continued to be a powerful and expanding force. The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) reported that in 2005 more than 8,000 newspapers were published worldwide, with an estimated daily readership of one billion. According to WAN, the number of free and paid-for titles was up 9% since 2001, which represented about 550 new dailies.

      Meanwhile, daily circulation was up 7.8% from 2001 to 2005. Advertising expenditure increased almost 9% during that five-year period and rose 4.4% in 2004–05. The research included circulation and advertising data from press associations in 216 countries and from London research house ZenithOptimedia. A large percentage (76%) of worldwide newspaper circulation was concentrated in just five countries. China was the world leader, with 23 of the top 100 most-circulated papers, while Japan had 22 titles in the top 100. India, the United Kingdom, and the United States followed, with 17, 7, and 7, respectively. In 2001–05 growth for circulations was concentrated in less-developed countries in Asia, South America, and Africa, and declines typically occurred in North America and Europe.

      The year 2006 was punctuated by two trends—the expansion of free newspapers and the shrinkage of newspapers from the full-size broadsheet to the compact tabloid format. Free-newspaper distribution surged in 2004–05 by 98% in Spain, 27% in Canada, and 22% in the U.K., while paid circulations dropped, from 3.7% to 0.9%. The WAN report counted 169 free daily newspapers worldwide, including 100 in Europe, 50 in North and South America, and 19 in Australasia. The free dailies comprised a combined circulation of 27,857,000, or 6% of all world daily circulations, and 17% of daily European newspaper circulations. The market share of free dailies in Portugal, Poland, and Denmark was more than 30% of the market share for dailies. Three free dailies—ADN and 20 Minutos in Spain and Metro in the U.K.—topped the one-million-circulation mark in 2005.

      During the past three years, more than 100 newspapers downsized from the large broadsheet to the compact-sized format in an effort to accommodate readers' demands for a more-convenient size and shorter stories. The compact tabloids called 20 Minutes (Europe) and Quick (Dallas) were named to underscore that they were a fast read for commuters and others who had little time to pore over newspaper content. Many of the 28 newspapers that converted in 2005 to the tabloid format reported a surge in circulation.

      Meanwhile, advertising revenues in 2001–05 were up 11.7%, riding the worldwide advertising explosion across media. ZenithOptimedia reported that advertising revenues in 2004–05 rose 5.7%. Though advertising expenditure for newspapers worldwide continued to gain steadily over the years, advertising market share continued its steady decline, particularly as advertising expenditure shifted to include digital and entertainment media. Newspapers continued to hold the number two media spot, behind television, for advertising expenditure.

      According to a limited global sample of newspaper companies, online news consumption doubled in 2001–05 and grew almost 9% in 2004–05. The number of newspaper Web sites in 2004–05 surged 20%—from 3,060 to 3,679—and Internet advertising revenues exploded in that period by 24%, according to Zenith OptiMedia.

      In the U.S. and Canada alone, Internet advertising revenues reached $10.3 billion, up 16% from 2004. Meanwhile, Asia-Pacific was again the growth leader in Internet advertising revenues, with a 42% expansion in 2005 over 2004. Though online advertising was on the upswing, the market share for newspaper companies' most-lucrative revenue maker— classified advertising—was shrinking. In most places in the world, classifieds represented one-third of all revenues for a newspaper company. According to WAN's third annual classifieds migration study, the total revenue for classifieds was up 5.3% in print and 52% online. Auto ads were the biggest loser worldwide, down an average of 7% in print and up 34% online. The revenue generated from print ads, however, was about 10 times higher than that for online ads. As a result, newspaper companies were forced to scramble for new income streams to make up shortfalls. PricewaterhouseCoopers' Global Media and Entertainment Outlook projected that in 2006–10 auto classifieds in the U.S. would drop 2%, while real-estate and recruitment ads would grow a projected 3.7% and 5.8%, respectively.

      Newspaper companies also faced vexing challenges from a host of nontraditional competitors such as Google, Yahoo, and CraigsList.org, a (nearly) free classifieds Web site launched in 1995 in San Francisco. By June 2006 CraigsList had expanded to 310 cities worldwide and had begun charging for recruitment ads in several cities. The Web site was seen as a threat because it took millions of dollars from newspapers' bottom line, including a reported $50 million–$60 million annually from Bay Area newspapers. Meanwhile, the Google and Yahoo Web sites took billions of dollars of local advertising dollars from newspapers by implementing a search- engine “keyword” strategy, in which advertisers bought keywords from them. When search-engine visitors typed in keywords to find information, the search results produced ads, typically across the top and along the side of the page. If a visitor clicked on an ad, the advertiser paid the search engine a “click-through” fee. Yahoo made more than $5 billion and Google more than $6 billion in 2005, and both expected significantly higher revenues in 2006 with keyword-search advertising, the fastest-growing form of online advertising. According to research firm Piper Jaffray & Co., individual newspaper companies worldwide were busy preparing a counterstrategy for the keyword-search industry, which, it was estimated, would earn worldwide revenues of $30 billion by 2010. Among the companies preparing their own search business was a consortium of three of the largest U.S. newspaper chains—Gannett, Tribune, and McClatchy.

      Web-site advertising by newspapers worldwide was expected to more than triple from 2006 to 2010, from $2.7 billion to $6.2 billion, a 25% compounded annual increase. With the exception of Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe, most countries were growing far more slowly in this area than the United States. Scandinavia's largest and most-profitable newspaper chain, Schibsted, reported that some of its newspaper Web sites in Norway and Sweden were making more than 30% of the company's total revenues. Meanwhile, Borrell Associates, a Virginia-based research house, reported that the top online newspapers in the U.S. were making an average of about 7% of the newspaper company's revenue in 2006, up from 6% in 2005. The Washington Post and the New York Times reported that they had broken the single-digit barrier online, making about 12% each.

      Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), which tracked consumer spending and consumer hours spent on media in the U.S., reported that the annual number of hours spent by each person reading newspapers would drop from 205 hours in 1999 to a projected 165 hours in 2009. Meanwhile, the Internet drew an average of 65 consumer hours per person annually in 1999; VSS projected that by 2009 that number would soar to 203 hours. According to VSS, market penetration for newspapers was projected to be 50% in 2009, compared with 53% in 2004. Those statistics compared with an 81% penetration rate in 1960, during newspapers' heyday, and 38% in 1900.

      In an effort to keep up with the proliferation of digital channels and to address news-consumption patterns showing that users were multitasking, newspaper companies worldwide were publishing on a variety of platforms. In Florida, for example, the Naples Daily News built a video studio that produced newscasts for its Web site, iPods, a cable news channel partner, and even Sony PlayStation, a handheld gaming unit with Internet connectivity. When the Asahi Shimbun in Tokyo saw a drop in its younger readers, it built a mobile-phone platform that attracted one million subscribers to news and sports channels.

       Citizen journalism continued to be a buzzword for 2006. Newspapers worldwide invited their readers to write for new community-generated content sites such as YourHub.com, a series of local Web sites created by the Denver Post. The best of the Web-site content, including blog items, photos, and stories, was parlayed into a weekly newspaper section and delivered to subscribers in these individual communities.

      Newspapers were also duplicating some of the Web's most popular sites. The Bakersfield Californian and the Morris family of newspapers across the U.S. both copied the social- networking site MySpace.com's functionality to create a very localized version for their communities. The usage patterns for social-networking sites were mushrooming.

Martha L. Stone

Magazines

 The magazine industry continued in 2006 to display an uncanny ability to adapt to new media threats. In 2005, the latest year for available data, advertising and circulation revenue reached record levels. According to Advertising Age magazine, the top 300 magazines grew 5.2% in gross revenue to $36.6 billion in 2005, down from an 8% increase in 2004. Time Warner's People once again claimed the top spot in revenue at $1.37 billion, up 8.1%. For the June 19 issue, featuring a cover shot of film stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie with their new baby daughter, the magazine sold 2.3 million newsstand copies, about 800,000 more than usual. Better Homes and Gardens from Meredith Corp. claimed the number two place at $971.5 million, up 9.4%. While total revenue reached record levels, subscription circulation for consumer magazines increased from 311 million in 2004 to 313 million in 2005. Single-copy sales declined from 51 million to 48 million, reflecting a downward spiral that began in 1980, when sales peaked at 90 million copies.

      In the first move of its kind, the Magazine Publishers of America announced in September that some of its participating magazines would institute a pilot program to supply free one-year digital magazine subscriptions to students at carefully chosen universities. A digital edition of a magazine replicated its print edition in editorial and advertising content but offered a reading experience very much like an ink-and-paper publication. Participating schools and respective magazine titles included the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (Foreign Policy); Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management (BusinessWeek); Parsons the New School of Design (Elle); the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts (Premiere); and the University of Notre Dame Computer Science and Engineering Division (Popular Mechanics).

      In a novel marketing effort, Philips Electronics paid Hearst Magazines $2 million to eliminate subscription cards from the September issues of Redbook, O at Home, Weekend, and House Beautiful. Each magazine ran a two-page Philips ad with the line “Simplicity is not having subscription cards fall out of your magazine.” The ads gave information about Philips-branded Web sites that were created specially for the promotion. The promotion was part of a series of ad deals the company made to reinforce its marketing promise to make life easier for people.

      Both Time and Newsweek announced new editors in 2006. Time named Richard Stengel, a staff member since 1981, to the magazine's top editorial position in May. Stengel had served as editor of the magazine's Web site but left in 2004 to become president of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. A Rhodes scholar and the author of several books, Stengel collaborated with South African Nobel Peace laureate Nelson Mandela on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (1994).

      Jon Meacham, who was promoted in September to editor of Newsweek, had held several positions at the magazine since 1995. Meacham had written two books: Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (2003) and American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (2006). After graduating from the University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn., he began his career at The Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times newspaper.

 Every Day with Rachael Ray, inaugurated by Reader's Digest Association, was named “launch of the year” by Advertising Age. The new magazine reached a circulation of nearly 827,000 within its first 10 months and was predicted to reach 1.3 million by February 2007. Editor Silvana Nardone said part of its success was that it captured the sunny, carefree attitude of Rachael Ray (Ray, Rachael ) (see Biographies) while still offering readers a hefty dose of recipes, travel, and entertainment value. In April the debut in predominately Muslim Indonesia of Playboy magazine caused a furor among Islamic leaders, who denounced the publication as “moral terrorism” that destroyed the country's way of life. The contents of the magazine had been modified to include scantily clad rather than nude women. Other readers, however, complained of the lack of nude photos and the traditional centrefold.

      A noteworthy book on magazine history published during the year was The Man Time Forgot by former Yale Daily News editor Isaiah Wilner. The book told the story of Briton Hadden, who in 1923 cofounded Time magazine with Yale classmate Henry Luce. Although Hadden played a significant role in shaping the magazine's astonishing success, he died just six years later of a brain infection—at the age of 31. Luce bought out Hadden's heirs and went on to build the enormous Time Inc. publishing empire.

      The magazine industry lost one of its pioneers in niche marketing with the passing of William B. Ziff, Jr. After taking over Ziff-Davis Publishing from his father in 1953, he built a magazine empire that targeted big-spending hobbyists with single-minded passions. Some of his titles included Popular Aviation, Popular Photography, Skiing, Stereo Review, Car and Driver, Popular Electronics, PC Magazine, and Computer Shopper. By 1994 Ziff had sold all of his magazines for an estimated $1.4 billion.

David E. Sumner

Book Publishing

United States.

      Throughout 2006 leading companies became more fully engaged in testing new strategies and technologies, potentially introducing profound changes to an almost century-old business model. In a year that saw somewhat stronger sales, many of the most intriguing industry stories were not detailed in bottom-line numbers.

      Overall, the Book Industry Study Group's (BISG's) Book Industry Trends 2006 reported that total publishers' net dollar sales in 2005 reached $34.6 billion, a 5.9% increase over 2004. For the first time, the survey included extensive primary research conducted with publishers whose annual revenues were less than $50 million. These were companies that had been underrepresented in earlier BISG data, and the change resulted in a recalculation of previous years' BISG figures. A major component of the year's growth came from the elementary- and high-school textbook market, which sold an estimated $4.7 billion in 2005, a 15.5% increase over 2004. Two other robust categories were juvenile books, which sold $3.3 billion, a 9.6% increase over the previous year, and religious books, which saw an 8.1% sales increase over 2004, reaching net dollar sales of $2.3 billion.

      The yearly growth did not belie, however, an industrywide sense that publishing—looking at razor-thin profits, flat unit sales, and major returns from some retailing channels—was a mature industry in which significant future growth would depend on innovative strategies. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, as of September, bookstore sales were $13.06 billion, a 1.8% decline from 2005.

      There were many indications, however, that perhaps a tipping point had been reached and that technological innovation would significantly change both the assumptions and the operations of publishing. One of the most ballyhooed developments was the introduction of the Sony electronic book reader. Featuring a readable screen, which employed “electronic paper” technology, and an online retail arm (patterned after the successful iTunes Store from Apple), the reader garnered extensive media attention when it was introduced in October. Another indication of possible growing acceptance of e-books was the success of the World eBook Fair, coordinated by Project Gutenberg. The five-week online giveaway of electronic books saw more than 30 million books downloaded worldwide. In addition, the amount of digital content grew in 2006 as major trade publishers continued to digitize their front list and backlist titles and as Google and Microsoft carried on their respective projects to digitize millions of titles, making them available for online searches.

      New strategies were also being employed to reach readers and potential book buyers. Publishers worked hard to place appropriate titles into new retail outlets, from trendy retailers, such as Anthropologie, to local nurseries and bakeries. In addition, Starbucks, one of the strongest global brand names, turned to books to further burnish its image as a trusted source of entertainment when it decided to sell in its stores Mitch Albom's novel For One More Day. The global coffeehouse chain reported that 45,000 copies of the novel had been sold in less than a month. In perhaps the most experimental development, Penguin began a marketing campaign for Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash in Second Life, the online virtual-reality community that had over one million “residents.” (See Computers (Virtual World of Online Gaming ): Sidebar.)

      Even amid the most innovative initiatives, the titles published in 2006 demonstrated the continued power and vitality of the written word. Many in the industry deemed the fall list the strongest for fiction in years, with new titles from Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, and Alice McDermott. In addition, such nonfiction titles as Bob Woodward's State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III and Sen. Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream generated widespread media coverage and commentary in the weeks approaching the U.S. midterm elections.

      Among those who had bought a book within the last year, 68% reported that they had purchased it in a bookstore, which thus showed that the mix of insightful inventory selection, engaging author events, and literary community of bookstores still provided a welcome “third place” destination—not home and not work—for readers nationwide. For independent booksellers, “hand selling” little-known titles about which they were enthusiastic continued to characterize their stores for consumers. In 2006 Water for Elephants, a novel by Sara Gruen that was embraced by independents, emerged from the pack to make the national best-seller lists.

Dan Cullen

International.

      While the eyes of the world were mesmerized in 2006 by the latest developments on the Internet, the book-publishing industry quietly continued its century-old success story. More than 7,000 exhibitors—the largest number ever—participated in the 58th Frankfurt (Ger.) Book Fair, the industry's international showcase event. The ongoing acquisition of smaller and regional publishing houses remained a worldwide concern for many smaller publishers and raised questions about the ability of small and innovative publishers to survive amid the ever-growing large companies. The success stories of some small publishing houses demonstrated that they could continue to be successful if they played to their strengths—flexibility, innovation, and an ability to take risks.

      The International Publishers Association (IPA) estimated global publisher sales worldwide in 2005 to be around €69 billion (about $88 billion). This figure was larger than the one combined for worldwide sales (at publisher prices) and rental of videos/DVDs, music CDs, computer games, and online music sales.

      A look at the geographic distribution of book publishing told a more sobering story, however; one-third of publishing took place in North America, one-third in Europe, and just under one-third in the Asia-Pacific region. The other regions together, including the Arab publishing world and the publishing industry in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, combined to add up to less than 5%. Although this figure was partially distorted by a shortage of data, facts showed that there were regions in the world where a contemporary book culture was practically absent. The situation was then exacerbated by an anti-industry government policy. Many countries expanded state-owned publishing; in some countries more than 50% of the books were written, edited, printed, and distributed by the state. Publishers, booksellers, and independent authors were rarely involved. While other sectors of the industry, from telecommunications to public transport, were being privatized, the publishing sector suffered from a silent renationalization through the back door. While public-sector publishing expanded, private publishers were going out of business As a general rule, government publishers were not known for their innovation, the high quality of their content, or an inclination to take risks. The implications for freedom of expression were serious as well, especially in places where the next generation was listening only to a single, government-friendly voice.

      Tolerance of book piracy reached unprecedented levels. Some government officials openly stated that they saw piracy as a way of supplying cheap books to the poor. Bolivia, for example, expressly allowed piracy of nonnational authors.

      The average number of new book copies fell in all countries, but there were some exceptions. The Japanese edition of the sixth title of the Harry Potter series had a first printing of two million copies, and the first Spanish-language edition had a one-million-copy print run.

      The resale price maintenance (RPM), also known as unique price or fixed price, though maintained in many countries, continued to be debated in others. Some publishers questioned its convenience, while others were pushing their governments to accept it. Mexico, for example, had only 300 bookstores servicing a population of more than 100 million. Newspapers continued to publish their own book series, and in some countries (such as Spain) publishers considered the action an attack on RPM legislation, owing to the very low costs they had. For others it was viewed as a clear case of unfair competition.

      The core issue for publishers was no longer whether to make books available online but how to do so. A key concern of publishers was the power of search engines as a new distribution partner. Google Book Search was by far the most publicized offering, but publishers were reluctant to allow a single search engine to dominate the Internet distribution channel. Initiatives were under way in several countries that would allow publishers to make their works available through a broad range of intermediaries. The most notable initiative was the Automated Content Access Protocol (), an industry standard for coordinating the access and use of online content, including published articles, books, and images.

      Turin, Italy, in partnership with Rome, was named the World Book Capital for 2006–07. In Sweden, at the Göteborg Book Fair, the theme of the event was freedom of expression, and the Publishers Freedom Prize was awarded to Iranian publisher Shala Lahiji.

Ana Maria Cabanellas

▪ 2006

Introduction

American TV broadcasters coped with the departure of four longtime news anchors, and “podcasting” spread quickly; in the publishing realm, newspapers continued to struggle to attract readers, Vanity Fair magazine disclosed the identity of Deep Throat, and the latest book in the Harry Potter series sold millions of copies.

Television

Organization.

       Rupert Murdoch, who bought Internet companies IGN Entertainment, MySpace.com, and Scout Media, was reelected chairman of the News Corp. in 2005 despite a shareholders' revolt. Murdoch's son Lachlan unexpectedly resigned from his executive post at News Corp. in August. Lachlan's brother, James, remained chief executive of BSkyB, which acquired EasyNet in order to be able to offer Internet access, pay TV, and telephony. British terrestrial broadcasters ITV and Channel 4 each acquired a 20% stake in Freeview, a digital free-to-air TV service launched in 2002.

      The British Broadcasting Corporation was hit on May 23 with a 24-hour strike in which 11,000 of 28,000 BBC journalists and technicians protested 4,000 job cuts. On August 15 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation locked out 5,500 workers. Seven weeks later, after protests from unions in London, Jerusalem, and the U.S., the dispute was resolved when CBC backed down from its plan to hire more contractual workers.

      The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Spanish-language production company TV Azteca and its chairman, Ricardo B. Salinas Pliego, with not having properly disclosed transactions from which they had benefited. Meanwhile, TV Azteca sued independent TV CNI Canal 40 for having accepted a loan from the Mexican unit of General Electric, which had violated Mexican laws that barred foreigners from running local media. Telesur, a 24-hour Spanish-language satellite station based in Caracas, was inaugurated by Venezuela's Pres. Hugo Chávez (Chavez, Hugo ). (See Biographies.) The state-run regional TV station was receiving assistance from Cuba and Brazil state TV networks and from the governments of Argentina and Uruguay.

      The European Commission cleared the joint venture by DirecTV and SkyTerra Communications (an affiliate of equity firm Apollo Group) to buy DirecTV unit Hughes Network Systems. In other sales-and- acquisitions news, private equity firms Permira and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. bought Luxembourg-based SBS Broadcasting under new CEO Mathias Döpfner (Dopfner, Mathias ), (see Biographies), German publisher Axel Springer purchased a majority in ProSiebenSat. 1 Media; and Russia's last independent network station, REN TV, was sold to state-controlled Evrofinans Bank. Japan's conservative broadcast industry was rocked by the takeover bid made by the Internet firm Livedoor Co. for Fuji Television Network Inc. A $1.6 billion deal ended the feud. Hong Kong broadcaster Television Broadcasts Ltd. bought the remaining 30% stake that it did not own in Taiwan broadcast firm Liann Yee Production Co., and Star TV, a satellite and cable operator in Hong Kong, bought 20% of the Indonesian national network ANTV, which was owned by the family of the chief economy minister, Aburizal Bakrie.

      Early in the year China tightened controls on TV ventures by foreign companies, an action that was viewed unfavourably by several media chiefs. Time Warner's Dick Parsons declared an unwillingness to compromise the integrity of its news broadcasting in response to criticism by Chinese officials even if the decision affected business prospects, and the Walt Disney Co.'s Robert Iger intended to postpone building a Disneyland on mainland China until he was assured of having permission to broadcast on Chinese TV. Rupert Murdoch stated that News Corp., which was under investigation for having used unauthorized local Chinese cable networks, had hit “a brick wall” in China.

      Marking the 25th anniversary of CNN, the first 24-hour news network in the U.S., founder Ted Turner remarked that the network was started as an “adventure.” Ten years after the network was launched, its coverage of the 1991 Gulf War turned CNN into a household name.

Programming.

      By late 2005, within an 11-month period, all four of the men who had dominated American television news since the early 1980s had vacated their posts, and their bosses were left trying not only to replace them but to determine what kind of program a 21st-century network newscast ought to be. First to leave was NBC's Tom Brokaw. He retired in December 2004, when he handed over the reins to Brian Williams in a long and carefully planned succession. CBS's Dan Rather left less of his own volition. His departure in March came as a direct result of a bungled report he did for a 60 Minutes Wednesday telecast the previous year. The report had used what turned out to be unverified documents to try to raise questions about U.S. Pres. George W. Bush's service in the National Guard as a young man. ABC's Peter Jennings, who might have been in position to gain viewers from his departing rivals, instead suddenly left the air in early April with the announcement that he was fighting lung cancer. Jennings (Jennings, Peter Charles ), known for his strong reporting in the field and calm erudition from the anchor desk, died August 7, at age 67. (See Obituaries.) Then, in November, ABC Nightline anchor Ted Koppel kept a promise he had made earlier in the year to step away from the program because of disagreement with ABC management over the show's mission and format. Nightline had taken its nightly place on the ABC schedule in 1980, when it was created to provide coverage of the taking of American hostages in Iran. Brokaw had been network anchor since 1983, Rather since 1981, and Jennings since 1983. Filing occasional reports, Brokaw and Rather remained affiliated with their respective networks.

      The big guns were gone, and in a sign of confusion or uncertainty, ABC and CBS did not immediately chose successors for their nightly news anchors. ABC employed morning-show host Charles Gibson and correspondent Elizabeth Vargas as temporary replacements for Jennings and only in December did it name Vargas and correspondent Bob Woodruff as his successors. CBS used veteran Washington, D.C., correspondent Bob Schieffer as its temporary anchor and by the end of the year had not selected anyone to succeed Rather. CBS network chief Leslie Moonves openly longed for a more contemporary kind of news program, and he replaced news-division president Andrew Heyward with Sean McManus, who had headed CBS Sports but had not put in time at the network's fabled news operation. (NBC also fired its news chief, Neil Shapiro, primarily over ratings trouble at the network's top-rated Today morning show.) ABC's decision to replace Koppel with three anchors—Martin Bashir, Cynthia McFadden, and Terry Moran—signaled a turn away from Nightline's reliable one-story format toward a look similar to that of other TV newsmagazines. British journalist Bashir was best known in the U.S. for having interviewed pop star Michael Jackson in the documentary that was the impetus for Jackson's latest round of legal woes.

      Despite the changes and uncertainty, network newscasts continued to draw more than 20 million viewers nightly. The numbers were a far cry from those of the 1970s and '80s but still well ahead of the combined audience for cable news channels on any given night. Indeed, the Fox network talked of launching a nightly network newscast on its broadcast stations by spinning off the work of its top-rated cable operation, Fox News Channel. Longtime cable king CNN took steps to try to reclaim viewers after Fox supplanted it in the ratings, owing to its more opinionated brand of news delivery. CNN in late 2004 installed former CBS News executive Jonathan Klein as president of its U.S. operation. Among other steps, Klein replaced anchor Aaron Brown with Anderson Cooper.

      In prime time the annual Emmy Awards honoured one old favourite and one newcomer to American television. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave its outstanding comedy series honour to Everybody Loves Raymond, the venerable CBS family series that had gone off the air in May. Top drama series was ABC's first-year mystery Lost, about the survivors of a plane wreck on a not-deserted-enough tropical island. In another sign of its ascendancy to the top of the topical comedy heap—in critical and popular buzz, if not in overall viewership—The Daily Show with Jon Stewart won two Emmys. Daily Show later spun off a nightly half-hour program called The Colbert Report, which was adored by critics for the manner in which former Daily correspondent Stephen Colbert sent up the bluster of top-rated cable-news talker Bill O'Reilly. In a sign of its popular and critical resurgence, the recently moribund ABC network finished with 16 Emmys overall, first among broadcast networks. Its comeback was fueled not only by Lost but also by the runaway popularity of another first-year series, the suburban caricature Desperate Housewives. Part comedy and part murder mystery, the show captured the American imagination instantly in a manner few series had done in recent times. The Emmy Awards were also notable for late-night host David Letterman's tribute to the dean of his genre, Johnny Carson, who died January 23, almost 13 years after he had retired as host of The Tonight Show. (See Obituaries.)

      While ABC made the biggest ratings gains, CBS won the overall battle for most viewers, and Fox just barely won the lead among the advertiser-coveted 18-to-49-year-old demographic. The big loser of the season—in a trend continued into the new fall season—was NBC, which suffered from losing the ratings powerhouse Friends and from its inability to develop new hit shows. NBC finished the season fourth both among the 18-to-49 group and in total viewers, a giant comedown for a network that had been the most successful through the late 1990s and into the 2000s.

      On the business front, turmoil was the order of the day as television began a transition toward the likely day when much of what it did would also be offered on the Internet. ABC, in a deal with Apple Computer, made episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives available for purchase and downloading via Apple's iTunes media service. Each episode would become available the day after it aired and cost $1.99. NBC began video streaming its Nightly News free of charge over its Web news site MSNBC.com and later joined ABC in offering shows through iTunes. Respected trade journal Television Business Report reported that many mainstream media channels were going online and that arrangements for video-on-demand content were commonplace. In response to the declining television advertising market, product placement—the insertion of sponsors' products inside TV series, rather than just in ads aired during ad breaks—was on the rise and was predicted to increase greatly. In September, for example, CBS reportedly added a Chevrolet Impala logo into five of its shows through digital methods. Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, late in the year The Wall Street Journal reported that ad inventory on the front pages of the leading Web portal sites AOL, Yahoo!, and MSN was sold out.

      In programming relating to children, The Walt Disney Co. asked the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to review rules that limited the use of interactive ads that mentioned the names of Web sites that kids could visit. Viacom's Nickelodeon, the most widely distributed children's TV network, also opposed the restrictions. PBS Kids Sprout began as the first national 24-hour channel aimed at American toddlers, and Nickelodeon launched seven international services. Arabic satellite TV broadcaster al-Jazeera launched Al-Jazeera Children's Channel to teach Arab children and adolescents aged 3 to 15 such values as open-mindedness and tolerance.

      The continuing worldwide coverage of the aftermath of the Dec. 26, 2004, South Asian tsunami was eclipsed by the April 2 death of Pope John Paul II (John Paul II ). (See Obituaries.) The global scale of the media coverage of the pope's death was unprecedented; ABC News.com reported that it was generating 35,000 stories a day. In their media coverage Arabic broadcasters al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya both cited the pope's support of Muslim and Arab causes.

      The Hindi-language quiz show Kaun banega crorepati (“Who Will Be a Ten-Millionaire”), which offered a prize of 20 million rupees ($450,000), was closely followed by 11.7 million Indians. Meanwhile, the Indian government banned the adult satellite channel Free X-TV for having shown programs that violated good taste and morality. In other controversial programming, Dutch TV presenter Filemon Wesselink was shown taking drugs during the show Spuiten & Slikken. Big Brother in The Netherlands featured a pregnant woman who during the series gave birth to a baby that she kept with her in the house in which the series was taking place. In its first week the Filipino version of the series was suspended and given a stern warning by the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board of the Philippines for showing what it called intimate scenes that included bathing and bodypainting. Producers of the series in Germany had a village built specifically for the program, a move that imitated the movie The Truman Show, but the series had poor ratings and was to end in early 2006, a year after it began.

Technology.

      Countries began imposing deadlines on media organizations to switch from analog to digital broadcasting even as the Internet and mobile telephone became new venues for TV programming. Free digital TV started to spread in Britain, Sweden, Italy, Germany, and France. Conventional broadcasters saw digital terrestrial TV as a means to reach new audiences and sell more ads, and pay-TV providers competed with special offers and expanded services.

      The conventional TV cathode-ray tube (CRT) metamorphosed. Samsung, RCA, and LG Electronics introduced 75-cm (30-in) screen CRT TV receivers that were one-third slimmer than earlier models. Sony unveiled BRAVIA, a series of nine models of flat-panel liquid-crystal-display (LCD) TV receivers. With 38- to 101-cm (15- to 40-in) screens, BRAVIA's picture quality was equivalent to images with one-megapixel resolution.

 Internet-based TV typically came along with personal computers that had built-in TV capabilities and a broadband connection. POV magazine founder Drew Massey financed ManiaTV, an Internet company that on a 24-hour basis served up film clips, music videos, and chatter from “cyberjockeys” (CJs) to college students and 20-somethings. Yahoo! launched a made-for-the-Web program called Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone (an audio-video-photo-blog-chat room run by Sites), Google offered on-demand stream video of the premiere of Chris Rock's new TV comedy Everybody Hates Chris, and Viacom's Nickelodeon created TurboNick, a free Internet-based 24-hour access to its programs.

      As part of a growing role of the Internet in marketing, cosmetics maker Coty Inc. launched its new fragrance, Lovely, on Vogue magazine's Web site, Style.com. Featuring actress Sarah Jessica Parker, the online commercial appeared before the TV airing of the same ad.

       French telecommunications provider Alcatel and Microsoft agreed to share development of Internet-based TV services provided by telephone companies. Nordic telecommunications operator TeliaSonera was already broadcasting Swedish broadcaster TV4's channels to high-speed Internet customers.

      The cellular (mobile) phone became the latest venue for TV programming. SmartVideo Technologies and V Cast started the year with live and prerecorded TV programs sent to American cell phones equipped with Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system. Australian telephone subscribers were introduced to cell-phone video by Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone via the Hutchison 3 network. Germany's Vodafone D2 was one of the first European operators to offer cell-phone TV service with shows, sports, news, and movies. Norway's state broadcaster NRK used a cross-country ski marathon in Sweden for testing the transmission from a camera-equipped cell phone to Norwegian TV watchers. French mobile telecommunications operators Orange and Bouygues Telecom began testing the Digital Video Broadcast Handheld (DVB-H) service, which enabled subscribers to watch broadcast TV on a cell phone. Nokia, the world's largest cell-phone manufacturer, launched a pilot project with Finnish Broadcasting Company and commercial TV channels as well as with mobile service providers TeliaSonera and Elisa.

      By the last quarter of 2005, Apple Computer had introduced the video iPod, which was capable of playing short movies, music videos, and ABC or Disney TV shows. Satellite broadcaster EchoStar released PocketDISH, a portable personal video recorder with a hard drive for recording programs and a screen for watching what had been recorded.

      Yet a different type of broadcasting venue was being pursued by Sirius Satellite Radio and auto-parts-maker Delphi, which separately unveiled more programming choices for their in-vehicle backseat video displays. Sirius and Microsoft were to develop a video companion to the satellite radio service, and Delphi and Comcast were to create an in-vehicle system that would enable owners to transfer selected video programming to their cars. Although prohibitively expensive and questioned by transportation safety advocates, satellite TV in cars was popular in 2005 as an accessory in SUVs, recreational vehicles, and pickup trucks.

Radio

      A new audio genre, called podcasting, came into vogue in 2005. Named after the iPod portable media player but not restricted to it, podcasting was essentially a system for posting a file with audio content onto the World Wide Web and for providing an automatic online notification to the computer of a subscriber to download the file. Subscribers could then copy the downloaded file to a portable media player and play the program whenever and wherever they wanted. The podcaster could be anyone from an amateur husband-and-wife team in Wisconsin to NBC's top-rated morning Today show, which launched its own podcast during the year. Podcasting took off about midyear when Apple Computer's popular iTunes online store added tens of thousands of podcasts to its offerings. The Pew Internet and the American Life Project estimated in April that six million Americans listened to podcasts, but a New York Times story in August asked, “Podcasts: All the Rage or About to Fizzle?” One expert quoted in the article estimated that in 2010 some 57 million people would be using podcasts, but another, more pessimistic, expert said that the number would be 30 million. Either way, it was a large audience, and traditional radio executives in 2005 debated how much impact podcasting would have on their industry.

      The New York City “shock jock” Howard Stern, meanwhile, spent much of his last year on what was being labeled “terrestrial” (as opposed to satellite-based) radio running down that medium, a situation that caused much tension with his employers at Infinity Broadcasting. He signed a five-year, $500 million contract with Sirius. Sirius and rival XM were the two players in the emerging field of subscription-based satellite radio. At the end of the year, Sirius was ramping up its campaign to convert Stern's imminent arrival into new subscribers and new buyers for the proprietary receivers necessary for the services. With about five million subscribers, XM had more than double the number of Sirius subscribers, and executives were predicting continued rapid growth. Kagan Research, a leading media analyst, predicted that the total number of subscribers would grow to 46 million by 2014.

      To replace Stern, the Infinity conglomerate came up with two new morning shows, an East Coast effort fronted by David Lee Roth (former lead singer for the rock band Van Halen) and a West Coast show headed by Adam Carolla, a comic who also had his own comedy talk show on Comedy Central and cohosted Comedy Central's The Man Show. Infinity also signed magician Penn Jillette to head a one-hour daily syndicated show. Leslie Moonves, the CBS/Viacom executive who oversaw Infinity operations, said that not all the new shows would succeed but that losing Stern would not be as painful as it seemed because the profit margins on his high salary were thin. A number of stations that were losing Stern began to market themselves as “free radio” to emphasize that there would be a cost for those who followed Stern to satellite. The radio advertising market, which was the basis of free radio, remained soft throughout 2005, however, and toward the end of the year, Wall Street analysts were predicting that little would change in 2006.

 In Nepal in February, King Gyanendra declared a state of emergency and imposed a media law that barred FM radio stations from broadcasting news and criticism of the king and the royal family. BBC Nepal news service was stopped, and all community radio stations were locked shut.

      Channel Africa, the international radio service of the South African Broadcasting Corporation, formed a partnership with the Southern African Broadcasting Association. Channel Africa took over production of a weekly magazine program named SADC Calling, which discussed regional activities and developments on such issues as HIV and AIDS.

       BBC announced that to launch its Arabic TV service, it was ceasing radio services in Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Kazakh, Polish, Slovak, Slovene, and Thai. The language services would be continued online. BBC began operating an Arabic radio service in 1938.

       Palestinian radio station Voice of Love and Peace (VOLP) planned to sue Radio Sawa, the U.S. government's Arabic network, for using 94.2 FM. Assigned to VOLP since 1996, the frequency was reassigned by the Palestinian Ministry of Information, which went to court to stop VOLP from continuing to broadcast. The Ram Allah Magistrates Court granted an injunction on the ministry's order, but Radio Sawa continued broadcasting.

Ramona Monette Sargan Flores; Steve Johnson

Newspapers

      In 2005 newspapers continued to face challenges on the advertising and circulation fronts—the very battlegrounds that permitted their existence. Some critics said that newspapers had been too slow to change to meet the needs of the news consumer, particularly in the developed world, where revenue advertising share and circulation declines were more pronounced than in populous Third World countries such as China and India. Robert Cauthorn, the former vice president for digital media at the San Francisco Chronicle and an ardent advocate for change in the industry, declared in the International Newspaper Marketing Association's Ideas magazine that “readership, the engine that powers everything, has been falling for 25 years. The ugly fact is that with each new day our readers open our newspapers, and they find another reason to want us less.” From a worldwide perspective newspaper circulations and advertising revenues were up, but the elevated numbers reflected a short-term increase following the 2001–03 worldwide advertising downturn. Though advertising sales had recovered solidly, the newspaper industry continued to lose ad market share over time. In 1994 newspapers worldwide commanded 36.1% of the advertising market share, second only to TV advertising. ZenithOptimedia, which supplied the annual statistical data to the World Association of Newspapers' “World Press Trends” report, projected that newspapers' ad share would slide to 29.3% of the ad market share by 2007.

      Advertising share declines were most prominent in developed countries in Europe and North America. Analysts said that the ad market share dropped as circulation declined because advertisers paid more to reach larger audiences. In 2000 Canada's newspaper advertising share was 43.8%, compared with 31.5% for TV and 13.1% for radio. In 2004 newspaper ad share had dropped to 38.4%, compared with 33.3% for TV and 13.9% for radio. In 2007 Canadian newspapers were projected to garner 37.3% of the ad market. Meanwhile, in South Korea newspaper ad share fell from 49.8% in 2000 to 44.1% in 2004; the projection for 2007 was 41.3%. The share for TV increased from 30.4% in 2000 to 33.6% in 2004. In the United Kingdom newspaper ad share dropped from 40.2% in 2000 to 39.1% in 2004 to a projected 38.2% in 2007, compared with 31.4% and 30.2% for TV in 2000 and 2004, respectively.

      Though newspaper circulation was booming in such countries as South Africa, Poland, and India, with 25.94%, 53.67%, and 14.04% circulation increases from 2000 to 2004, respectively, circulations were shrinking in the developed world; from 2000 to 2004 declines were experienced in the United Kingdom (8.74%), the U.S. (2.06%), and Hong Kong (78.46%).

      In the U.S. the circulation statistics for 2005 told a much different story. Editor & Publisher magazine headlined the dramatic drops in major newspaper circulations across the country in its May 2 publication as “Bloody Monday.” The statistics showed marked circulation declines from first-quarter 2004 to the same period in 2005 for the Baltimore Sun (11.5% daily), the Chicago Tribune and Denver's Rocky Mountain News (6.6%), the Los Angeles Times (6.4%), and the San Francisco Chronicle (6%).

      Several reasons were cited for the steep drops, including the federal “no call” rule, which barred telemarketers from contacting those who had declared in writing that they did not want to be called. Prior to the 2005 ruling, the majority of newspaper subscription sales had been made by telemarketers. Another factor was the 2004 scandal in which a number of popular newspapers—the Chicago Sun-Times, owned by Hollinger Inc.; New York's Newsday and Hoy, owned by the Tribune Co.; and the Dallas Morning News, owned by Belo, among others—inflated circulation figures to attract larger advertising revenue. This caused several newspapers to “right size” their 2004 statistics in 2005.

      The reduced circulation and advertising figures sent some newspaper investors reeling. Though newspaper profit margins remained higher than those for other industries (the American newspaper industry recorded a profit of 22.9% in 2004) and were expected to grow in 2005, investors were agitated by declining stock values. Following a 14% stock-price free fall from July to November 2005, the largest investor of Knight Ridder, the second largest U.S. newspaper chain, demanded in November that the company be sold. During that same period, Gannett, the country's largest newspaper chain, experienced an 11% stock price decline, and the New York Times Co. faced a 13% drop.

      Convergence—the integration of a company's media operations, including TV, radio, print, and online to achieve editorial and business efficiencies and economies—continued in 2005. Some media companies that owned only print and Web sites were also converging by integrating their operations into one newsroom and one advertising department. The New York Times Co. announced the convergence of its print and Web operations in preparation for a move in 2007 to a new office tower. Nordjyske Medier, based in Ålborg, Den., completely merged its newsroom and cross-trained its 249 journalists to be able to report in all types of media. The company's advertising staff was also trained to sell advertising in multimedia campaigns. The strategy, launched in 2001, was credited with shifting the company to profitability.

      Another strategy to increase readership was to provide, according to the usage patterns and desires of news consumers, around-the-clock news operations that provided relevant content anytime and anywhere. Media companies were providing content for traditional and nontraditional news channels, such as mobiles/PDAs, iPods, video screens in subways and in hotel elevators, shopping mall kiosks, and electronic ticker billboards on busy city streets.

      Part of the audience-focus strategy was to embrace the idea of community-generated content. OhmyNews.com (international site ), a South Korean-based Web site, employed 40,000 registered community journalists worldwide to write stories about which they were passionate. The community journalists were paid on the basis of where on the site the editors placed the material. Hundreds of new stories, edited by a small team of paid journalists, were published daily. The community-generated content strategy was also popular in the U.S. The Georgia-based Morris chain of newspapers launched BlufftonToday.com, a Web site whose main purpose was to encourage “a community in conversation with itself.” The content from the community-generated blogs also appeared in the newspaper of the same name. The site and newspaper, launched in April, increased circulation, and Morris decided to use the model elsewhere.

      The most popular community-generated content was not deep, intellectual, journalistic-style stories, however. Jacksonville.com reported that in 2004 more than 80,000 community photos were submitted, including images of babies, dogs, cats, sunsets, and vacations. About 13% of all Web-site traffic, or 21 million page views in 2004, was for community-generated photos. Media companies followed the craze and asked readers to contribute text, photos, and video, especially for breaking news stories. The July 7 London transit bombings generated hundreds of video, audio, and text reports from eyewitnesses to online news sites. On the day of the bombings, the 100 reader-originated photos and video clips generated about one-third of the traffic on the BBC.co.uk Web site—about 15 million page views. During the Hurricane Katrina disaster, CNN.com and NOLA.com solicited content from readers and received hundreds of pictures, eyewitness accounts, and pleas to reunite loved ones scattered by the catastrophe.

      The shrinkage of newspapers for the convenience of the reader from the large broadsheet size to the tabloid size, a trend that began in earnest in 2003, was in full swing in 2005. Venerable brands such as The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Wall Street Journal Asia, and The Guardian (London) all downsized in an effort to capture a larger audience and reduce costs. The WSJ estimated that it would save $17 million in production costs alone. In London both The Times and The Independent converted in 2003; The Times had a 1% increase in circulation year on year, and The Independent registered a 15% rise in circulation, its highest increase since 1997. The free commuter newspaper, most notably Stockholm-based Metro, was now considered the most circulated type of newspaper in the world. According to “World Press Trends,” from 2000 to 2004 free-daily-newspaper circulation grew dramatically in several countries, notably in Hungary (66.67%), the U.K. (81.82%), Singapore (123.11%), and Italy (900%). Metro reported that it supplied seven million free daily newspapers in 18 languages to 86 major cities in 19 countries.

      Though Lord Black had stepped down in 2003 as chief executive of global media giant Hollinger Inc. following a scandal in which he was investigated for alleged fraud and other abuses, the company continued to recover from staggering losses allegedly stemming from the scandal. Hollinger filed suit to recover $425 million that it claimed Black and some former executives took in the form of unauthorized bonuses and excessive salaries. In November Black was indicted for fraud.

Martha L. Stone

Magazines

      In 2005 Vanity Fair magazine shocked the world when, in its July issue, it became the first publication to reveal that W. Mark Felt, the 91-year-old former associate director of the FBI, was the Watergate Scandal informant known as “Deep Throat.” John D. O'Connor, the attorney who wrote the article, had been in negotiations with the magazine for two years prior to publication. Felt's daughter, Joan, disclosed in an interview that the family had many reasons for revealing her father's role in Watergate but said she would not deny “that to make money was one of them.”

      The biggest controversy of the year involving a magazine occurred when Newsweek published an article in its May 9 issue that claimed that U.S. interrogators, in an attempt to rattle suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed a Qurʾan down a toilet. Many attributed to the article's impact a wave of anti-American protests in Afghanistan and Pakistan that left at least 15 dead. Newsweek retracted the story a week later, after the U.S. Department of Defense challenged its veracity. In a note to readers, editor Mark Whitaker said that the report had been based on information from “a knowledgeable U.S. government source.” He went on to say, however, that his source was no longer certain that he had read about the alleged incident in the still-unreleased Pentagon report cited in the article.

 In a competition sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors to determine the 40 greatest magazine covers of the past 40 years, the Jan. 22, 1981, Rolling Stone cover of a nude John Lennon curled around a fully clothed Yoko Ono was chosen as first; the cover appeared the month after Lennon's death. The Vanity Fair August 1991 cover that portrayed the nude and pregnant actress Demi Moore took second place, followed by the April 1968 Esquire cover that featured boxer Muhammad Ali with arrows piercing his body. Esquire, Time, and Life each had four winning covers. A panel of 52 editors, design directors, and photography editors selected the winners from 444 entries representing 136 magazines.

      A July report by PQ Media revealed that product placement, which influenced every segment of media, would increase 17.5% in magazines—to $161 million—in 2005. With the increased pressure for product placement in magazine articles, the American Society of Magazine Editors in October announced revised guidelines for editors and publishers to ensure a clear demarcation between advertising and editorial content. ASME's newly revised “Ten Commandments” included the statements “Advertisements should look different enough from editorial pages that readers can tell the difference” and “Advertisers should not pay to place their products in editorial pages nor should they demand placement in return for advertising.”

      In June the Meredith Corp., best known for publishing Better Homes and Gardens and Midwest Living, became the second largest U.S. publisher with its $350 million purchase of Family Circle, Parents, Fitness, and Child magazines from Gruner + Jahr USA, a division of the German-owned Bertelsmann AG. In announcing the purchase, Meredith chairman William Kerr said, “One of our growth strategies is to broaden our magazine portfolio to reach younger women and to serve the rapidly growing Hispanic market.” The purchase was the largest in the Des Moines, Iowa-based company's 103-year history.

      Gruner + Jahr's U.S. division, which was the sixth largest U.S. magazine publisher, fired Dan Brewster, its top American official, after having suffered a major setback with the demise in 2002 of its Rosie magazine and subsequent accusations of circulation mismanagement that arose during its court battle with the magazine's editor, talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell. Brewster later sued the company, accusing it of having made him a scapegoat.

       People was named Advertising Age's “Magazine of the Year” in October “for handling the [Hurricane] Katrina disaster more deftly than the government…[and] reaching the highest circulation in its 31 years, holding its position atop Time Inc.'s formidable magazine portfolio and confidently navigating the foamy, sometimes filthy, currents of celebrity weeklies.” Just hours before People was set to close its annual “best- and worst-dressed” issue, the editors decided to change the cover and include an additional eight pages of Hurricane Katrina coverage.

       Time Inc. strengthened its place as the largest U.S. magazine publisher by expanding its international operations with the purchase of Grupo Editorial Expansión, Mexico's second largest magazine publisher. Its 15 titles brought Time Inc.'s total to 155 magazines. The Mexican publisher's stable included the business magazine Expansión, the celebrity-centric Quién, the women's lifestyle review Balance, and the men's title Life and Style.

David E. Sumner

Book Publishing

United States.

      Though the American publishing industry's bottom-line profits in 2005 highlighted the realities expressed in one industry executive's quip that “flat is the new growth,” initiatives in digital search and delivery spurred speculation that five years into the new millennium, publishing might indeed be entering the 21st century.

      In 2005 sales figures again bore out that the American industry was a mature one. The Book Industry Study Group's (BISG's) Book Industry Trends 2005 projected that total publishers' net dollar sales in 2004 had risen only 2.75% over 2003, reaching $28,584,000,000. Though BISG was predicting a compound annual growth rate of 3.4% in publishers' net dollar sales between 2004 and 2009, the compound annual growth rate in unit sales for the same period was projected to be only 1.4%. Regarding trade-book sales, BISG's Trends quoted Ingram Book Co. president Jim Chandler's observation that “the pie is about as big as it's going to get.”

      The market-research firm Ipsos-Insight estimated that in 2004 consumer spending for books (across all channels) held at $13.3 billion for the second straight year. Unit sales, it said, were up 2.5% from 2003, reaching 1.7 billion. One distribution channel that showed growth was that of independent/small-chain bookstores. That market share accounted for 9% of the dollars spent by consumers, up 2.1% from 2002. According to Ipsos, the independents' overall performances exceeded the industry average for the past several years.

      The 2005 year-to-date bookstore sales, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, were $10,332,000,000, a 2.2% decline from August 2004, the most recent figures available. In six of the first nine months of 2005, participating bookstores—including trade, college, religious, chain stores (including superstores), and others—reported lower sales than in 2004. These reports came during a year in which total retail sales were relatively robust; August sales were 9.9% ahead of those for that month in 2004.

      The religious-book sector was a major engine in industry growth, in both revenue and units, with net sales of $1,946,300,000 in 2004. BISG projected a 37.3% increase in net revenues for the sector over the next five years. The success of the Rev. Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life, which had sold 23 million copies since 2003, prompted many trade publishers to focus on the religious market.

  J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince sold a record 6.9 million copies in the first 24 hours after its publication on July 16, and there were 13.5 million books in print before publication. Reflecting this, the Association of American Publishers reported a 71% increase in gross domestic sales in the children's and young-adult hardcover category as of September (the most recent figures available). Overall, sales of titles for teens were up 23% since 1999.

      BISG reported that used books were one of the fastest-growing segments of the industry, driven by large increases in online sales and characterized by positive purchasing experiences for consumers. In 2004 sales of used trade titles (noneducational books) were $589 million; that number reached $2.2 billion when used textbook sales of $1.6 billion were included. This was an 11.1% increase over 2003. The fastest-growing component of the used-book market was online sales, which in 2004 saw a 33.3% revenue growth totaling $609 million.

      It was a Silicon Valley interloper, however, that introduced the most intriguing possibilities into the often staid world of publishing. In December 2004 Internet company Google Inc. had announced that it was launching a project to digitize and index the collections of titles still protected by copyright in the libraries of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Stanford University (along with titles in the public domain in the collections of the New York Public Library and the University of Oxford). Google's plan to offer brief excerpts of the titles via free online searches—and to possibly link the searches to ad sales—garnered a strong reaction from many in the industry. On the legal front, authors and publishers sought an injunction to halt the initiative. In addition, Amazon.com and industry giant Random House announced new business models for the online viewing of titles on a pay-per-page basis.

Dan Cullen

International.

      It was no surprise that J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, whether in English or in translation, proved to be the worldwide publishing sensation of 2005. In South Africa, for example, where the weekly average sale required for a book to qualify as a best seller was 1,000, Harry Potter sold 40 times that number in a single day in July.

      The vicious discounting in the U.K., led by the supermarket groups, was much resented by independent booksellers. That strategy had previously been unknown in South Africa; as a result, the decision by supermarket chain Pick 'n Pay to undercut the standard bookseller price by 40% introduced a significant element of instability into the book market. Booksellers in countries such as France, where resale price maintenance (RPM) remained in force, breathed a sigh of relief. The inconclusive debate about the desirability of RPM within the EU continued. In May 2005 Polish publishers roundly condemned a government proposal to reintroduce RPM. Some argued that the reintroduction of RPM was likely to provide further stimulus to the already sizable markets in illegal photocopies and unlicensed books.

      Takeover activity slowed significantly during the year, following the megamerger activity of 2004, which left little scope for further restructuring, especially in the U.K., where the top four publishing groups—Bertelsmann, Hachette (now incorporating Hodder Headline), Pearson, and News Corp.—accounted for almost one-half of total sales by value. In June 2005, however, Editis, the second largest French publisher, bought independent publisher Le Cherche Midi for a rumoured €10 million (about $12.6 million), and Éditions Privat agreed in May to purchase Éditions du Rocher for an undisclosed sum.

      Having achieved some success in stemming book piracy in India and China, the U.K. Publishers Association (PA) turned its efforts toward Pakistan and Turkey. In India 500,000 pirated copies had been seized since the campaign began, although piracy remained widespread, in part because the penalties imposed by the courts were proving to be an insufficient deterrent. In China success hinged on convincing the authorities that the problem existed. Progress was proving to be slow in Pakistan, where the trade was vast; seemingly legitimate traders were involved, and the penalties were wholly inadequate. Turkish authorities were more cooperative. The PA admitted, however, that piracy was partly fostered by the setting of unreasonably high prices in less-developed markets.

      The phenomenon of newspapers' promoting their own book series took hold, with the emphasis on low pricing and heavy promotion. In Germany eight different series had been launched by midyear; the most recent, a library of management books, sold 21 million copies. Four of the five national daily newspapers in The Netherlands also launched their own series, and the phenomenon became well-established in France, Italy, and Spain. U.K. newspapers, however, preferred to give away DVDs and music CDs.

      When search engine Google began digitizing works from major libraries, the action was met with protests over its right to digitize copyrighted material. In an effort to compete with Google, the French National Library responded with a proposal, supported by other EU member states, to create a European digital library that would offer 15 million books online. (See also Computers and Information Systems ; Libraries. (Libraries and Museums ))

Peter Curwen

▪ 2005

Introduction

Television

Organization and Regulation.

      Singer Janet Jackson drew large fines from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission for her performance in the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, in which she, through the assistance of her singing partner, Justin Timberlake, exposed most of one of her breasts. The FCC imposed a $550,000 fine on CBS for the Super Bowl flashing incident, a levy the network contested on the grounds that it had no advance knowledge of the singer's plans regarding the costume. Although the move appeared to many observers to have been intentional, Timberlake claimed the exposure was the result of a “wardrobe malfunction.” The incident cast a veil of caution over TV for the rest of the year. When the ABC network scheduled an airing of an uncensored version of Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning World War II film Saving Private Ryan on Veterans Day, more than 60 affiliates declined to carry it, including those in Boston, Atlanta, Ga., Detroit, and Dallas, Texas. They did not want to take the risk of being fined for indecency for the occasional occurrences of obscene language in the movie. In that same month, ABC took heat for a sexually suggestive promotion that ran in advance of a Monday Night Football telecast and showed Nicollette Sheridan, star of the ABC series Desperate Housewives, wearing only a towel and attempting to seduce Philadelphia Eagles star Terrell Owens into not playing in that night's game. In response to thousands of viewer complaints, the FCC considered whether to impose fines. In November Viacom, Inc., parent company of CBS, agreed to pay the FCC a $3.5 million fine that regulators had imposed for indecent TV and radio programming apart from the Jackson incident.

       Comcast Corp., the leading American cable operator, attempted to acquire Disney, parent of ABC, as a programming-content wing, but the $54 billion bid that the Philadelphia-based company made for Disney was rebuffed. NBC worked to make a coherent single entity out of its takeover of Vivendi Universal, which was completed in May. The new company, NBC Universal, established single sales, marketing, and publicity departments over all of its television networks: NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Telemundo, and Bravo as well as former Universal companies USA Network, Sci Fi Channel, and Trio. The synergy worked during the telecast of the Olympic Games from Athens; the Games were shown across many NBC Universal networks, which gave viewers multiple options for coverage.

      Reelection campaign advertisements for Pres. George W. Bush on American TV made reference to the Olympics, and International Olympic Committee officials objected on the grounds that it was a political use of the name. The ads, which highlighted the Olympic participation of Iraq and Afghanistan as “two more free nations,” aired on MSNBC, CNBC, and other NBC cable networks during the broadcast of the Athens Olympics.

      Australian-born American Rupert Murdoch planned to move the headquarters of News Corp. to New York. In the second quarter net profit rose 7.8%, mainly from TV ($351 million), cable ($154 million), and newspaper ($144 million) affiliates. Brazil's antitrust regulator CADE (Administrative Council of Economic Defense) imposed conditions on the acquisition of Hughes Electronics by News Corp., which gave News Corp. a monopoly of satellite TV markets in Latin America.

      Canal Plus Netherlands, which offered digital pay-TV via satellite, cable, and digital video broadcasting, was bought from Vivendi by Dutch firms Greenfield Capital Partners and Airbridge Investments. Britain's biggest commercial free-to-air TV broadcaster ITV PLC became the majority shareholder of breakfast-TV producer GMTV after acquiring another 25% of its stock. ITV was formed by the merger of Granada and Carlton, each of which owned 25% of GMTV. The German cartel office opposed cable-TV operator Kabel Deutschland's takeover plans of three regional cable-network operators, Ish (Cologne), Iesy (Frankfurt), and Kabel Baden-Württemberg (Heidelberg). Pursuant to the German Takeover Act, Viacom (owner of MTV Networks Europe) published in June its intention to acquire 75.8% of Viva Media AG. In November TDC, a leading telecommunications company in Denmark, acquired Swedish broadband company Song Networks Holding AB, which was to be renamed TDC Song.

      Galaxy Satellite Broadcasting's Jim Blomfield resigned in August amid rumours of international satellite operator Intelsat's pullout from the joint venture with Hong Kong's Television Broadcasts Ltd. Lenovo Group Ltd., China's leading personal computer maker, formed a multimedia venture with Sun Media Investment Holdings Ltd., the private-investment firm of popular TV program host (and company chairman) Yang Lan and her husband, Bruno Wu Zheng. TV Tokyo traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange with an initial public offering of 3.79 million shares. Tokyo Regional Taxation Bureau ordered Nippon Television Network to pay ¥90 million (about $850,000) in additional taxes and penalties for having failed to declare taxable income over a three-year period ended March 31, 2003.

       Australia's media ownership bill was not dealt with by Parliament “due to a backlog of bills in the Senate upper house.” Communications Minister Darryl Williams had reintroduced the bill in November 2003 and had argued that the growth of the sector was being limited by an outmoded regulatory framework.

Programming.

      The most popular show in American television programming at the end of the 2003–04 TV season in May was the CBS crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and it retained that rank in the first months of the next season. Emmy Awards went to HBO's The Sopranos, a first-time winner for outstanding dramatic series, and to the first-year Fox show Arrested Development, the winner for outstanding comedy. The big fall hit was ABC's Desperate Housewives, a campy soap opera about lithe and licentious women on a comfy suburban block. The series rapidly became one of TV's top-three shows in all key demographic groups. Such a rapid ascent was surprising for any TV series in the cable-and-Internet era, but it was especially surprising for a scripted series. Desperate Housewives brought new hope to near-desperate writers, agents, and actors; all of the instant ratings successes in recent years had come from so-called reality series, and this led to a kind of panic in Hollywood's creative community. NBC could not parlay its Olympics success into fall-season ratings. The massive hit sitcom Friends retired in May, and after the first couple of months of the 2004–05 TV season, the network was losing ground in the most valuable viewer demographic (18–49-year-old adults) for the first time in a decade. The network was hurt when The Apprentice, the surprise early-year reality hit that featured real-estate developer Donald Trump (see Biographies (Trump, Donald )) as he led would-be acolytes through business challenges, did not fare as well in its fall edition.

      Two lions of network television news retired in 2004. Don Hewitt stepped down as executive producer of CBS's venerable 60 Minutes, the pioneering newsmagazine he founded in 1968, and NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw gave up his anchor chair, yielding to Brian Williams. With the announcement by CBS News anchor Dan Rather that he would retire in 2005, only ABC's Peter Jennings remained of the longtime big-three TV-network anchors. Also retiring in 2004 was respected TV journalist Bill Moyers. Because of the rise of cable news and the shrinking of the audience for network news, it was widely believed that the next generation of news anchors would cast much shorter shadows. Rather had found himself in the eye of a political firestorm because of a story he reported during the 2004 presidential campaign. His report, for the spinoff program 60 Minutes Wednesday, alleged that President Bush's National Guard service in the early 1970s had been spotty, at best. The story, however, was based on alleged National Guard documents that CBS was forced to admit had not been properly authenticated. A panel was appointed by CBS to investigate the blunder.

      The commercial arm of the BBC partnered with digital broadcaster Japan MediArk Co., and on December 1 they launched BBC Japan, an entertainment channel that ran programming specifically developed for the Japanese audience. In Great Britain the BBC announced that its digital terrestrial TV service Freeview was reaching four million homes with integrated digital TV (iDTV). The BBC, BSkyB, and Crown Castle International made up the Freeview consortium. In April BBC news reporters began attending two-hour seminars on impartial journalism following criticisms by the Hutton Report on the coverage of the death of scientist David Kelly. BBC World, the BBC's 24-hour international news and information channel, won Best News Channel in the seventh HOT BIRD TV awards. The awards were held in Venice on October 2 and were broadcast by Eutelsat, one of the world's largest satellite operators.

      UKTV Style's Watching Paint Dry treated viewers to the opportunity to watch different kinds of paint dry on an empty shop wall each day and asked them to vote online for their favourite paint. With guidance from fertility expert Allen Pacey of the University of Sheffield, Eng., the BBC televised a sperm race as part of the educational Lab Rats series on BBC Three. The race between the sperm of scientist Mike Leahy and comedian Zeron Gibson took place in glass capillary tubes and was shown by means of a microscope connected to a big screen. (Gibson's won.) Vee-TV, Britain's Channel 4 program for the deaf, decided to exclude offensive signs characterizing homosexuals, ethnic groups, and racial minorities from its sign language. Britain's Office of Fair Trading branded as illegal the collective sale of TV media rights for horse racing at 49 racecourses to a joint venture of Arena Leisure, BSkyB, and Channel 4 called Attheraces. English premier league association football (soccer) was broadcast by BSkyB, but in agreement with European competition regulators, it sublicensed rights for several games. Sportech launched ahead of Euro 2004 Littlewoods Bet Direct, the only fixed-odds betting service available 24 hours a day and seven days a week within ITV's interactive menu. Meanwhile, the Ligue de Football Professionnel of France launched the auction of broadcasting rights to its top matches over the following three years. Fierce competition erupted between rights holder Canal Plus and Television Par Satellite, the digital TV platform of Television Francaise 1 SA and M6-Metropole TV. Shows on Iraqi TV's al-Sharqiya channel were becoming popular. One program, Ration Card, randomly drew the national ration-card number of an Iraqi citizen. Producers then showed up on the winner's doorstep and handed over $1,000.

       Mexico's Grupo Televisa SA changed the name of its global unit to Televisa Estudios and added licensing and merchandising services for video and DVD products. Colombia's Caracol network signed a five-year distribution contract with DirecTV, which also started to beam Puerto Rican programming from WAPA America as part of its Para Todos service on September 1.

      Among other TV-related stories worldwide, a six-episode Thai TV show called Nok Hunt was staged by new budget airline Nok Air to choose 10 flight attendants from among 20 applicants who underwent several tests. A New Delhi woman set fire to herself because her husband and three children were glued to the India-Pakistan cricket series on TV. In Manitoba a 20-year-old was jailed for having hurled a bagful of vomit and feces inside a Winnipeg bus, similar to an episode on the MTV show Jackass. German news service Deutsche Welle celebrated its 10th year online with reports in the Star Trek–based Klingon language (created by linguist Marc Okrand).

Technology.

      Television technology marched forward aggressively in 2004 as high-definition television (HDTV) and various services for time-shifting programs made a push toward the mainstream. “Consumers will have more flexibility over what they watch and when they watch it,” said Phillip Swann, president of TVPredictions.com. Swann pegged growing usage of HDTV, digital video recorders (DVRs) such as TiVo, and on-demand video service as the year's most important TV trends.

      Although HDTV remained a prohibitively expensive proposition for most consumers, prices for the necessary equipment began to decline significantly in 2004, and the number of high-definition programs that were being offered grew. The telecasting of sports was a key factor in driving the growth, experts said. For example, Cox Cable in San Diego, Calif., saw its “take rate” for high-definition services jump 40% after San Diego Padres baseball games began to be offered in the new, more vivid format.

      The use of DVRs, long predicted as the wave of TV's future, finally began to climb in 2004, largely because cable-TV operators began to offer them packaged inside their cable boxes. This arrangement was simpler than TiVo's, which typically required users to purchase and install a separate audio-video appliance. Independent industry analysts predicted that the number of DVR-equipped homes would explode from 7 million at the end of 2004 to some 30 million, or close to one-third of American households, within four years. Also popular were new video-on-demand cable-TV services, which allowed a user to call up an episode of HBO's The Sopranos, for example, from an on-screen menu and watch it immediately rather than wait for the show to appear on the regular HBO schedule. The two technologies together were forcing networks and advertising agencies to rethink the traditional 30-second TV advertisement.

      On the basis of its tracking of DVR usage by its 800,000 customers, TiVo revealed that the most-watched Olympic moment was gymnast Paul Hamm's high-bar performance. The most-replayed Super Bowl moment was Jackson's “wardrobe malfunction.” In October Nielsen Media Research, the company that provided the Nielsen ratings, began culling data on DVR use from 5,000–10,000 TiVo households that had agreed to participate. TiVo faced off against operators that provided cable and satellite services with DVR functions. Hollywood studios and the U.S. National Football League blocked TiVo from allowing its subscribers to transfer recorded shows to other devices, but TiVo and Netflix agreed to develop a service for customers to rent videos by downloading them through TiVo.

       Microsoft Corp. unveiled MSN TV2, made by Thomson for RCA, which offered a subscription package that included MSN, NBC, Discovery Channel, and Fox Sports. At the same time, Microsoft introduced the new Windows XP Media Center software, which made it possible for a PC to function as a photo album, jukebox, DVD player, TV receiver, and DVR.

      In August Toshiba introduced Qosmio, the first laptop integrated with audio and video features, DVD drive, TV tuner with a no-waiting TV mode, enhanced speakers, and near-TV-quality display. The Samsung MM-A700 cellphone used MobiTV technology to function as a TV. It could show news updates, sports clips, weather forecasts, music videos, and cartoons from 14 cable stations of streaming video provided by the Sprint network. Samsung also launched HDTV with a picture-enhancing feature called DNIe (digital natural image engine). Ahead of the holidays personal computer giant Dell released its first plasma-screen TV. It had released its first LCD (liquid-crystal display) TV in December 2003. Sharp, Japan's top maker of LCD panels, announced its latest product, a 114-cm (45-in) LCD TV, to keep up with demands for 102-cm (40-in) or larger flat TVs. Earlier, it had introduced the world's first wireless flat-panel TV, the Aquos LC-15L1U-S, with a 38-cm (15-in) display screen and built-in battery.

      Patients in 32 British hospitals complained about TV sets in their rooms having no “off” switch. Even when they refused to subscribe, the TVs blared ads for the service and messages from hospital authorities. Television service, installed by private firm Patientline, cost patients $5.75 per day.

Radio

      Air America, a new liberal radio network intended to counter the prevailing right-wing themes of American talk radio, signed on in March 2004 with comic Al Franken as its marquee host. Also cohosting a show was comedian and actress Janeane Garofalo. Despite the abundance of news in an election year, the network had startup woes. It quickly lost its Chicago outlet, piled up debt, and within the first three months underwent a corporate restructuring. By year's end, however, Air America had more than 40 outlets, including some owned by the giant Clear Channel conglomerate, and it was proving popular with young-adult listeners. Much like Howard Stern's show, Franken's show was also turned into a regular telecast, on cable TV's Sundance Channel.

      Meanwhile, Stern, the popular New York-based talk host, was preparing to abandon over-the-air radio for the new medium of satellite radio. (See Sidebar (New Frontiers in Radio ).) Fed up with what he considered to be harassment in the form of fines from an FCC that was newly vigilant about what it termed indecency, Stern opted to sign with Sirius Satellite Radio, one of two competitors in the emerging satellite arena. With a contract said to be valued at $500 million and scheduled to start in 2006, Stern brought new credibility to a medium that had struggled to attract listeners.

      Also helping satellite was the arrival of Bob Edwards, the longtime host of NPR's flagship Morning Edition broadcast. Edwards began hosting an eponymous interview show on XM Satellite Radio in October, five months after NPR pushed him out of the hosting chair. NPR's demotion of Edwards, less than a year shy of his 25th anniversary as host, proved wildly unpopular with listeners, who logged more than 30,000 protests, according to the public-radio programming service. NPR management said the move was undertaken to inject new life into the morning broadcast but later admitted that they had badly mishandled the departure. Nonetheless, at year's end the levels of listener donations to local NPR stations did not seem to be showing any long-term effects of the Edwards affair, according to company officials. NPR continued to gain listeners, a popularity boom that many analysts interpreted as an audience reaction to the increasing homogenization of commercial radio. Its share of radio listeners had grown fivefold in two decades, to more that 5% of the total radio audience in the U.S. A record $236 million bequest in 2003 from Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc, had the radio service planning to hire many new reporters, including some to fill in news beats it considered to be inadequately covered, such as the media.

      In commercial radio a second successive year of little to no advertising growth had the big broadcasters scrambling for solutions. The big two, Clear Channel and Infinity, decided to trim the number of commercials aired per hour in an attempt to make the time more valuable and reduce listener ad fatigue. Both Clear Channel Communications and the Viacom conglomerate, which owned Infinity, made moves to boost their influence in the growing Hispanic radio market. Viacom bought 10% of the Spanish Broadcasting System, and Clear Channel announced plans to convert 20 to 25 of its stations to Hispanic formats.

      Radio Arman (“Radio Hope”), Afghanistan's first privately owned independent FM radio station, was begun in 2003 by the Mohseni brothers Saad, Zaid, and Jahed. In 2004 it was broadcasting 24 hours a day, seven days a week, a mix of talk shows, traffic updates, and music—Indian, Western, Arabic, and Afghani. A hit with young Afghans, the disc jockeys were aged 19 to 25, and half of them were women. In September Radio Arman launched a talent search for new Afghan superstars. Four winners recorded CDs for promotion on the air.

      Established by the British in 1954, Radio Uganda celebrated its golden jubilee in September. For a time Radio Uganda had been overshadowed by newer FM stations in Kampala, and high-powered shortwave transmitters at the station eventually fell into disuse. Using satellite links, Radio Uganda later came to reach the whole country. Developments in radio programming facilitated the promotion of Uganda's amnesty program, particularly on Mega FM, the most popular station in northern Uganda. Its well-known program Dwogpaco (“Come Back Home”) featured ex-LRA ( Lord's Resistance Army) members asking their fellow combatants to surrender. The show was conducted in the language of the Acholi, the largest ethnic group in the area. The show was also broadcast on Radio Juba in The Sudan, where many LRA members were still based. During the launching of the Radio Uganda Listeners Association on the occasion of Radio Uganda's golden jubilee, the minister of state for information, James Nsaba Buturo, announced the merger of Radio Uganda and Uganda Television.

      Imprisoned murderer Jiri Kajinek was paid to star in an advertising campaign by Czech pop station Kiss Radio. Some 500 billboards showed 43-year-old Kajinek wearing headphones under the slogan “Radio for life.” Kajinek had become a local legend when he escaped from a maximum-security prison and evaded recapture for more than a month.

Ramona Monette Sargan Flores; Steve Johnson

Newspapers

       Newspapers in 2004 were rocked by scandals that dented the industry's credibility as executives came to grips with a blasé advertising recovery. The pressure on profitability combined with ongoing structural changes in the advertising and readership markets made for a challenging climate in a year otherwise expected to be economically better than the previous three years, which were marked by recession. Newspaper managements responded with format changes and new young-adult products.

      The restoration of credibility rose to the top of the newspaper-industry agenda after a series of high-profile cases involving alleged corporate malfeasance and inflation of circulation numbers. Conrad Black, chairman of global media giant Hollinger Inc., and other top corporate executives were investigated by regulatory agencies over alleged fraud, misstatements to shareholders, and improper diversion of funds as part of transactions. One regulator accused Black and former Chicago Sun-Times publisher David Radler of having abused a public company and treated it as their “personal piggy bank.”

      As investigations continued throughout 2004, Hollinger sold Telegraph Group Ltd., which published London's highest circulated quality newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, to David and Frederick Barclay, owners of The Scotsman newspaper and of London's Ritz Hotel. The U.K. purchase came after a ferocious public-bidding war for the group. Later in the year Hollinger sold the Jerusalem Post to Canada-based CanWest and an Israeli media group.

      Meanwhile, investigations by new management at Hollinger revealed that circulation at the Chicago Sun-Times had been overstated, and tens of millions of dollars had to be reimbursed to advertisers whose rates were based on the audited circulation numbers. Similar investigations in the United States found Tribune properties in New York, Newsday and Hoy, as well as Belo Corp.'s Dallas (Texas) Morning News to have had similar inflated circulations over varying periods of time. Similar advertiser reimbursements were implemented. The U.S. Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) promised tighter auditing standards in the future and censured the offending newspapers by excluding them later in the year from a crucial industry-circulation report for advertisers.

      In the U.S. there was a nearly 1% decline in circulation. Declines were sharply higher in urban markets, where publishers such as the Washington Post and the Miami (Fla.) Herald indicated a willingness to experiment with shorter stories, more graphics, and quick-read sections in response to circulation declines. A Deutsche Bank report, though, suggested that new ABC rules allowing newspapers to more easily count deeply discounted circulation was masking the fact that nondiscounted circulation had dropped closer to 5% over the previous two years.

      The year 2004 was projected to be the end of a three-year advertising slump for newspapers. Publishers looked to the pattern of the previous global recession in 1990–91 and also counted on the Athens Olympic Games and the U.S. elections as further impetus for advertising growth. Newspapers got the growth, but at only half the percentage that had been forecast. In the U.S. the decade-long decline of traditional mass-merchandise retailers that relied on advertising and the rise of discounters such as Wal-Mart that did not rely on advertising impacted recovery expectations. By year's end major retailers Kmart and Sears had announced a corporate merger. Leading analysts such as Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch predicted that the mediocre advertising performance of all media industries, notably newspapers, would continue through 2005.

      Another major impact on newspaper revenues was the ongoing shift of employment advertising from print to online. While 69% of major American newspapers had developed Web-only classified advertising options by 2004, the rise of national-employment Web sites in countries worldwide continued to take market share away from newspapers. A report by Borrell Associates in the U.S. indicated that all of the market-share shift of employment advertising to online since 2000 had come from newspapers. Fighting back, newspapers around the globe continued to create local online classified advertising options, while one-time print competitors banded together to aggregate classifieds to fend off national online competitors such as Monster.com. With most quality newspapers heavily reliant on classified advertising in their profit models, the tepid global job growth combined with content shifts to the Internet caused newspaper revenues to stagnate.

      Paper manufacturers, having faced a decline in demand for newspaper pages since 2001, were able to sharply increase newsprint prices in 2004, despite the fact that no major increase in newsprint consumption was seen in most parts of the world, with the exception of Asia. In recent years publishers had become accustomed to the lowest inflation-adjusted newsprint prices in modern newspaper history.

      After experiencing weak retail and classified-advertising sales, circulation erosion, and higher newsprint costs, many publishers were forced to cut staffing, notably in editorial departments that had been largely spared during the recent recession. Other content cutbacks could be seen in traditional newspaper features such as the comics, theatre listings, obituaries, and other sections—some of which publishers migrated to their Web sites.

      Leading global financial newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, reliant on the weak business-to-business advertising sector, continued to report weak earnings.

      Despite credibility issues and economic strains, pockets of innovation remained at newspapers. While a change in format had been implemented by newspapers worldwide in the past decade, the launch in London of tabloid editions alongside broadsheet editions of The Times and The Independent in late 2003 sparked a wave of similar moves throughout Europe in 2004. Both London newspapers eventually dropped their broadsheet editions in 2004 as more than 70% of the market began daily choosing the tabloid. Gazet van Antwerpen in Belgium and Blick in Switzerland also launched dual formats, only to drop their historic broadsheets. Other newspapers to launch a tabloid version were De Standaard in Belgium, the Irish Independent in Ireland, Die Welt in Germany, The Scotsman, Dagens Nyheter in Sweden, and Het Parool in The Netherlands. The New Straits Times in Malaysia became the first major Asian quality broadsheet to launch a tabloid edition. Format change results varied widely, with some newspapers reporting short-term increases in circulation, notably among women and young adults. Though newspaper executives advocated that broadsheet advertising prices remain the same in tabloid format, advertisers fought for pricing based on space measurement—again, with varying results from market to market.

      In South Africa the success of the two-year-old down-market Daily Sun continued to put pressure on the country's 17 other daily newspapers, mostly positioned as middle- and upper-market products. In a country of nearly 47 million people dominated by an economically ascendant black population, only 1.1 million daily newspapers had been sold daily prior to the Daily Sun's launch. By 2004 the newspaper's daily circulation had surpassed 400,000 copies, 75% of which represented “aspiring blacks” who had never before read a newspaper. Modeled after Britain's Sun, minus the topless pictures of women, South Africa's Daily Sun stood in contrast to the Nigerian-owned up-market broadsheet ThisDay, which closed after only one year of publication.

      A microcosm of an increasingly integrated Europe came with the continued growth of Fakt, a picture-oriented popular daily launched in Poland in 2003 by German publisher Axel Springer. Within months of its launch, Fakt surpassed Gazeta Wyborcza to become Poland's highest-selling daily newspaper, with more than 500,000 copies purchased daily. The significance of a German publisher's having success in another European country might portend other cross-border ventures by Axel Springer and other publishers in the quickly evolving European Union.

      New newspapers aimed at young-adult urban-commuting markets continued to grow in influence. The success of Metro and 20 Minutes in Europe—free commuter newspapers that attracted young adults and women more than their paid daily newspaper counterparts did—spawned similar ventures throughout North America, South America, and Asia. Traditional publishers such as Associated Newspapers in England, De Telegraaf in The Netherlands, Tribune and Belo in the United States, and Quebecor in Canada all managed urban newspapers, mostly free. In the U.S. Gannett continued to launch weekly young-adult-oriented tabloids in its regional markets.

      Publishers experimented with new newspapers in nonnative languages. While Spanish-language newspapers continued their rise in the U.S., new Chinese-language newspapers appeared in Asia where pockets of Chinese speakers lived. An Argentine newspaper, La Razon, was published in languages in various parts of the world, including China, as part of an effort to attract business to its native country.

      Convergence was an oft-used term in newspaper companies during the year. Leading companies such as Tribune, New York Times, CanWest, Media General, and Belo explored ways to sell local multimedia advertising packages that included newspapers, online subscriptions, television programming, outdoor billboards, and other options. As U.S. lawmakers balked at regulatory attempts to liberalize local cross-media ownership, Australia appeared on the brink of loosening such regulations—which would have the potential to open the door for newspaper publishers to explore more commercial options.

      Aside from the Hollinger divestitures, 2004 was not known as a year for major sales of newspaper companies. The biggest move might have come when News Corp. shareholders voted to move the $48 billion media empire founded on the backs of Australian newspapers from Australia to the U.S. The move, approved by 90% of News Corp. shareholders, was designed to attract institutional investors.

Earl J. Wilkinson

Magazines

      Both the U.S. and worldwide magazine industries bounced back in 2004 after three years of little or no growth. U.S. advertising revenue for September increased for the fifth consecutive month and topped the previous September by more than 17%. Ad revenue for the first nine months of 2004 was 10% higher than for the first nine months of 2003.

       Internet advertising, which included online magazines, was expected to reach $10 billion in 2004, which would mark a 34% increase over 2003 and would top the record 2000 intake.

      An annual guide to new magazine launches—published by Samir Husni, a professor at the University of Mississippi—reported that the 949 new titles in 2003 represented the most new introductions since 1998. Nearly 800 new launches through the first 10 months of 2004 indicated that 2004 start-ups might equal that figure.

      The year, however, also saw a troubling trend with the outsourcing of magazine design and content development to foreign firms. Folio magazine reported in June that firms in India and the Philippines had contracted with a number of small-circulation American magazines to do various aspects of their production work. Copy editors and graphic designers were among the employees cited as most at risk of losing their jobs to overseas competitors. (See Economic Affairs: Special Report (Offshoring ).)

      For the second time, Time Inc. revived its historic Life magazine, which was launched on October 1 in over 70 daily newspapers. Time called Life a “newspaper-distributed magazine” and not a “supplement” like its competitors Parade and USA Weekend. Life would be published weekly with Friday issues of newspapers. Folio described the new Life as a “breezy lifestyle magazine for relatively upscale urban consumers.” The original Life had debuted in 1936, and it ran weekly until 1972. The company revived it as a monthly from 1978 to 2000.

      The Committee to Protect Journalists honoured journalists from four countries with International Press Freedom Awards at a New York City dinner on November 23. The organization gave a posthumous award to Paul Klebnikov, the editor of Forbes Russia, who was shot by an assassin on July 9 in Moscow. Klebnikov, an American of Russian descent, had joined Forbes in 1989 and had risen to senior editor before leaving the U.S.-based magazine to become editor of Forbes Russia in April 2004. In May the magazine attracted significant attention when it published a list of Russia's wealthiest people, including 33 Moscow billionaires. Klebnikov became the 15th journalist to have been murdered in Russia since 2000.

      The Russian-language edition of Cosmopolitan appeared in the Guinness Book of World Records as the glossy magazine with the highest monthly circulation in Europe. It reached a record-breaking circulation of 610,000 with its March 2004 issue. British Glamour magazine placed second in Europe with a monthly circulation of 580,000, and French-language Marie Claire was third with 380,000 copies. Cosmopolitan was the first glossy magazine to be published in post-Soviet Russia.

      The widely respected World Press Review, which published news and commentary from around the world for 30 years, released its last issue in April 2004. Sustained by the Stanley Foundation throughout its life, the 50,000-circulation magazine had never been profitable, and the foundation finally withdrew its support. Publisher Teri Schure, however, purchased the magazine's name and Web site () and continued to publish it as an online magazine. In October 2004 Dow Jones & Co. announced that beginning in December its unprofitable Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review would cease publication as a newsweekly and instead would appear as a monthly opinion journal.

      Revenues and circulation for Martha Stewart Living and its parent company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, continued to reel from the legal woes of founder, former chairwoman, and CEO Martha Stewart. Circulation for the magazine fell from 2.4 million to 1.9 million between June 2003 and June 2004. The company's revenues (through the first nine months of 2004) also fell about 25%. In March, Stewart was convicted of having lied to government investigators about why she sold nearly 4,000 shares of ImClone Systems stock. She was sentenced in July to five months in prison and began serving the term in a West Virginia prison on October 8.

      In November 2003 a Manhattan judge had ruled that there was no winner in the ugly court battle between entertainer Rosie O'Donnell and Gruner + Jahr USA, saying neither side would collect any damages. The publishers had sued O'Donnell for $100 million, alleging breach of contract for having walked away in mid-September 2002 from the magazine Rosie. She countersued for $125 million, saying that Gruner + Jahr broke its contract with her by cutting her out of key editorial decisions. The former McCall's magazine had begun publishing as Rosie in April 2001 and folded with the December 2002 issue.

David E. Sumner

Book Publishing

United States.

      In a year that saw a heightened national focus on writers, books, and publishing, many in the industry watched with disquiet a continuing softness in book sales in 2004. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) domestic book-publishing sales report noted that, as of September (the most recent month for which figures were available), total trade sales were up only 1.2%, totaling $8,302,700.

      This continued a trend of underwhelming book sales in the U.S. The Book Industry Study Group's (BISG's) Book Industry Trends 2004 projected total consumer expenditures of all book sales in 2004 of $38.9 billion, a rise of 2.9%. As had been the case for several years, however, that growth was projected to be realized on a minuscule rise in unit sales. For 2004 that was an uptick of 1.2%, following an estimated unit decline of 1% in 2003. R.R. Bowker, publisher of Books in Print, projected that U.S. title output in 2003 increased 19%—to 175,000 new titles and editions—the highest total ever recorded.

      Much of the national awareness of publishing in 2004 among both consumers and the media was a direct result of the bruising U.S. presidential campaign. The fractious partisan debates regarding both the policies and the personalities of the candidates helped to secure many nonfiction books prominent spots in off-the-book-page media coverage and on best-seller lists. From the entire range of the political spectrum, titles emerged for their moment of face-out celebrity on bookstore shelves, often serving as the leads of news reports. From the right, with titles such as Unfit for Command, and from the left, with titles such as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd's Bushworld, book releases piqued the interest of a public invested in the George W. Bush– John Kerry contest, and sales surged.

      Underscoring this, the AAP reported that as of September there had been a 7.6% rise in publishers' gross sales of adult hardcover books, with a 10.2% rise in unit sales. Beyond the activity of recent hardcover releases, however, the picture was less sanguine. AAP figures showed that domestic book-publishing sales of adult paperbacks—a staple of consumer publishers—had grown only 1.8%. While any reports regarding children's books were likely to pale compared with 2003—which saw the publication of the phenomenally successful Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix—sales of children's and young-adult hardcover books were down 27.4%. Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly in a year in which “moral values” played such a prominent role in national debates, the AAP figures showed that the sales of religious books had grown 23.6%.

      Entering the crucially important holiday period, the major chain book retailers reported very small increases in same-store sales, and both chain and independent booksellers were keeping their fingers crossed that early signs of an economic recovery would help fuel strong fourth-quarter book sales. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of September (the most recent figures available), year-to-date bookstore sales were up only 0.5% over 2003. For independents one of the bright spots of 2004 was the release of a report from Ipsos BookTrends that showed that in 2003 independent bookstores did well on a unit basis, with demand outpacing the overall trade-book industry. The independent/small-chain bookstore channel's market position reached a five-year share high of 16%, which was posted against a backdrop of a steady hold in overall consumer demand for general trade books compared with 2002 (the most recent figures available). Americans bought close to the same number of books in 2003—1,176,000,000—as they did in 2002—1,177,000,000. In 2003 independent bookstores secured 18% of total spending for trade books, up from 16% in 2002. Overall spending on books dropped about 2% in 2003—to $11 billion from $11.3 billion in 2002—according to Ipsos figures.

      In a year of strong political interest, one issue found particular resonance. Opposition to the controversial Sec. 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act—which gave the FBI greatly expanded authority to search business records, including the records of bookstores and libraries—resulted in the collection in bookstores and libraries of almost 200,000 signatures on petitions calling for Congress “to restore readers' privacy rights.” The petition drive was spearheaded by the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association, the Association of American Publishers, and PEN American Center.

Dan Cullen

International.

      Confusion as to the desirability of resale price maintenance (RPM) in the newly enlarged European Union continued to hold sway in the book- publishing industry in 2004. The existing RPM exemption was due to expire at the end of December.

      Publishing bodies in the U.K. continued to attempt to shut down book- piracy operations in India. In January one of India's biggest operations was closed down in Meerut, and 24,000 counterfeit volumes were confiscated; in April, Mumbai's (Bombay's) largest supplier of pirated books was arrested, and 15,000 titles were seized. Despite the fact that one in five books was counterfeit, prosecution had been unsuccessful.

      Much of the book-publishing industry continued to be beset with falling sales and profitability. In August 2004, however, the Amsterdam-based multinational publisher Wolters Kluwer increased its share price after having implemented cost-cutting procedures, reduced its debt, and improved its corporate structures. Its much-improved cash-flow situation produced a resurgence of takeover activity.

      At the end of November 2003, the Bundeskartellamt, the German antitrust body, finally approved the purchase of trade publisher Heyne by Bertelsmann subsidiary Random House Deutschland, subject to the sale of certain paperback interests to Sweden's Bonnier Group.

      In January 2004, despite its previous opposition to Lagardère Group's attempt to take over Editis (the former Vivendi Universal Publishing), independent French publisher La Martinière announced its intention to take over its ally, Le Seuil, and thereby formed the third largest publishing house in France. This proposal in turn stirred up opposition from other independent publishers distributed by Le Seuil; they were fearful that the merged company would become overly focused on profitability.

      In late February five bids were tabled for a majority stake in Dutch book and newspaper publisher PCM, which also owned Belgium's largest book publisher, Standaard Uitgeverij. An offer from Apax Partners to purchase a 52.5% stake was accepted. On March 1 Monaco-based Éditions du Rocher bought (for an undisclosed sum) French literary publisher Le Serpent à Plumes, with 400 titles on its backlist, from Éditions du Forum. That same day Ebury Press, part of Random House, acquired (for an undisclosed price) the 200 titles published by C.W. Daniel.

      In November 2003 Taylor & Francis had acquired the Dekker Group of the U.S. for $138.6 million, as well as Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers for €16.75 million (€1 = about $1.24); Taylor & Francis continued to pursue its expansionary path, merging with business publisher Informa in May to create T&F Informa. In the all-share deal, T&F shareholders received 17 shares in the new company for every 10 existing T&F shares they held.

      In April a bid worth £940 million (£1 =  about $1.80) was tabled for the whole of WH Smith (including Hodder Headline) by venture group Permira. In August, however, WH Smith agreed to sell subsidiary Hodder Headline to Lagardère for £210 million in cash and an additional £13 million to shore up the pension fund.

      In May, Wolters Kluwer sold 80% of its Dutch subsidiary ten Hagen & Stam (for an undisclosed sum in cash and shares) to legal and governmental publisher Sdu Uitgevers, a subsidiary of Sdu. Also in May, Lagardère put 60% of French publisher Editis up for sale, and this was acquired by Wendel Investissement for €660 million, thereby creating the second largest publishing group in France.

Peter Curwen

▪ 2004

Introduction

Television

Media network mergers came unglued, conglomerates were broken up, and new players—in several senses—arrived on the video scene. In radio, attention focused on a top personality, satellite radio began marketing efforts, and public radio was riding high.

Organization and Regulation.

      In American television much of 2003 was consumed by the bitter and often surprising battle over the attempt by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to relax the rules that tried to minimize concentration of the ownership of television stations. The FCC, led by its conservative chairman, Michael Powell (the son of U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell), proposed new rules, including ones that would allow one owner to control TV stations reaching 45% of the country, up from 35%, and that would end a ban on a company's owning a newspaper and an over-the-air station in the same city. Protest movements formed, but it was not until after the FCC had voted to change the rules, in June, that the protesters' effectiveness began to be felt. The movement brought together a rare coalition of conservatives and liberals, including the National Rifle Association and the National Organization for Women, who were joined by their fear that increasing media-ownership concentration would squeeze local voices out of the nation's most powerful communications medium. In the September week that the changes were to take effect, however, a federal appeals court issued a stay against their implementation. Both houses of Congress, although led by the Republicans, separately voted to overturn one or more of the new rules. With all of this up in the air at year's end, the rules-change picture was, as Powell said, “muddied.” The television networks and big media companies continued to push aggressively for the changes, but what was surprising was the degree to which this seemingly arcane issue eventually caught the attention of average Americans. A compromise was reached on November 24.

      Merger-and-acquisition activity continued through 2003. The top story was likely the troubled financial picture at the Vivendi Universal entertainment conglomerate and the signals it sent to NBC, the last American network without a major-studio partner. NBC parent General Electric (GE) reached an agreement to merge Universal, whose TV and movie interests were worth some $13 billion, with the network; GE would own 80% of the new company, which would be named NBC Universal and would be the world's sixth largest media company. In the deal GE acquired Universal's film and TV studios and a 5,000-film library; the USA Network, the SCI FI Channel, and the Trio cable network; the Spanish-language Telemundo network; and an interest in the Universal Studios theme-park chain. Universal was the production company behind the popular Law & Order criminal-justice television series; Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent were mainstays of NBC's prime-time schedule. NBC executives even discussed the possibility of creating an all-Law & Order cable channel and of using Universal's movie library in the increasingly popular video-on-demand services, but the primary benefit of the merger was the protection that it would give NBC from dependency on advertising for its sole revenue stream. All the other major American television networks were already partnered up with or part of more broad-based entertainment companies. FCC and U.S. Department of Justice approval of the NBC-Universal deal was still pending at year's end, but industry analysts saw few likely roadblocks to its completion. In September the New York Supreme Court ordered Vivendi to pay its former CEO Jean-Marie Messier the €20.6 million (about $23.4 million) severance package that had been promised him but had been halted by a French court while stock-market regulators investigated recent Vivendi financial statements.

      Perhaps even more important in 2003 was the attempt by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to gain control of the leading American consumer satellite-subscription service. DirecTV beamed cable and network channels and other programming into more than 12 million American homes. Murdoch had coveted DirecTV for years, and in April News Corp. agreed to spend $6.6 billion to buy a controlling 34% interest in Hughes Electronics Corp., the DirecTV parent and a subsidiary of General Motors Corp. The service would fill a major hole in News Corp.'s worldwide satellite offerings and give the company another outlet for its own programming. Regulatory approval was pending. Murdoch named his youngest son, James, CEO of the British pay-TV company British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB). News Corp. owned 35% of BSkyB, and Murdoch sat as company chairman.

      Liberty Media paid $7.9 billion for a 57% share of the QVC home shopping network, which reached 85 million households. The FCC cleared Liberty's 98% ownership of QVC; the other 2% remained with QVC's management team. Liberty acquired UnitedGlobalCom (UGC), a cable provider to 11 million subscribers in 25 countries. UGC's main subsidiary, Amsterdam-based United Pan-Europe Communications, was reorganizing following bankruptcy.

      In October British regulators approved the £4 billion (about $6.7 billion) merger of Granada and Carlton Communications, both of which ran the commercial TV network ITV. American rivals Viacom Inc. and Haim Saban announced interest in the merged company, since new legislation allowed companies outside the European Union to buy into Britain's commercial TV broadcasters. Viacom president Mel Karmazin was looking at ITV competitor Channel Five, which was owned by pan-European broadcaster RTL and Britain's United Business Media. Saban, who had made a fortune in American children's television, closed a long-fought deal to buy Germany's biggest commercial broadcaster, ProSiebenSat.1, from the insolvent KirchMedia.

      SBT, Brazil's second largest network, was ostensibly offered in July to Mexican media giant Grupo Televisa by owner Sílvio Santos, who dramatically indicated that he had only six years to live. Santos, who had hosted a 10-hour variety show on Sundays for three decades, also claimed that he was negotiating with José Bonifacio de Oliveira Sobrinho, a former executive of SBT's main rival, Globo TV. In July Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates disclosed ownership of a 7% stake in Grupo Televisa, which clarified the large-scale deployment of Microsoft's channel guide for cable TV by Televisa's subsidiary Cablevision México. Similar deployments in Mexico and Costa Rica were later made by cable companies Cablevision Monterey, Megacable, PCTV, and Cabletica. Refocusing on its television business, TV Azteca, Mexico's number two broadcaster, spun off mobile-phone operator Unefon in October. TV Azteca and the new Azteca Telecom were owned by Mexican tycoon Ricardo Salinas Pliego.

      Hong Kong property developer Lai Sun sold its one-third stake in Asia Television Ltd. (HKATV), the smaller of the territory's two free-to-air broadcasters, for HK$230 million (about U.S.$29.6 million). HKATV's CEO Chan Wing-kee bought the shares, increasing his ownership of company shares to half. Television Broadcasts (TVB) launched its Galaxy pay-TV service in Hong Kong in December. Tom.com, the media company of Li Ka-shing, Hong Kong's richest businessman, bought 64% of the Mandarin-language China Entertainment Television (CETV) from AOL Time Warner, which retained 36%. In late October, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in a joint venture with CNBC Asia Pacific, launched an MGM movie channel on satellite and cable TV systems in Asia to broadcast subtitled motion pictures from MGM's 4,000-film library.

Programming.

      In American television programming, the year's surprise was the initially modest cable makeover show that aimed to bridge the gulf between gay and straight men. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy debuted on NBC's Bravo cable outlet in July, featuring a “Fab Five” of gay men, each with special expertise. In each episode they made over a style- or grooming-challenged straight man nominated for the show, usually by his wife or girlfriend. Snappy repartee from the gay men gave it more pungency than most makeover shows, and the program reflected a trend of increasing media acceptance of homosexuality. The audience grew weekly, and the show even proved popular during a few prime-time airings on broadcast network NBC. After a short initial season, a second season of 40 episodes began in November, and the producers were beginning to clone Queer Eye to run in other countries.

      The most popular prime-time series, in both the season that ended in May and the early portion of the one that began in September, was again CBS's CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, a stylish and carefully detailed drama about a Las Vegas, Nev., forensics team. The most popular comedy was, again, NBC's Friends, a series about six young New York City pals that was expected to end its 10-season run with considerable fanfare in May 2004. The Emmy Awards, however, went to NBC's political drama The West Wing, which won despite creator and head writer Aaron Sorkin's exit from the show, and to veteran CBS family comedy Everybody Loves Raymond. The show's star, Ray Romano, had won an Emmy himself in 2002. (See Biographies (Romano, Ray ).) In 2003 James Gandolfini, who played America's favourite bad guy—Tony Soprano on HBO's The Sopranos—for a fifth season, took the award for best actor in a drama. (See Biographies (Gandolfini, James ).)

      In the spring the American television networks mostly distinguished themselves with dedicated and costly reporting from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Hundreds of reporters from the U.S. and many other countries were “embedded” with U.S. and British military units, which led to wider coverage of the military action but also increasing possibilities of injury and death. Further, embedded journalists were open to charges that the picture they presented of the war was unbalanced at best, jingoistic at worst. (See Special Report (Media Go to War ).) Australian Psychological Society members urged parents to shield preschool to preteen children from TV's relentless 24-hour coverage of the war.

      The 2003–04 American prime-time TV season began in disarray. As the calendar year drew to a close, five of the six broadcast networks, all but CBS, had suffered ratings declines—compared with the beginning of the prior season—among the 18-to-49-year-old viewers advertisers most coveted. Network executives blamed the sharp declines, especially among young men, on a change in the methodology that the Nielsen Media Research audience-measurement service was using to calculate viewership, but Nielsen pointed to other factors—including increased Internet and video-game usage and programming that did not target men—as potential reasons for the dramatic change. With or without young men, none of the nearly 40 new series for the fall television season, including an NBC situation comedy with luminary Whoopi Goldberg, was proving to be especially popular in the beginning months of the season. There were modest successes, such as the CBS drama about a young woman routinely visited by God, Joan of Arcadia, but no undeniable breakaway hits.

      Although it was the season's clear ratings success, CBS became embroiled in controversy over its movie about former president Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, that it planned to air in November. As conservative groups and the Republican Party raised objections to the portrayal of conservative icon Reagan, who was suffering from Alzheimer disease, CBS declared the program unfair to the president and declined to air it. They sold it to corporate sibling Showtime, a pay-cable channel. Some critics charged that the network's capitulation was politically motivated, given its interest in regulatory issues before the Republican-led government, but CBS chief Leslie Moonves insisted that it was merely a matter of the movie that was delivered being different from the one that the network had contracted to buy.

      Across the Atlantic, the BBC also was embroiled in a political dispute, this one with Prime Minister Tony Blair over a May 29 report that the government had exaggerated the threat of Iraq's weapons program. A judicial inquiry was set to look into the apparent suicide of British weapons expert David Kelly, which was possibly related to talks he had had with BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan. Also, the BBC was criticized by News Corp. for buying American and other foreign programs that boosted BBC domestic ratings at the expense of commercial broadcasters. It was suggested that the BBC sell some of its more popular programs to other channels.

      The Arab satellite station al-Jazeera launched an English-language Web site in September, five months after hackers had brought its temporary Web site down during the Iraq war. Al-Jazeera reporter Tayssir Alouni was arrested and jailed in Spain, accused of being a member of al-Qaeda. In Saudi Arabia an unprecedented TV program, Saudi Women Speak Out, allowed eight women to speak openly about subjects such as the right to drive, unemployment, and political participation.

      A SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) channel was established in May jointly by Singapore Press Holdings, Media Corporation of Singapore, and StarHub to broadcast news and information about the epidemic. (See Health and Disease: Special Report (What's Next After SARS? )) Action star Jackie Chan starred in a TV commercial broadcast globally to revive tourism in SARS-hit Hong Kong. A Philippine UNICEF project involving Probe Media Foundation, Asia News Channel, and National Broadcasting Network taught teenagers to search, shoot, and script video news features on topics of interest to the youth for airing as the Kabataan News Network.

      A Taiwanese soap opera, or chinovela (“Chinese” + “television” + “novella”), made a hit in Asia. Liow sing hua yen (“Meteor Garden”), based on the Japanese comic book Hana yori dango (“Men Are Better than Flowers”), starred the boy band F4 and Barbie Xu.

      News Corp.-owned British subsidiary NDS Ltd. provided China's cable authorities with broadcast encryption technology for distribution nationwide, but News Corp. (and other foreign media) content remained restricted on domestic networks. China's state broadcasting authority disallowed TV commercials for feminine hygiene products and hemorrhoid ointments during mealtimes. Similarly, Vietnam's cultural police disallowed TV ads for condoms and toilet paper at mealtimes. The Ukrainian parliament passed a law banning alcohol and tobacco advertising on TV and radio and restricting ads in print media because of health considerations.

Technology.

      The flat-screen technology firm Cambridge Display Technology, a University of Cambridge spin-off that was vying with the Eastman Kodak Co. in producing next-generation flat screens from organic LEDs (light-emitting diodes), laid off 20% of its staff to reduce manufacturing costs. South Korea's Samsung Electronics joined with Japan's Sony Corp. to manufacture LCD (liquid crystal display) flat screens, while the largest maker of LCD panels, LG.Philips, a joint venture between South Korea's LG Electronics and Dutch group Philips Electronics, planned to invest $2.6 billion in new flat-screen production. Motorola, Inc., signed with the Hong Kong firm Proview International Holdings to make flat-screen televisions and computer displays. China's TCL International Holdings and the French electronics maker Thomson combined their TV and DVD business to become the world's largest TV maker and produce 18 million TV sets annually, with sales of more than €3 billion (about $3.5 billion).

      Télévision Française 1 (TF1) and Canal+, France's two top commercial TV operators and owners of satellite TV services, planned to pipe digital TV over high-speed, high-capacity phone lines. Europe's first high-definition television (HDTV) channel, Euro 1080, made a trial broadcast in September for a planned launch in 2004. Anthony Wood, creator of the ReplayTV digital TV recorder, unveiled his Roku HD1000 media player, which displayed or played digital media such as photos and music on HDTV sets.

      TiVo, a maker of TV-recording devices, introduced a TV-audience-measuring system for advertisers and network programmers. It tracked customer viewing data gathered from TiVo's 700,000 users. J-Phone, a Japanese unit of Britain's Vodafone Group, announced that users could now watch TV programs on mobile phone screens. Personal video players with 20 gigabytes of memory arrived from France. Archos AV320 and Thomson's Lyra RD2780 had 96- and 89-mm (3.8- and 3.5-in) screens, respectively, and could play back digital video from a video camera, the Internet, or TV.

      Over the summer India's four biggest cities—Mumbai (Bombay), Delhi, Chennai (Madras), and Kolkata (Calcutta)—began to shift to a set-top-box system for watching cable TV, a move designed to reduce piracy. The box usually cost about $120, however, and so would be out of reach of many potential viewers. India had the third largest cable TV subscriber base in the world (44 million) because of low rates.

Radio

      The big news in American radio was made, not surprisingly, by its biggest star, nationally syndicated right-wing talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, whose show was said to reach some 20 million listeners weekly. First, in early October, Limbaugh lost his side job as a National Football League commentator on the ESPN sports cable TV channel after suggesting that the well-regarded quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated by media eager for African American quarterbacks to do well. More startling, however, was the admission later that month by Limbaugh that for years following back surgery, he had been addicted to painkillers sometimes prescribed by doctors but also popular with recreational drug users. The admission seemingly was forced by reporting in the National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid often derided for its willingness to pay for information. A former maid of Limbaugh's told the paper that she had been her employer's drug connection and had purchased for him large quantities of OxyContin and other pills. Limbaugh left his show and checked himself into a rehabilitation centre in Arizona. He returned to the air in November after what he called “five intense weeks, probably the most educational and intense five weeks on myself that I have ever spent.” He did not try to reconcile the help he received with his frequent on-air calls for harsher punishment for drug use.

      The battle to win consumers to the new subscription-based satellite radio technology heated up with aggressive marketing at Christmastime. In December, XM Satellite Radio was the leading player, with over one million subscribers, and Sirius Satellite Radio was a distant second with 200,000. Sirius officials said the service needed two million subscribers to be profitable. Some industry analysts were predicting rapid growth for the services, which broadcast a wide variety of music and other programming with limited or no commercials, as satellite radios began to be included in new-model cars. Sirius launched a broadcast service of 60 types of music into stores and office buildings, hoping to break into the “elevator music” market dominated by Muzak, while XM paired up with Canadian Satellite Radio to sell its services in Canada.

      In the meantime, as consolidation elsewhere in the radio business led to homogenization and a loss of local voices, one clear benefit was a gain in listenership for National Public Radio. Moreover, Joan Kroc, the widow of McDonald's restaurant founder Ray Kroc and a devoted public-radio listener, left NPR more than $200 million in her will, an amount NPR said was “believed to be the largest monetary gift ever received by an American cultural institution.” NPR officials said that the money would go into an endowment to help create financial stability for the nonprofit organization, which had often scraped for funds. The U.S. Congress approved a budget of $557 million in 2004 for the Broadcasting Board of Governors, overseer of the Voice of America and other overseas radio broadcasters. It also authorized the establishment of a 24-hour Middle East radio and TV network. On November 28 the venerable Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty announced that it would cease broadcasts to the three Baltic States, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia at the end of the year.

      U.S. regulators approved Univision Radio, the product of a merger between Univision and Hispanic Broadcasting that brought more than 50 TV stations and 68 radio stations together. The Miami, Fla.-based Spanish-language broadcaster Radio Unica Communications filed for bankruptcy to clear the way for its sale to Multicultural Broadcasting for $150 million and the separate sale of its radio network and promotions company. Its AM operations included Radio Unica Network and stations covering Spanish-speaking markets in Florida, New York, Texas, and California.

      Former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, living in exile in Japan, got his own radio show. Financed by friends in Peru, The Chino's Hour (in reference to Fujimori's nickname) offered the disgraced leader's political commentary. The Voices of Kidnapping, a call-in program on Radio Caracol, remained a lifeline for Colombians who broadcast messages to their loved ones held hostage by groups of insurgents and criminals. It was the brainchild of Herbin Hoyos, himself a kidnapped-and-escaped radio journalist.

      Britain's radio sector seemed ready for mergers and consolidation once the competition commissioners approved. Newly relaxed media ownership laws boosted stocks of Capital Radio, Chrysalis, Emap, and GWR. American companies such as Clear Channel and Viacom showed little interest, however.

Ramona Monette Sargan Flores; Steve Johnson

Newspapers

      After two years of advertising declines and cost cutting to maintain earnings levels, newspapers in mature Western democracies experienced a financially tepid 2003 with an anxious eye to the end of the worst advertising recession in more than half a century.

      The genesis of an economic recovery in North America and Western Europe came without job gains and left newspapers that had become reliant on employment advertising in the past decade struggling to see a turnaround in economic fortunes. Local retail advertising remained strong even as the retail environment continued its strategic shift away from local stores, which promoted themselves on the basis of value, toward national and international megastores that discounted goods and services at the expense of traditional advertising and marketing expenditures. Nevertheless, there were signs of optimism, including the end of double-digit decreases in employment advertising, interest-rate-fueled growth in real-estate and automotive advertising, and sharp growth in nationally focused display advertising and inserts. In some countries the fragmentation of television and radio audiences and the impact of the Internet on television-viewing time helped to better position newspapers in the advertising marketplace.

      Paid circulation of daily newspapers had been in decline in North America since 1989 and in Western Europe since 1990. In 2002 circulations in Western countries declined 1.3%—the sharpest one-year decline since 1995. While circulations of daily newspapers had dropped 2.2%, the circulation slide increased to 3.5% in 1997 as the Internet increased in popularity. Significant research in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Norway, and other countries showed that a smaller number of young adults over time were reading newspapers or were reading them with less frequency than previous generations. Not only was the reading habit occurring less in formative teenage years, but new evidence showed that even young adults who had developed the habit were reducing their reading frequency. Rising Internet usage, combined with these long-term trends among young people, continued to impact sales frequency of print daily newspapers.

      While regional daily newspapers in the United Kingdom saw circulations decline after the major companies discontinued discounting, newspapers in the United States and elsewhere saw circulations inflated through third-party sales, giveaways to schools, and other marketing offers—blessed by each country's circulation audit bureau. To illustrate the level of gimmickry involved with newspaper subscriptions, a South Korean government commission found that more than 75% of subscription offers since 2000 had come with a discount or gift. Meanwhile, the U.S. became the latest country to create national do-not-call lists that protected consumers from intrusive telemarketers, a move expected to impact those newspapers that relied on telemarketing for more than half of their subscription acquisition.

      The launch of free commuter newspapers throughout Europe in the past eight years sparked similar ventures by traditional publishers in Italy, The Netherlands, and the U.S., among others. Led by Metro International, daily newspapers began launching weekly entertainment and youth-oriented newspapers. The Chicago-based Tribune Co. launched a free commuter newspaper in New York City called amNew York, and the Washington Post Co. launched a similar venture called Express. Other such daily papers were being planned.

      Similarly, traditional publishing companies accelerated their creation of Spanish-language daily newspapers in the U.S.—including Belo in southern California and Dallas, Texas; Knight Ridder in Fort Worth, Texas; Tribune in Chicago and Florida; and others.

      The lesson learned through the distribution of free commuter newspapers and Spanish-language newspapers was that there were vast numbers of nonreaders and infrequent readers in certain markets that might best be reached through new newspapers instead of traditional ones. That trend extended to newspaper publishing in Latin America, South Africa, and Asia, where down- to midmarket newspapers were aimed at undereducated, nonreading segments of the population.

      In recent years Latin American launches had included Epensa's Correo in Lima, Peru; Diarios Modernos's Nuestro Diario in Guatemala; and La Nación's Al Día in San José, Costa Rica. In each case the newspapers were launched in markets that were saturated by existing newspapers, but the new offerings created hundreds of thousands of new daily readers.

      Another success story was the national launch in 2002 by South Africa's Media24 of the Daily Sun. Similar in style to the Latin American down-market dailies and the Bangkok newspaper Thai Rath, the English-language Daily Sun captured the imagination of the South African newspaper industry. A decade after the end of apartheid, the majority of South Africa's 34 million blacks, while quickly moving up social and income ladders, remained poor and undereducated. The Daily Sun targeted the fast-rising aspirant black population with raucous headlines, many photographs and maps, and short well-written stories in its fixed-page tabloid format. The Daily Sun had a 250,000 daily circulation, with a readership that largely had never before read a newspaper. In Nigeria the informal Free Readers Association launched a partnership with vendors to allow people who could not afford to buy newspapers to read them at newsstands.

      Perhaps the most significant financial and strategic transaction in 2003 was the purchase by Australia's John Fairfax Holdings of New Zealand's Independent Newspapers Ltd. The largest publishing companies in Denmark, Jyllands-Posten and Politiken, merged. U.S.-based Gannett purchased Scottish Media Group. The New York Times Co. exercised an option to buy out the Washington Post's ownership share in the International Herald Tribune. After a dispute between family owners, Freedom Communications put its company up for bid only to reach a settlement that allowed family members who wanted to opt out of ownership to do so. The Seattle (Wash.) Times Co. and the Hearst Corp. tussled over a joint-operating agreement.

      In other developments the San Francisco Examiner, sold by Hearst three years earlier in a complex exchange sale of assets, laid off most of its staff and switched from paid to free distribution. Even as Axel Springer Verlag went through challenging economic times in Germany, the company launched a 700,000-circulation daily newspaper in Poland called Fakt. Hong Kong's popular Apple Daily was launched in Taiwan, with an immediate distribution of 750,000. Business-oriented daily newspapers such as the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, De Financieel Economische Tijd, and others continued to languish in the global business-to-business advertising slump, which thereby prompted rumours of sales and market repositioning.

      Size increasingly seemed to be an issue for publishers. In the hypercompetitive London market, the broadsheet The Independent launched a same-day tabloid edition in what executives equated to offering toothpaste in different sizes to the marketplace. While Norwegian newspapers continued to move away from broadsheet formats, British editors suggested that even their newspapers could be converted to tabloid format if the market preferred it. In Sweden, Dagens Nyheter experimented with a combination of broadsheet and tabloid editions.

      Newspapers continued to send mixed signals on whether an industry standard would ever be developed for their popular Web sites. Marketers at newspapers that converted their Web sites to a free-registration basis saw nonreaders of their print titles opt in to digital access at rates of two and three times the print circulation base—names used to sell newspaper-branded products. Other companies, notably CanWest in Canada, declared it irrational for newspaper companies to give away content for free and announced steps to eliminate most free access. In most cases newspapers were implementing strategies somewhere between two extremes—allowing free access to certain content and combinations of pay-per-view and timed access for other content.

      The lines between media continued to blur; a Shanghai television station launched a daily newspaper, and a French television company bought a minority stake in a free commuter newspaper.

      The New York Times was rocked by a scandal involving a journalist who deceived editors and plagiarized articles. The newspaper's top two editors eventually resigned, and questions were raised about management styles. A new book that alleged close ties between editors of France's leading newspaper and the country's political establishment prompted ethics inquiries at Le Monde, and both Le Figaro and La Tribune experienced their own scandals. In mid-November Canadian press baron Conrad M. Black resigned as CEO of Hollinger International, whose holdings included major newspapers in Chicago, New York, London, and Jerusalem. Black and his partners were accused of taking $15.6 million in unauthorized payments; he faced the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission in December.

      The never-ending battle over censorship and press freedom continued in many countries. The Jordanian government closed a weekly newspaper and detained three journalists over an article about the Prophet Muhammad's sex life; the Zimbabwean government continued to shutter a number of daily newspapers; and Venezuelan Pres. Hugo Chávez Frías at one point used currency controls to deny newspapers the U.S. dollars they need for importing newsprint. Subtle and not-so-subtle pressure from the government of Pres. Vladimir Putin in Russia prompted the closure of several newspapers there. Meanwhile, the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq yielded the launch of dozens of new daily newspapers in an array of news and opinions not seen since the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe more than a decade earlier.

      The government in China continued its long-term goal of moving the newspaper industry from its subsidized status to being entirely exposed to the free market, and it discontinued the practice of free-subscription offers to households. Analysts expected newspaper closures, but it was unclear whether a private-sector Chinese newspaper industry would be dominated by regional or national dailies.

Earl J. Wilkinson

Magazines

      While the U.S. magazine industry began rebounding in 2003 from its two-year economic slump, its greatest gains came from the electronic sector. The Online Publishers Association, which represented 25 Internet publishers, reported 23% higher advertising revenues among its members during the first nine months of 2003 compared with 2002. During the first quarter of 2003, Meredith Publishing's online advertising revenue increased 80%, and Ziff Davis's online revenue rose 87%. The increases came partly from improved technology that gathered information about online users, which publishers used to sell other products to readers or advertisements to advertisers.

      Louis Borders, founder of Borders Books, launched , a Web venture that allowed users to read content and archives of more than 150 magazines for a $4.95 monthly fee. The site had an intelligent database that tracked what subscribers read and used that information to steer them to additional content. Folio magazine reported, “In effect, it creates a second market for magazine stories, not unlike a foreign release for films.”

      Total advertising revenue for print and online magazines increased 9% during the first nine months of 2003 compared with the same period in 2002. Magazine publishers were worried, however, that as do-it-yourself checkouts spread at grocery and department stores, single-copy sales would continue to fall. In order to distinguish self-checkout areas, many retailers had removed customary magazine racks and other product displays. According to a 2002 supermarket study, only 12% of shoppers who used self-checkout lines bought nearby products, compared with 20% in traditional checkouts. Single-copy sales were down in the six months ended June 30 compared with a year earlier; according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, 54% of titles reported that their sales were off from 2002.

      More than 850 publishing delegates gathered at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris for the 34th Fédération Internationale de la Presse Périodique (FIPP) World Magazine Congress in May. The event was a homecoming in France, where the FIPP had been founded more than 75 years earlier. The record attendance came despite China's last-minute decision to keep its 118 delegates at home owing to the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) scare. The appointment of William T. Kerr, chairman and CEO of Meredith Corp. USA, as FIPP chairman was announced at the closing ceremony. He replaced Gérald de Roquemaurel, chairman and CEO of Hachette Filipacchi Médias, who completed his two-year term.

      In July the Canadian government announced deep cuts to a fund designed to help protect domestic magazines from American domination. The Canadian Magazine Fund would decrease to $16 million in 2004 from the $32.6 million publishers shared in 2003. Government officials said Canada's magazine industry was on “a solid footing and enjoying healthy growth.” A feared saturation of the market by big American magazines after legislative changes in 1999 did not materialize. The government would reallocate some funding to subsidize community newspapers, particularly those catering to ethnic and aboriginal communities.

      Wal-Mart's 2,800 stores stopped selling Maxim, Stuff, and FHM in May because of their racy content and in June added blinders to hide cover lines of Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire, and Redbook. The chain added the family-oriented American Magazine to its shelves and gave the June-launched magazine a big boost. According to “Capell's Circulation Report,” Wal-Mart accounted for 15% of all single-copy magazine sales. Media buyer Carol McDonald of OMD Chicago told Folio magazine, “Let's face it, if you're not in Wal-Mart, you're not doing business in this country.”

      Another new magazine, Lucky, was named Advertising Age's Magazine of the Year in 2003. The women's magazine, which called itself “the magazine about shopping,” told readers how and where to buy clothing, beauty items, and household products. It surpassed one million subscribers during its first two years.

      Martha Stewart Living cut its rate base from 2.3 million to 1.8 million subscribers in October. Single-copy sales of the magazine fell 18% for the first half of 2003. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia revenues suffered after insider-trader allegations began swirling around Martha Stewart, the company's founder, in 2002. Stewart resigned as chair and CEO of the company in June 2003. The company began regular publication of Everyday Food, a recipe magazine, with the September issue after a six-month test run. It was the first Stewart magazine that did not include her name in the title—a decision she described as a “strategic business move.”

      Some best-selling novels that focused on life in the women's magazine industry appeared in 2003. Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada was joined by Lynn Messina's Fashionistas and Caroline Hwang's In Full Bloom. Before writing their respective novels, Weisberger had worked at Vogue and Messina had been employed by In Style. Stephen Glass, the former New Republic writer who was fired for having fabricated 27 stories, also published his autobiographical novel The Fabulist. His story was dramatized in the film Shattered Glass, which starred Hayden Christensen and was widely released in November.

David E. Sumner

Book Publishing

United States.

      Toward the end of a seesaw year, many in publishing were hopeful that a third-quarter uptick in book sales in 2003 represented recovery and growth in an industry that had been facing challenging conditions despite increases in both domestic consumer expenditures and publisher net-dollar sales in 2002.

      Following a lacklustre 2002 retail holiday season, the new year brought a weak economy, war in the Middle East, and increasing competition from other entertainment media. As a result, in the early months of 2003, trade-book sales fell, and the Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce reported that results for the first five months of the year were 2.6% off the previous year's sales. The publishing industry (including both chain and independent booksellers), however, entered the second half of the year buoyed by more positive sales trends, thanks in large measure to best-selling author J.K. Rowling's fifth Harry Potter title, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

      On June 21 the title—with a record first printing of 6.8 million copies—went on sale, and within days the book's American publisher, Scholastic, estimated that over five million copies had been sold. Quickly, Scholastic went back to press for an additional 1.7 million copy second printing. During the summer consumers also flocked to bookstores to purchase Living History, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoirs. In addition, the relaunch of TV impresario Oprah Winfrey's book club sent millions out to purchase the backlist classic East of Eden by John Steinbeck. As sales of hardcover children's titles led the way, U.S. Census figures showed bookstore sales up over 10% for June, July, and August 2003 (the most recent figures available) over the same period in 2002.

      Despite a potential fall recovery, in the minds of many in the industry the prognosis was still guarded. According to the Book Industry Study Group's (BISG's) 2002 Consumer Research Study on Book Purchasing, trade-publishing growth was flat, and there were no projected changes in the trend. With a sales increase in adult trade titles between 2001 and 2002 of only 1%, consumers purchased 1.63 billion units and spent almost $13 billion in 2002, the last year for which final figures were available. Though publisher revenues were rising, the boost appeared to come from price increases rather than a growth in unit sales. BISG's Book Industry Trends 2003 projected total consumer expenditures of all book sales in 2003 of $37.6 billion, a rise of 2.8% over 2002. Those sales, however, were projected to be realized on a 0.5% drop in unit sales, and BISG projected only a 0.7% rise in unit sales in 2004. With consumers 50 years or older accounting for 53% of trade books purchased, the industry faced significant challenges in widening and deepening its market.

      Many in publishing, however, pointed to several positive signs. One was the phenomenal cultural and consumer event surrounding the publication of the latest Potter title. Nationwide, thousands of bookstores created elaborate events and staged in-store activities for customers that involved the book's settings and characters. For independent booksellers offering such unique experiences, the events helped strengthen ties to customers in a year that saw their market share grow to 15.5%. On the political front, booksellers and librarians in Vermont, Massachusetts, and other states worked during the year with lawmakers on the state and national level to amend the USA PATRIOT Act to preserve the privacy of book-related records.

Dan Cullen

International.

      In a sign that India was finally coming to grips with the issue of piracy, in July Pearson Education successfully pursued Hyderabad publishers through the courts for copyright infringement, and the Delhi High Court published a landmark injunction in August 2003 to stop Indian publisher Pushpa Prakashan from producing illegal translations of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter titles. Since 2000 some 250,000 titles had been seized. Pirated copies of Rowling books in translation also began to appear in China. Any translations available on the Internet, however, were not subject to copyright laws.

      AOL Time Warner put its book division up for sale for at least $400 million but allegedly dropped the price to $300 million when potential bidders, including Bertelsmann subsidiary Random House, failed to make any offers. In May Bertelsmann showed renewed interest after it sold its scientific publishing arm, BertelsmannSpringer, for €1.05 billion (about $1.21 billion) to private equity firms Cinven and Candover.

      In July, in the face of fierce opposition by the Bundeskartellamt antitrust body, Bertelsmann subsidiary Random House Deutschland, owner of Goldmann, agreed to drop its controversial takeover of Ullstein Heyne List (Germany's largest trade publisher), which was owned by Axel Springer. It proposed instead to purchase only paperback publisher Heyne.

      The European Commission rejected the French government's request to refer the takeover of the European and Latin American businesses of Vivendi Universal Publishing by the Lagardère Group (owner of Hachette Livre) to the competition authorities in France and insisted that the case be kept in Brussels. Its investigation was opened in June, and the final report was due in January 2004.

      The U.K.'s Taylor & Francis (T&F) remained active on the takeover front. In January it bought Bios Scientific for £2.7 million (£1 = about $1.61). T&F subsequently paid $95 million for the U.S.-based CRC Press. In July T&F subsidiary Routledge acquired Kogan Page's 200 active higher-education titles. Also in July, after nearly 50 years of independence, Frank Cass & Co accepted a takeover bid worth £11.3 million, with an additional £3.7 million dependent upon future performance, mainly because it was struggling to get space in large high-street booksellers. It claimed that its difficulty in doing so represented a form of “cultural censorship.”

      In July the merger was completed between Aschehoug Dansk Forlag and Egmont Lademann, both owned by the Egmont Media Group, to create Denmark's second largest publisher, with an output of 1,000 titles annually.

      The European Commission announced that printed products would continue to be eligible for reduced rates of value-added tax. Although VAT accordingly remained at 0% in the U.K. and a few other member states, it was expected that a VAT minimum rate of 5% would be established in due course.

      The German book industry experienced a 2.7% drop in sales during the first half of the year. Local sensibilities were also offended by the fact that a book in English, Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, headed the best-seller list for the first time.

      The Copyright Amendment (Parallel Importation) Bill 2002 was passed in a much-amended form by the Australian Senate. The final version excluded printed books and thereby effectively upheld the status quo of territorial copyright.

Peter Curwen

▪ 2003

Introduction

Television

Organization.

      The international television news of the year 2002 centred on the corporate maneuverings of the European media giants. At Vivendi Universal, Jean-Marie Messier (see Biographies (Messier, Jean-Marie )) had grown the company into a global multimedia empire—but with a €20 billion (€1 = about $1) debt. In restructuring the company after his departure, among other actions, new CEO Jean-René Fourtou sold off Italian pay-TV Telepiù and broke up pay-TV Canal Plus. In Germany, Bertelsmann AG's Thomas Middlehoff departed too, and in his wake the TV group RTL was to be expanded. Bankrupt KirchGruppe offered international investors its considerable TV- and film-rights catalog and control of Germany's biggest commercial broadcaster, ProSiebenSat.1. Kirch's sports rights were sold separately from the pay-TV company Premiere.

      News Corp. and Telecom Italia paid €900 million for Telepiù, which, after combining with rival Stream, became pay-TV Sky Italia and dominated the market. BSkyB partnered with the BBC and transmitter Crown Castle International to broadcast Freeview, a 30-channel digital TV service. Liberty Media-controlled OpenTV purchased both rival ACTV and Liberty's Wink Communications to centralize the development of interactive applications for TV. Granada, the U.K.'s largest commercial TV group, merged with rival Carlton Communications and acquired majority control of 15 ITV regional TV licenses, including two in London. Granada also doubled its stake in independent Irish TV3 to 90% for €50 million.

      The Chinese government required dominant free-to-air Television Broadcasts Ltd. to reduce its 50% stake in pay-TV Galaxy Satellite Broadcasting Ltd. In August China allowed ATV, Hong Kong's second largest TV network, to broadcast its ATV World and ATV Home channels to the Pearl River Delta area of southern China. Former People's Liberation Army propaganda officer Liu Changle, chairman of Phoenix Satellite TV, the first nonmainland network to broadcast in China, acquired a 46% controlling share of ATV.

      In contrast to the flurry of international events, the business side of American television was relatively calm for much of the year. NBC in November purchased the arts-themed cable channel Bravo, with its few but affluent viewers, from Cablevision Systems for $1.25 billion. Bravo's signature series was Inside the Actors Studio, a program featuring one-on-one interviews with famous and sometimes talented actors taped at the storied New York acting school.

      Consolidation continued, however, in the cable world, as the Federal Communications Commission approved the acquisition of the No. 1 cable company, AT&T Broadband, by the No. 3 company, Comcast. The new behemoth would serve some 27 million homes in 17 of the 20 largest U.S. cities. As a condition of the deal, AT&T had to put its minority ownership stake in the second largest cable company, Time Warner Cable, into a trust for sale within five years.

      The U.S. Department of Justice, however, announced its opposition to the planned merger of the two leading satellite-television-distribution systems, DirecTV and Dish Network, on the grounds that the consolidation would leave insufficient competition in the direct-broadcast satellite (DBS) market. In the department's suit to block the merger, each DBS was seen as an important competitor to cable television. The two services had a combined 18.4 million customers, and the government's opposition was seen as a likely deal killer.

Programming.

      By the end of 2002, American television was rebounding from the advertising slump caused by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks—and the recession. Ad sales at the May “upfront” markets, at which much of the network TV time is sold for the coming season starting in September, reached a record $8.2 billion. That was more than a 14% increase over the previous, sluggish May. The trade publication Advertising Age reported an industry forecast that ad spending during the second half of the year would be up 6.2% over the previous year.

      Despite network TV's outperforming most other ad-based media in a still-soft economy and demonstrating its continued power as an aggregator of audience, all was not well in TV land. For the first time, the number of people watching the basic cable channels in prime time was larger than the number watching the six broadcast networks— NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, the WB, and UPN.

      One of the key Emmy Awards, for best actor in a dramatic series, went to Michael Chiklis, not a network actor but the star of The Shield, a new police drama on a little-known cable channel, FX. A leading network, ABC, was in desperate trouble, having bet too much of its future on the one-time hit game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, which it had been running up to four times per week. When that show's audience disappeared and the series ended its prime-time run, ABC was caught without much of a succession plan. It took the unprecedented step of airing in prime time repeats of a series that had first run on cable, the detective series Monk.

      As a further sign of the rise of cable relative to the old-line networks, for much of the year ABC was reported to be in talks with CNN about the two companies' combining their news operations. Both sides were said to be attracted by the potential for saving money and reaching new viewers, although by year's end no deal had been struck.

      In another gesture of disrespect toward its news division, ABC got caught in 2002 trying to woo late-night comedy star David Letterman over from his longtime home, CBS. To make way for Letterman, ABC was prepared to cancel Nightline, the weeknight half-hour news program that had been a beacon of quality television and responsible reportage since it began during the Iranian hostage crisis. Letterman ultimately opted to stay at CBS, while ABC instead canceled Politically Incorrect, the topical talk show airing after Nightline. ABC announced plans to replace Politically Incorrect in early 2003 with an hour-long late-night comedy talk show starring the comic Jimmy Kimmel, best known as the host of an unapologetically sexist cable curiosity called The Man Show.

      The Politically Incorrect cancellation was brought about, in large measure, by controversial remarks host Bill Maher had made after the September 11 attacks to the effect that the U.S. military's penchant for bombing targets from safe remove was more “cowardly” than the deeds of the suicide bombers who had piloted planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In other ways, though, television coped admirably with the September 11 aftermath. Two of 2002's most watched and critically lauded documentaries relived the day, CBS's 9/11 in March and HBO's In Memoriam: New York City, 9/11/01 in May. Each was an Emmy Award winner. On the one-year anniversary of the attacks, much of television paid respectful attention to the daylong commemorations. The attacks had brought about a boost in news viewing that continued well past the one-year anniversary. Taking most advantage of the increased audience was Rupert Murdoch's upstart Fox News Channel, which early in the year surpassed CNN as the country's most popular cable news channel. CNN was also openly struggling with a slight format change that saw it focusing more on the personalities of its news presenters. Shows hosted by news “stars” such as Connie Chung took centre stage, and the CNN founding credo that “the news is the star” was sent to the wings.

      All of the news channels, however, continued to draw fire for their tendency to provide “wall-to-wall” coverage of hot-button topics, regardless of their relative newsworthiness. Critics suggested that such coverage choices turned molehills into mountains and fueled illogical public fears of such relatively rare phenomena as child abduction. The channels responded that they were only serving public demand, as viewership always tended to spike during such sagas as the Washington, D.C.-area sniper manhunt.

      On the network news front, NBC became the first of the “Big Three” networks to announce an official heir to one of their trio of aging news anchors—NBC's Tom Brokaw, ABC's Peter Jennings, and CBS's Dan Rather. NBC said that Brian Williams, the lead anchor on the network's cable station MSNBC, would take over for Brokaw in 2004.

      The November elections demonstrated continuing problems with network coverage of American voting. During the 2000 presidential election, Voter News Service (VNS), a multinetwork consortium, had dropped the ball, causing the networks to call both Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush winners in the critical state of Florida. In fact, neither would be a clear winner there on election night. The result was public outcry, a congressional inquiry, and a promise to reform the VNS. Nonetheless, in the 2002 midterm elections, VNS exit-polling information was declared unreliable and was not released, so the networks' principal method of determining why people voted the way they did was still unusable.

      The most popular prime-time series during the 2001–02 season ended in May was the long-running NBC comedy Friends, about six pals who live near each other in New York City. By the following fall, however, the top series spot had been taken by the CBS forensics drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Both programs were exemplars of a trend that had begun after the September 11 attacks toward audiences' favouring more traditional programming. Friends also won its first-ever Emmy Award for top comedy series. Best drama honours went, for the third year running, to The West Wing, NBC's look at a fictionalized and idealized White House. As the 2002–03 season got under way, a weakened NBC and a strengthened CBS battled for the title of most popular network, but few new series struck a powerful chord with critics or viewers. Meanwhile, Public Broadcasting Service, the nation's public-television programmer, continued to grapple publicly with declining and aging viewership as many of its former niches—animal programming, biographies, British imports, and history—had been turned into separate cable channels by private companies.

      Much of the year's programming buzz was generated not by in-season network programs but by reality programming, a genre that continued to prove its viability, if not its good taste. The year's most-discussed series was undoubtedly MTV's The Osbournes, chronicling the lives in Los Angeles of addled patriarch Ozzy (see Biographies (Osbourne, Ozzy )), the former lead singer of the heavy-metal band Black Sabbath, his shrewd manager-wife, Sharon, and their two almost-grown children. The show's clever conceit was to edit such domestic moments as Ozzy's being unable to work the television remote device so that they played like a 1950s sitcom, albeit a 1950s sitcom spiced up by frequent bleeped-out expletives.

      During the summer the Fox network had a breakout hit with American Idol, an American version of the British singing-talent-contest series Pop Idol. Week after week a large call-in vote narrowed a group of finalists performing popular songs down to one eventual winner, Texan Kelly Clarkson. After the show ended, her first single, performed several times on the series itself, shot to number one. Fox, of course, readied a sequel, and other networks rushed to air their own talent-contest series.

      Reality and game shows went global—with mixed results. The Weakest Link in Thailand upset contestants and viewers. The National Youth Bureau protested its promotion of “fierce competition and selfishness … which contravenes Thai generosity.” A contestant on the Philippine version of the show died of a heart attack while waiting to go on, and another who was booted out as the “weakest link” tried to commit suicide; immediately after his aborted attempt, he fell to his death. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire spin-offs in Argentina and in Germany awarded jobs to weekly winners chosen by phoned-in votes.

      Program content continued to be an issue. The research group of the advertising agency McCann-Erickson in the Philippines advised sponsors to withdraw their ads unless changes were made in popular noontime shows filled with distasteful visual materials and language and subjecting “game contestants to ridicule.” The French audiovisual watchdog group CSA recommended banning pornography, particularly during early-morning viewing hours. Russian Deputy Press Minister Valery Sirozhenko announced special monitoring of all TV channels in his country; the ITAR-TASS news agency reported that an estimated one-fifth of programs contained subliminal messages inserted in extra frames. The Japanese Diet (parliament) debated a human rights protection bill that would create a committee to advise crime victims and families of suspects hounded by media. The banned quasi-religious Falun Gong organization interrupted state broadcasts in northeastern China on March 5 with a TV spot alleging that the self-immolation of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 2001 had been staged by the government.

      Freedom of speech had its ups and downs, too. On nationwide TV, Cuban Pres. Fidel Castro repeatedly called Mexican counterpart Vicente Fox a liar for denying that he had pressured Castro to leave a UN aid summit in Mexico before U.S. Pres. George W. Bush arrived. Venezuela's Pres. Hugo Chávez claimed the coup in April in which he was ousted temporarily was abetted by private TV stations promoting an anti-Chávez demonstration at Venezuela's oil company headquarters. State-run Iraqi TV did not carry President Bush's speech to the UN General Assembly seeking a resolution on Iraqi arms, but it ran a commentary labeling his remarks ignorant prattle that reflected “his irresponsible attitude to humanity.” During Ramadan one-year-old Dream TV, Egypt's first privately owned satellite network, ran 41 episodes of Horseman Without a Horse, a story set in the Middle East between 1855 and 1917 and based in part on the discredited anti-Jewish “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Kabul (Afg.) TV and Radio's decision to ban all TV screenings of Indian movies and female singers was upheld by the country's highest court, but the ban was lifted on September 17. In Qatar, TV cameras were allowed for the first time to film the ruler's wife, a mother of seven in her early 40s, who opened Cornell University's medical college in Doha. Mexico's government and broadcasters agreed in October to overhaul the secretive frequency-licensing process in the 41-year-old Federal Radio and Television Law and create a public registry for concessions.

      The Spanish-language Univision's Sábado gigante celebrated 40 years on TV with the same comedic host, Don Francisco, who was beloved by millions of viewers in 42 countries. (See Biographies (Francisco, Don ).) Meanwhile, NBC's Today show marked its 50th anniversary on the air, and that show's cohost, Katie Couric, made headlines with her generous new contract. (See Biographies (Couric, Katie ).)

Technology.

      Digital personal video recorders (PVRs) continued to fail to emerge at anything more than a snail's pace. Industry experts contended that the devices, the best-known example of which went by the trade name TiVo, would revolutionize television because their digital recording capacities allowed consumers to rearrange TV schedules, including skipping over commercials, quickly and conveniently. Despite reams of positive publicity, PVRs were forecast to be in only 1.8 million homes by the end of 2002—less than a 2% market penetration.

      SONICBlue's ReplayTV came under fire from major TV and film companies that claimed that the system, which recorded TV shows on PC hard drives and allowed users to skip over commercials, violated copyright laws. A portable version was being developed, using Intel's XScale processors for mobile devices. Cable operators predicted that their video-on-demand service would add PVR capabilities after testing PVRs built into cable boxes. In response, television networks started integrating ads into their programs themselves. Scripps Networks' Fine Living cable channel incorporated various forms of advertising to foil PVRs.

      Sony Corp. unveiled a new Wega lineup of flat TV monitors that ranged from a 32-in (1 inch = 2.56 cm) liquid crystal display (LCD) TV to 42-in and 50-in plasma sets. Sanyo Electric introduced a new range of flat plasma display panel-based TVs with higher contrast and luminance.

Radio

      Good Morning Afghanistan was inaugurated on state-run radio early in 2002 to provide an up-to-the-minute look at changes in that country. The anchors adopted a freewheeling style but remained mindful of cultural and religious taboos. Supported by Baltic Media Center in Denmark and financed by the European Commission with $10,000 monthly, the show's advisers came from the BBC and the Voice of America. Good Evening Afghanistan debuted in September.

      In October Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin revoked the 1991 decree that gave special permission to the Prague-based U.S.-funded surrogate broadcaster Radio Liberty to maintain a bureau in Moscow. The station had often been at odds with Russian officialdom for its “tendentious” reporting, especially on Chechnya and Ukraine.

      India's broadcasting deregulation triggered a boom in sales of car and pocket radios, but FM broadcasters worried that hefty license fees could prove burdensome in a limited market. Five stations started in April in Mumbai (Bombay), where there used to be only the state-owned All India Radio.

      On June 20 the U.S. Copyright Office's Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) set a royalty for Internet radio rate of seven hundredths of a cent per song per listener for simulcasts and Internet-only materials. Payments retroactive to 1998 were due October 20. This resulted in the shutting down of hundreds of stations, with most of the 10,000 Webcasters expected to follow suit. Broadcasters claimed the rate was too high, while recording-industry representatives said that the expansion of broadcast services to an Internet audience was unfair to artists and record labels. In November CARP called for further comments and proposals to be discussed in 2003.

      Like the television broadcasters, American radio joined in an ad-sales recovery after a weak 2001. Some of the industry's major companies boasted of year-to-year third-quarter sales gains on the order of 10–15%, according to the trade journal Mediaweek, which said radio was helped by “trickle-down” from the tight TV ad market but also cautioned that the economy remained volatile. At the same time, radio ad buying, traditionally focused on the 25–54-year-old demographic group, began aiming slightly younger. This boosted the popularity of younger-skewing formats and personalities, including ABC's Tom Joyner and Doug Banks.

      In another growth area, leading Spanish-language television network Univision was expecting to complete its $3.5 billion purchase of Hispanic Broadcasting by the end of the year; the deal had been announced in June. Hispanic, the leading Spanish-language radio group, said its third-quarter net profits were up 50% over the previous year on revenue that was up just 7%.

      Two companies, XM Satellite Radio Holdings and Sirius Satellite Radio, competed aggressively against each other even while trying to sell the public on the new category of satellite radio. The services, which, except in some new cars, required new receiver-unit purchases and a monthly fee of $10–13, were pitched as commercial-free and providing better sound and far more formats than did the increasingly homogenized AM or FM radio. After little more than a year of business, XM had a commanding market lead, with an estimated 400,000 customers expected by year's end, compared with Sirius' 30,000. Neither number was overwhelming for businesses that took an estimated $2 billion to launch, however. XM and auto parts maker Delphi Corp. presented a pocket-sized device that tuned into XM's service outside cars.

      Sound capabilities such as these, aimed at 16–23-year-olds, could add to potential driver distraction, according to the insurance industry. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had estimated that driver distractions—talking, eating, reading, and changing radio stations—were a factor in 20–30% of all auto crashes. The distractions that such devices as radios, cellular phones, e-mail- and Internet-accessing devices, navigation systems, and automatic collision notification were the subject of a five-year study in Detroit by Wayne State University's Brain and Behavior Institute and the General Motors Corp.

      Some of the radio formats that the satellite providers marketed themselves against were losing market share. Country radio failed to break out of its ongoing slump, and the relatively new all-1980s music format was losing steam across the country, according to the radio ratings service Arbitron, but classic rock, urban, and “contemporary hits” formats were doing well.

      Conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh was also doing well. In 2001 Limbaugh stunned his fans by announcing that he was nearly deaf. The bombastic talk host received a cochlear implant in December of that year, however, and began bragging on air about his “bionic ear.” It seemed to be working; his audience in 2002 was claimed to be 20 million listeners on some 600 stations, and a Milwaukee critic, comparing the Limbaugh shows before and after the implant, wrote that “the old Rush is back.”

      CBS/Viacom in November announced that it would begin simulcasting David Letterman's CBS Late Show on some of Viacom's Infinity Broadcasting radio stations to see how a TV comedy show might go over on the picture-free medium.

Ramona Monette Sargan Flores; Steve Johnson

Newspapers

      A prolonged advertising recession and new fears of reader and advertiser flights to digital options prompted newspapers in 2002 to make structural cuts in staffing, reduce the number of pages printed, and begin strategic preparations for evolving news operations to multimedia delivery. Before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, 2002 was expected to be a year of economic recovery, a point critical to the success of the advertising industry in general and newspapers specifically. Though the recovery never materialized, double-digit revenue declines leveled off to single-digit declines late in the year.

      Particularly hard hit was classified employment advertising, the fastest-growing category in the 1990s, which plummeted 35% and 43% in the United States and Germany, respectively, in 2001—trends that moderated in 2002 yet still pointed downward. In 2000 employment advertising represented 18% of an American newspaper's advertising base; one year later that percentage dropped to 10%. Globally, newspaper executives wondered about the degree to which employment advertising's decline was cyclical versus structural. At the heart of worries was the haphazard way in which Internet classifieds, led by digital powerhouse Monster.com, were growing market share during recessionary times. Though employment advertising in American newspapers declined 35% to $5.7 billion, American revenues from on-line job sites increased 38% to $727 million, with Monster.com capturing one-half of the on-line employment advertising market.

      Meanwhile, the local retail advertising sector remained weak for newspapers, though losses were not as severe as in employment advertising. In the U.S. retail advertising growth in newspapers had been at or below inflationary levels for nearly two decades. As low-advertising national chains continued to overshadow and put out of business high-advertising local retailers, the fundamentals of the newspaper's advertising base continued in neutral gear with little hope for growth.

      Globally, national advertisers cut back expenditures in all media, though there was some evidence in late 2002 that a two-year trend was abating. Some of the trends affecting local retail advertising began to have a major impact at the national level. Advertising revenues were severely hit when Montgomery Ward closed, Kmart declared bankruptcy, and Bealls announced severe cutbacks. Some of the cutbacks, though, were due to the long-term success of supercentres and low-margin national and international chains such as Wal-Mart.

      Newspapers spent much of 2001 adjusting to the new economic environment with layoffs, early retirements, and employee buyouts, affecting profit-and-loss statements yet freeing up space in the budget in 2002. Companies that delayed cutbacks in 2001 were forced to act in 2002, including several notable newspapers in Europe. Despite a 2% revenue decline, publicly traded American newspaper companies improved operating profits by 24% in the first half of 2002, thanks to cutbacks and efficiencies.

      At least 55 free commuter newspapers representing 10.1 million in daily distribution were being circulated in Europe, Latin America, North America, and Asia/Pacific—a publishing phenomenon that did not exist prior to 1995. Approximately 70% of the commuter newspaper circulation was in Europe. Commuter newspapers, started by Stockholm-based Metro International, were typically advertising-rich free tabloids handed out to subway riders. Metro's success prompted traditional publishers such as Associated Newspapers in England, Bonnier in Sweden, De Telegraaf in The Netherlands, Schibsted in Norway, and News Ltd. in Australia to launch commuter titles, in some cases to fend off competitive threats and in other cases to test the market. In the 12 euro-area countries in which commuter newspapers were distributed, free newspapers distributed in public transportation systems represented 11% of total daily newspaper circulation.

      While paid daily newspapers fretted over economic declines, innovators aiming new newspapers at the 18- to 34-year-old urban demographic disrupted trends and sent traditional publishers searching for competitive answers. The concept behind the free commuter newspapers spawned new publishing initiatives in Chicago and Copenhagen. In Chicago the Tribune Co. launched RedEye, and its rival Chicago Sun-Times debuted Red Streak, colourful daily tabloids sold at a low price. In Cophenhagen a 32-page tabloid titled Dagen focused on longer articles and lifestyle features. All three new titles were aimed at the young upscale urban audience that traditional newspapers had failed to capture in sufficient numbers.

      In Latin America newspapers continued to experiment with “popular” tabloids to reach audiences that upmarket newspapers were unable to reach. In Lima, Peru, for example, publisher EPENSA became the market leader in daily newspaper circulation as its two-year-old Correo overtook its lead title, Diario OJO, in circulation. With 4 of Lima's 18 daily newspapers, EPENSA achieved its goal of market leadership even as rival El Comercio mounted a counteroffensive.

      Circulations of paid daily newspapers continued to decline less than 1% annually in Western countries, with traditional newspaper powerhouse countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany leading the declines in 2000–01. Spain and Portugal, on the other hand, experienced increases in paid circulations. Counting free commuter newspapers, Western Europe daily newspaper circulation had actually risen 5% since the mid-1990s. While newspapers, especially in the United States, saw strong sales after the September 11 terrorist attacks, readership waned to normal levels afterward. Critically important for newspapers was that circulation penetration (the percentage of paid newspaper copies sold to the general population), which had slowly declined during the past half century, appeared to be dropping faster. This development emerged even as national press associations and other industry bodies argued that “readership,” a broader measure of the audience that included pass-along-copies, was a better measurement and a better story for newspapers.

      Analysis of circulation trends showed that while weekly interaction with newspapers remained strong, and in some cases was growing, there was a broad trend toward declines of daily readership—across demographics yet more pronounced among young people. Research indicated that as media options proliferated, new generations looked upon newspapers as situational purchases instead of all-encompassing, comprehensive products.

      Publishers continued to watch survey after survey indicate that younger people were turning to digital options for news and information. Newspapers responded with higher-quality local-news Web sites, rich with advertising, and several notable companies reported that these business ventures were profitable for the first time in 2002. In the United States, newspapers dominated local markets in terms of Web-site hits. In the United Kingdom, newspapers experimented with streaming headlines and promotional messages via cellular telephones. (See Computers: Special Report (Wireless Revolution ).)

      As traditional publishers ventured into niche publishing— multiple Web-site management, e-mail newsletter delivery, cellular telephone “publishing,” and digital versions of the print newspaper— industry chief executives talked openly of publishing companies as “information mills” with many delivery platforms and the print newspaper as its core product.

      Notable management developments included the Washington Post's agreement to sell its 50% ownership stake in the International Herald Tribune to the New York Times, which became sole owner of the entire business enterprise. In the United Kingdom, Johnston Press continued its growth by acquiring Regional Independent Media and becoming the fourth largest newspaper publisher in the country. In the United States, Midwestern publisher Lee Enterprises bought Howard Publications for $694 million. The number of ownership changes— which had been brisk in the 1990s in countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States—ground to a halt in 2001–02 owing to the poor economy. Speculation was constant, however, about mergers and acquisitions related to Australia's four major publishers: News Ltd., John Fairfax Ltd., Rural Press Ltd., and Australian Provincial Newspapers. Meanwhile, analysts talked openly of ownership “swap” possibilities in the United States, especially if the Federal Communication's Commission removed a ban on local cross-media ownership, presumably to cluster newspapers and television stations in the same market for news gathering and advertising sales purposes.

      Elsewhere, for the second time in a decade, U.K. national newspapers engaged each other in a circulation price-cutting war that depleted coffers during a recession and little else. Germany's venerable broadsheet titles, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Süddeutsche Zeitung, implemented cutbacks in the face of the advertising recession. In Latin America deteriorating economies in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay hurt newspapers as depressed currencies caused economic distress via newsprint purchases made in U.S. dollar denominations. A legendary newspaper name, the New York Sun, resurfaced after several decades of extinction to inject Manhattan with a politically conservative view on the world.

      In the context of information glut, publishers, editors, and academics engaged each other in new debates about the role of traditional journalism in an emerging multimedia world. Increasingly, executives agreed that an increase in the quality and quantity of local news—including nontraditional concepts of content development such as Web logs (“blogs”)—were vital to the future of journalism within publishing companies. (See Sidebar (Blogs Mix Up the Media ).)

Earl J. Wilkinson

Magazines

      The economic downturn continued to batter American magazines in 2002, although some positive signs toward year's end pointed toward recovery. Magazine advertising revenue for September 2002 was up 9% over September 2001, while ad revenue for the first nine months of 2002 was up 1.5% over the same period in 2001.

      The recession claimed one of its most glamorous magazine victims when Talk magazine was abruptly halted on Jan. 18, 2002. Staff members were told that day about the closure in a meeting with editor Tina Brown and publisher Ron Galotti, who revealed that the decision had been reached within “the last 24 hours.” Brown, editor of Vanity Fair in the 1980s, had left The New Yorker some 18 months earlier to become Talk's founding editor.

      After giving up her television program in May, Rosie O'Donnell quit the magazine Rosie in September following a bitter dispute over editorial control with publisher Gruner + Jahr USA. The last issue was published in December 2002. The 125-year-old McCall's title was changed to Rosie in early 2001 after O'Donnell and the company invested $10 million each to launch the joint venture. The magazine's 3.5 million circulation in June 2002 was a 12.5% decline from the 4 million of a year earlier; single-copy sales of some issues had fallen by more than 50%. In October the company filed suit for damages in New York State Superior Court, claiming that O'Donnell had breached “duties of good faith and fair dealing and of fiduciary duty.” Time Inc. closed down two publications in October: Sports Illustrated Women and Mutual Funds, a personal-finance magazine.

      Several Muslim nations banned the Feb. 11, 2002, issue of Newsweek International after the magazine published an undated Turkish manuscript depicting the Prophet Muhammad with the angel Gabriel in an article comparing Islamic and Christian scriptures. Islam forbade the display of any image of the prophet. Newsweek International was pulled from the newsstands amid fears of widespread protests. Malaysia's deputy prime minister told the BBC, “Normally if publications contain photographs…of the Prophet Muhammad, the law of the country would have been violated. As such we will not allow the edition to be circulated.” Earlier, Indonesia and Bangladesh had banned that issue of the magazine, and the Egyptian parliament had declared that the magazine's depiction of the prophet was blasphemous. In May Newsweek won the American Society of Magazine Editors top award for “general excellence” for magazines with a circulation of over two million.

      Magazine circulation in the U.S. continued to surpass that of any other country. The 10 highest-circulation magazines in the U.S. at the end of June 2002 were: Modern Maturity 17.5 million; Reader's Digest 12.2 million; TV Guide 9.1 million; Better Homes and Gardens 7.6 million; National Geographic 6.9 million; Good Housekeeping 4.71 million; Family Circle 4.7 million; Woman's Day 4.2 million; Time 4.11 million; and Ladies' Home Journal 4.1 million.

      The number of subscribers, however, did not necessarily translate into revenue; the top 10 magazines in total revenue were: People, TV Guide, Time, Sports Illustrated, Better Homes and Gardens, Reader's Digest, Parade, Newsweek, Business Week, and Good Housekeeping. Among other nations, the highest-circulation magazine was China's Reader magazine, with 5 million subscribers. France's weekly TV Magazine had 4.5 million readers, while the United Kingdom's Sky Customer, also a TV magazine, led there with 3.9 million. Germany's leading magazine was TV Movie, with 2.5 million readers, and Italy's TV magazine, Sorrisi e canzoni TV, had 1.6 million readers.

      A study by the Blue Dolphin Group found that among American households subscribing to magazines, 11% subscribed on-line in the last quarter of 2001. That figure increased steadily throughout 2002 from 5.7% during the first quarter of 2001. According to a study from Insight Express, however, most Americans preferred a traditional print magazine over an on-line magazine, according to a study from Insight Express. The study also found that only 32% read any magazines on-line, 22% preferred reading magazines on-line, and 73% said that they would not give up their print magazine for an on-line alternative—even for half the price.

      In a major victory for press freedom in Latin America, Costa Rica eliminated the crime of desacato (“insult”) and voided this restriction on press scrutiny of public officials. More than a dozen countries in the region still had similar laws. Pres. Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Echeverría signed the bill into law in May after Costa Rica's legislature voted in March to eliminate references to desacato from Article 309 of the Criminal Code.

      In Kenya the Law Society of Kenya chairman, Raychelle Omamo, called for her country's magazines to portray a more positive image of women. “Inculcate a new image of women as workers, mothers, leaders, and politicians…if you engage women positively, the country will change,” she said at a Nairobi hotel during the launch of the magazine Eve, whose slogan was “the essence of Africa's new woman.”

David E. Sumner

Book Publishing

United States.

      Notwithstanding lamentations by some insiders that the publishing industry was in a “death spiral,” the reports of the industry's demise were greatly exaggerated. Though modest in growth, overall book sales were projected to rise 2.8% in 2002. Consumer purchases of adult trade books in the first six months of the year increased 1.6% over the same period in 2001, and spending on books ($5.3 billion) was 3% higher than in 2001. Publishers' sales of adult hardbound consumer books reportedly rose 21.1% over 200l; paperback consumer book sales increased 14.6%. Despite the absence of a new Harry Potter title in 2002, sales of juvenile hardbound books still rose 17.6% through August, and juvenile paperbound registered a 10.6% increase.

      A major development in the consumer books segment was the growing demand for Spanish-language books and for English books geared to the Latino market. Reflecting the increasing importance of this market segment, the Association of American Publishers created a special task force to spearhead industry efforts to serve this market.

      Though a number of e-book-only imprints—including AtRandom, iPublish, and MightyWords—shut down, the market continued to exhibit steady if unspectacular growth. A survey conducted by the Open e-Book Forum revealed double-digit sales growth (10% to 15% annually) and an even greater increase in the number of consumers downloading e-book readers (a 70% increase in downloads of the Adobe Acrobat e-book readers and more than five million copies of the Microsoft Reader). Estimates for 2002 indicated that one million e-books would be sold, double the number sold in 2001.

      Oprah Winfrey's decision to deemphasize her book club proved less catastrophic than publishers had feared; Good Morning America, The Today Show, Regis & Kelly, and USA Today rushed into the breach with book clubs of their own. Book clubs generally were experiencing a nationwide resurgence, but as a decentralized, grassroots phenomenon with no national organization and no membership lists; actual numbers were hard to quantify.

      Amazon.com's practice of offering used books for sale on the same page as the new edition drew the wrath of authors (and some publishers). The Authors Guild sent Amazon a letter of protest and urged its members to “de-link” their own Web pages from Amazon's.

      Contributing to the industry's unease was an announcement in mid-August that—despite earlier assurances to the contrary—the financially troubled Vivendi Universal SA (which had realized a €12.3 billion [about $12 billion] loss for the first half of 2002) was putting its American publishing arm, Houghton Mifflin, on the block. The fate of the venerable publishing house was still unresolved at year's end.

      Intellectual property rights were a major concern for the industry, and much attention was focused on two pending court cases. In Random House v. RosettaBooks, Random House sought to enjoin the distribution by e-book publisher RosettaBooks of eight electronic books by Random House authors, claiming that it held the e-book rights by virtue of contracts granting it exclusive rights to publish the works in book form. In October 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft, a constitutional challenge to the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, which added 20 years to existing and future copyright terms.

Patricia S. Schroeder

International.

      During 2002 the European Union (EU) Council of Ministers ignored pressure from the U.S. government to abandon plans to insist that non-EU suppliers of digital products, including e-books, charge value-added tax (VAT) at the rate applicable to the buyer's country of residence.

      The Dutch Ministry of Economics set out to abolish resale price maintenance (RPM) for educational books. In March, however, the European Commission and the German publishing industry agreed to keep German RPM intact but exempted foreign on-line book retailers that sold books to consumers in Germany. Collective embargoes were outlawed other than to prevent deliberate abuse—for example, reimports specifically designed to circumvent RPM. The Buchpreisbindung covering RPM would come into force in October. Meanwhile, the European Parliament's legal committee ruled that imports of books into EU member states with fixed-price regimes should be subject to the same controls as locally published books as part of a proposed EU directive on book pricing. No member state would be forced to introduce RPM, but the goal was to achieve a harmonization of practices across the EU.

      In February the European Commission called on Belgium to adopt the EU law on public lending right (PLR) into national law; Belgium had not made payments since 1994. The Danish government announced in March that a 15% reduction in PLR payments would be effected by making no payments to any author entitled to less than about $600 a year. This would affect 15,000 of the 19,660 people registered for PLR. In February 2002 the new Danish minister of culture reneged on a long-standing promise to reduce the VAT on books, keeping it at 25%—the highest in the EU. Although the rate had been lowered to 6% in Sweden, the minister argued that an equivalent move would have almost no effect upon total sales.

      After two years of discussion, amendments to laws governing the relationship between authors and publishers were finally passed by the German government. The German Copyright Contract Act was designed to guarantee “appropriate” payment to authors, translators, and other freelance writers by those who commissioned them. In addition, a special “best-seller” provision increased royalties when sales were unexpectedly large. The law was not retroactive, however. The World Intellectual Property Organization's long-awaited digital copyright treaty, which supplemented the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886, revised 1971), came into force in March after the 13th country signed the treaty.

      Antipiracy raids in India continued to root out the endemic abuse of copyright, which involved half of all fiction and academic titles. These took place in December 2001 in Lucknow and New Delhi and in 2002 in Mumbai (Bombay)—where the haul was the largest ever—and Hyderabad and Kerala state.

      There were a number of insolvencies and takeovers involving German companies. Könemann of Cologne, the fastest-growing publisher in Germany, called in the administrators in January 2002 with debts of $140 million. This had a severe trickle-down effect for the U.K.'s Quarto Group, which was owed $1.8 million. Meanwhile, travel publisher Mairs Geographischer Verlag acquired bankrupt Swiss publisher Kümmerly + Frey, and Random House sold imprints Falken and Bassermann to Gräfe und Unzer, subject to regulatory approval, as well as announcing the shutdown of Mosaik Verlag and Orbis by the end of 2002 and the sale of Frederking & Thaler back to its founders.

      David & Charles parent F&W Publications was sold in March to private equity firm Providence Equity Partners for $130 million. Also in March, Taylor & Francis tabled a bid worth approximately £300 million (about $450 million) for Blackwell Publishing, which had been undergoing a period of internecine strife, and subsequently expressed interest in buying the academic division of Wolters Kluwer. By August a queue of bidders, including other trade publishers and private equity firms, had formed for both ventures as well as the academic publishing units of BertelsmannSpringer, which were put up for sale in June.

      U.K. publishers' exports overtook those of the U.S., which was seen as evidence of both the anglicization of the EU and the failure of American exporters to take advantage of the opening up of the Australian market. Internet retailing in Europe was increasingly dominated by Amazon.com. In July 2002 Bol.com, Bertelsmann's Internet retailer in the U.K., was converted into a book club with fewer titles but lower prices.

Peter Curwen

▪ 2002

Introduction

Television

Organization.

      By 2001 the late 1990s rush to complete megamergers seemed to have ended in the United States, as each of the six leading American broadcast networks had aligned with a much larger entertainment/business company. With the smoke cleared and regulatory approval granted, ABC was part of the Disney empire, NBC was part of General Electric, CBS and UPN belonged to Viacom, WB was primarily part of AOL Time Warner, and Fox had been taken over by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Such alignments provided vital protection for the business model of network television, still the nation's most powerful aggregator of audiences for advertisers but increasingly seen by analysts as outdated for having only one revenue stream—advertising—which was vulnerable to economic fluctuations.

      The year's major deal involving a network saw NBC in October making a nearly $2 billion acquisition of Telemundo Communications, the Spanish-language network with a 20% share of the Hispanic audience. The move was significant because of the booming U.S. Hispanic population. (See Special Report (U.S. Census of 2000 ).) NBC outbid Viacom for Telemundo, owned by Sony Pictures and Liberty Media Corp., and said the companies were planning to combine advertising sales efforts and offices and share some news resources. NBC's costly Olympic telecasts would have an additional outlet, and Telemundo could draw on NBC expertise to develop comedy series. Meanwhile, Univision, which reached 80% of Hispanic viewers, was moving forward with plans to launch Telefutura, a Spanish-language network targeting younger viewers, in early 2002.

      News Corp. had long been considered the leading suitor of Hughes Electronics, owner of the top American satellite television service, DIRECTV. In October, however, General Motors Corp., the controlling shareholder of Hughes, accepted a surprise $25.8 billion bid by DIRECTV's major rival in consumer satellite programming, EchoStar Communications. If granted regulatory approval, the merger would make the new company the country's largest provider of television subscriptions, with 16.7 million customers totaling 17% of the pay-TV market, compared with cable operator AT&T's 14 million. Analysts and legislators expressed doubt that the merger would pass muster because it effectively killed competition in rural areas not served by cable.

      In December the French company Vivendi Universal announced it was picking up USA Networks Inc.'s TV and film production units, including the USA and Sci-Fi cable networks—as well as top executive Barry Diller—for some $10.3 billion. (See Book Publishing (Media and Publishing ).) Cable TV tycoon John C. Malone strengthened Liberty Media's German holdings by adding six cable systems, including those servicing Berlin, Hamburg, and Bavaria, for $5 billion. Meanwhile, AOL Time Warner became the first foreign broadcaster licensed by China. Its Hong Kong-based China Entertainment Television (CETV) Chinese-language channel broadcast over cable systems in Guangdong. In exchange, Time Warner Cable carried China Central Television's (CCTV's) English-language channel in New York City, Los Angeles, and Houston, Texas. Having obtained 29% of China's Sun Television Cybernetworks, the Chinese-language online network SINA.com became the company's largest shareholder. Sun TV, a major satellite TV broadcaster and cable TV program syndicator, owned restricted land rights to operate two satellite TV channels in China. Phoenix satellite TV, which broadcast from Hong Kong in Mandarin Chinese, also received rights to transmit, but only in the Pearl River Delta area of southern China, where foreign broadcasts were allowed. Phoenix was partly owned by News Corp.'s satellite TV network, STAR. Murdoch reported a 15% drop in News Corp.'s fiscal-third-quarter revenue, while losses in film, magazine, and newspaper sectors were somewhat offset by gains in cable network programming and TV businesses. Chief executive Mark Schneider of Europe's cable operator United Pan-Europe Communications NV resigned after reporting huge losses beginning the second quarter.

      New York cosmetics heir and owner of Central European Media Enterprises (CME) Ronald S. Lauder won his complaint against the government of the Czech Republic, which failed to protect CME from being squeezed out of TV Nova, the Czechs' most popular TV station. An international arbitration panel in Stockholm ordered the government to pay CME some $500 million.

      Germany's second-largest TV network, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), signed an agreement to cooperate with T-Online International AG as a way of getting around new regulations banning advertising on the news and information Web sites of public institutions (such as ZDF) funded by TV license fees. T-Online's parent company, Deutsche Telekom, proposed to team with the Kirch Group, Europe's largest producer of entertainment, sports, and news content, to develop hardware and software platforms for TV set-top boxes, but the deal fell through. RTL New Media took over Bertelsmann AG's interactive-TV and broadband division for $12 million. Bertelsmann then started BeBroadband for its e-commerce activities with a “preferred partner” relationship with RTL.

      Lebanon's New TV resumed broadcasting, four years after the implementation of a 1994 audio-visual media law. The station boasted digital broadcasting facilities and relay stations on Lebanon's highest peaks.

American Programming.

      The September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States dramatically altered the American television ratings picture. Before that date NBC was riding high, having finished first among young adults during the 2000–01 television season completed in May. CBS was looking forward to a ratings bonanza from the third edition of the reality game show Survivor, scheduled for October. The annual Emmy Awards, announced in September, would recognize top prime-time achievers and give the networks a promotional boost going into the new season. The networks and other television producers were also feeling happy to have averted potential disaster in the spring of 2001 by reaching contract agreements with actors and writers unions, which had seemed poised to go out on strike. Some networks had prepared for a walkout by stockpiling new series episodes, but most admitted that if it had occurred, they would have had to fill their most popular hours, prime time, with reruns, reality series, and newsmagazines.

      The September attacks forced first one and later a second postponement of the Emmys, as well as the delay of the TV season's debut by one week. When things finally got started, it seemed that the television order had changed. Television news organizations drew plaudits for selflessness in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks. In addition to agreeing to share video, they provided nonstop commercial-free coverage from the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon beginning on Tuesday morning until Saturday, September 15. In the process all three of the old-line networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—broke their previous records for continuous coverage, established during the first Moon walk and after the assassination of Pres. John F. Kennedy. In the first three days, CBS anchor Dan Rather and ABC counterpart Peter Jennings each put in 44 on-air hours.

      High ratings continued for cable news provider CNN, which earlier in the year had modernized its format and brought in new anchors in response to growing competition from the likes of Murdoch's Fox News Channel. In the first three weeks after the attacks, CNN's ratings were up 500% from what they had been during the first eight months of 2001.

      The prime-time landscape was also altered by the terrorist attacks. Viewers were now drawn to established quality series, which resulted in record ratings for such shows as CBS's Everybody Loves Raymond and NBC's Friends, Law & Order, and The West Wing. The producers of The West Wing, a dramatic series about a fictional but realistic White House, even hustled to put together a special episode directly responding to the acts of terrorism; it drew the series' highest ratings ever. Meanwhile, reality series other than Survivor drew very few viewers. This type of programming, so popular in 2000, had succeeded in stanching the steady loss of network audience share to cable. In September and October it was flailing, however. People coping with dramatic realities in their own lives had no patience for the ersatz danger in “reality” shows, which typically staged grueling competitions amid harsh living conditions for their nonactor participants. Even Survivor, while still drawing top-10 ratings, saw its popularity shrink considerably from the previous winter's edition, which had led the series to first place in the 2000–01 season ratings race.

      On top of all of this, the decline in the American economy hit advertising-dependent television networks particularly hard even before September 11 and the several days without advertising that ensued. Afterward, the economy reeled, ad spending dropped even further, and the networks were talking openly about the need for major changes. The top four broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC—had increased their ad revenue by an average of almost 7% a year for five years straight, building up to a total of more than $16 billion during 2000. According to the Los Angeles Times, however, what analysts had projected to be a 2% drop during 2001 looked after September to be more like a 6% drop, a decline the paper called “unprecedented.” This blow to the networks came against a backdrop of escalating production costs and loss of market share to cable. In response the networks vowed to slash costs, develop fewer new series, and possibly even eliminate Saturday-night prime-time programming altogether—a very drastic move.

      When the Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony finally was held in early November, the networks got another bit of bad news. For the first time, one of the coveted best series Emmys went to a show made for cable television, the HBO look at “30-something” single women in New York, Sex and the City (series star Sarah Jessica Parker [see Biographies (Parker, Sarah Jessica )] was herself an Emmy nominee). Another HBO series, the critically acclaimed The Sopranos, saw two of its actors take two of the other top honours, best actor in a drama (James Gandolfini) and best actress in a drama (Edie Falco). The West Wing otherwise held off The Sopranos to win the best drama Emmy for the second year in a row. Best comedy actress went to repeat winner Patricia Heaton of Everybody Loves Raymond, and best comedy actor went to first-timer Eric McCormack of NBC's Will & Grace.

International Programming.

      When the private Independent Television (NTV) network was taken over by Russian government-owned Gazprom in April, after a protracted struggle with its cofounder and original owner, tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky (see Biographies (Gusinsky, Vladimir )), a majority of the news team (including general director Yevgeny Kiselyov) transferred to TV6. That station later faced court-mandated liquidation, however, in the wake of a lawsuit by energy giant Lukoil, whose daughter company, Lukoil-Garant, was a 15% shareholder. Boris Berezovsky, another of Russia's “oligarchs,” who was now living in exile and who controlled 75% of TV6, had offered to buy out Lukoil-Garant, which then countered with an offer to buy out Berezovsky.

      “Canada's Own” CBC Television, launched its new season with theme nights accompanied by on-air hosts, as well as new branding that tied together drama, comedy, news, and sports programming on both the main network and CBC Newsworld. Hockey Night in Canada provided leaguewide coverage, including highlights, features, and analysis. Australian rugby fans in 300 households participated in a four-month interactive-TV trial by Cable & Wireless Optus beginning in August. Viewers of Seven Network's Bledisloe Cup broadcast chose match data they wanted displayed and participated in live polls. Optus's interactive partners Pizza Hut, Coles Myer Ltd., and HMV music stores provided services. Nine Network unveiled plans to elevate Friday nights in its programming with headline matches of the Australian Football League (AFL). Seven lost its 45-year association with the AFL earlier in the year.

      Seven Network could expect significant cost savings once its new $40 million broadcast centre in Melbourne—the first such digital facility in the country—began operations by the end the year. The capacious centre had 100-hour video servers and on-line storage that could contain 10,000 hours of footage (one year's programming).

      France's first reality-TV show, Loft Story, garnered 5.2 million viewers daily, about three-quarters of them between 15 and 25 years old, since it aired early in the year. Its creators, Holland-based Endemol Entertainment, had been told that telepoubelle, or “garbage TV,” would never catch on in France. Earlier, Big Brother had hit it big all over Europe except France. Loft Story was Big Brother with a twist; five women and six men, in their 20s, agreed to live in a loft for 10 weeks and be filmed round-the-clock by 26 cameras. TV watchers voted by telephone each week to eliminate one of two participants. The lone woman and lone man who remained by July won a $416,000 Parisian apartment—but had to live together in it for the next six months. (See Sidebar (TV-Too Big a Dose of Reality? ).)

      India's state-owned Doordarshan television network aired before a live audience the country's first matchmaking TV show, Swayamvar (“Own Groom”). The program, based on a common practice in northern India in which princes vie for the most beautiful princesses, gave women participants the prerogative to choose their own men. The program featured 26 women, one per episode, from cities across India. The biggest hit on Indian TV, however, was the Hindi-language version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, starring the popular film star Amitabh Bachchan. (See Biographies (Bachchan, Amitabh ).)

      In other media news, Fernando Dutra Pinto, wanted for the kidnapping of Patricia Abravanel, the 24-year-old daughter of Brazilian TV baron Silvio Santos, broke into the magnate's mansion and held the 70-year-old Santos hostage for seven hours (telecast live) before surrendering to the police. Kim Ahyun, who complained that she was not allowed to cover “male” subjects such as politics and business, quit her job on South Korean TV. She founded Fasonaki, a company that shot and sold footage of international fashion shows to local TV and cable companies. Sally Wu, Phoenix news anchor in Hong Kong, was praised as a model journalist by Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji. Her company, five-year old Hong Kong broadcaster Phoenix (through its parent company Fox News), was first in its live coverage and Chinese translation of September 11 in New York City, by going on air within minutes of the attack.

Technology.

      New television sets in the U.S. were equipped with secondary audio programming technology that, when activated by the remote control, allowed Spanish-speaking viewers to hear TV dialogue in Spanish. The system could also provide auditory assistance to the visually impaired by describing what was happening on the screen. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission required American broadcasters to provide descriptive video service (DVS) for the blind, equivalent to closed-captioning for the deaf. DVS allowed for a second audio track in which a narrator describes visual action. Pioneered by public TV station WGBH in Boston, DVS was commercially available only on the Turner Classic Movies channel on cable TV,

      It was reported that V-chip technology—which allowed the blocking of selected program material and had been standard equipment on all television sets manufactured since January 2000— was being used by only 7% of American parents to regulate children's viewing habits. Most parents relied on TV ratings of sex and violence in shows.

      In December flat-panel TVs from Sharp's new Aquos line in 76-cm (1 cm = 0.39 in) and 56-cm liquid crystal display (LCD) panels were introduced. Sharp also unveiled its first consumer plasma display panel (PDP) TV prototypes in 109-cm and 127-cm models.

      Hitachi and Sanyo had earlier exhibited high-definition 107-cm PDP TVs, while Toshiba rolled out its 107-cm and 127-cm PDP TVs in November. Sony offered rear-projection LCD “Grand Wega” TVs, including a 152-cm prototype. HDNet, the world's first high-definition national TV network, debuted with a major league baseball game. Sports and entertainment programming was seen as the key to increasing sales of digital high-definition TV.

      Microsoft Corp.'s long-delayed Interactive TV software debuted in June on Portugal's TV Cabo. Interactive TV subscribers received e-mail, banked, shopped, placed bets, and played games on TV, using a set-top box. ReplayTV technology was to be integrated in Motorola set tops for its DigiCable business. ReplayTV enabled users to record 60 hours of television on a hard drive and eliminate commercials with a 30-second skip button. TiVo won patents for its digital video recording (DVR) technology, which AOL Time Warner planned to include in next-generation set-top boxes to be developed and marketed jointly with Samsung Electronics. Japan launched its e-platform, and a startup company to broadcast data services for it, at the CEATEC consumer show in October. Japan's ep Corp. promised the first service in the world that would seamlessly combine digital broadcasting, Internet access, and data storage in a hard-disk drive. Princeton Graphic System's high-definition TV receiver and Channel 1's companion service enabled Web surfing without a set-top box, using Internet hardware that was built into the set. The 91-cm HDTV-ready AI3.6HD display supplied connections for every TV service and device.

      A report from Scarborough Research found that almost one-quarter of adult Americans were watching less TV since they started using the Internet. On the other hand, Nielsen//NetRatings found that heavy Internet users were big consumers of all media and might not necessarily have decreased time spent watching TV or reading newspapers. Scarborough's findings showed that Americans had increased radio listening since going on-line.

Radio

      The dominant news in American radio was the potentially debilitating ailments suffered by two of the medium's biggest stars. Paul Harvey (see Biographies (Harvey, Paul )), fresh off a 10-year contract to continue his lucrative work with ABC Radio Networks, was off the air for about four months in midyear after an apparent viral infection cost him the temporary use of his voice. Harvey's daily news reports and commentary were heard on more than 1,200 stations. More shocking, conservative talk host Rush Limbaugh revealed in October that he had gone virtually deaf because of a rare autoimmune disease that attacks the inner ear, and there was little chance of recovery. Even before the disclosure, some listeners thought they had detected a change in the rhythm and timbre of Limbaugh's talk, but others said they could not notice a difference. During the summer the popular Limbaugh had signed a contract with Premiere Radio Networks reportedly paying him $250 million through 2009, and he vowed to continue with his work, using technological aids to help him hear listeners or read what they had said—or simply to stop taking calls and do his daily show as a monologue. “Nothing's stopped me from talking, and that's what I get paid to do,” he told the Associated Press. “Nobody's paying me to listen.”

      Recent years' consolidation waves in the radio business seemed to have ebbed, perhaps because there was little left to consolidate. Like other advertiser-dependent businesses during 2001, Clear Channel Communications Inc., which had emerged as the largest American radio broadcaster, with 1,180 stations, was undergoing a rough year, posting a large third-quarter loss. Toward year's end Radio One Inc., with 65 stations the largest owner and operator of urban radio stations, and ABC Radio Networks, with 163 urban affiliates the largest urban programmer, combined forces in a partnership creating the leading African American radio service.

      The most intriguing radio story of the year, however, might have been the first stirrings of Internet-based radio as a force. The technology awaited cheap and ubiquitous Internet access to really come into its own, but some experts believed there was a huge potential audience of disaffected local radio listeners, troubled by ever-narrowing formats and ever-increasing commercial time. An executive with Arbitron Webcast Services, which rated Internet radio stations' popularity, told Time magazine that the proportion of Americans who had listened to Web radio had grown to 20% from 6% in just two years. A competing company, MeasureCast, reported that listening to the stations whose Internet broadcasts it measured had more than tripled during 2001.

      In the latest incident in press crackdowns by authoritarian African regimes, Zambia's popular private station Radio Phoenix was shut down for having allegedly defamed Pres. Frederick Chiluba. Many silenced journalists flocked to the Internet, which was relatively safe from censorship.

      Following a federal parliamentary inquiry, the Australian government was tasked with funding a “black-spots” scheme to improve radio services in certain areas. The inquiry also highlighted concerns about a lack of local content due to networked or syndicated programs.

Ramona Monette Sargan Flores; Steve Johnson

Newspapers

      A severe advertising recession that forewarned a global economic downturn overtook newspapers in 2001, even as the September 11 attacks in the United States produced some of the most dramatic news coverage by the press in more than a half century.

      Advertising sectors—notably employment advertising and so-called dot-com advertising—were exposed to economic whims after having led the newspaper-industry revenue surge in the late 1990s, and their vulnerability served as an early-warning system for the overall economy. In the first half of 2001, newspaper employment advertising in the U.S. plunged 25%. Dot-com advertising, which had begun declining after the April 2000 crash of Internet stocks, was virtually nonexistent in newspapers.

      Sharp contractions in classified, retail, and national advertising began in February in the U.S. and continued to decline throughout the year—a pattern repeated in Europe and the Asia-Pacific area later in the year. In some non-U.S. regions, national advertising was the first recessed sector as media buyers in global economic capitals, already reeling from an economic contraction, began pulling back advertising plans. In Latin America the already-poor economic situation from the previous four years was made worse by sinking economies in Brazil and Argentina, and the Western downturn made matters even worse.

      Meanwhile, newspapers worldwide chafed at the unpredictability of newsprint prices, which made up 20–30% of the total cost of the publishing business. After successive price hikes in 2000, newspapers entered 2001 with projections of a 10–20% rise in prices, a sharp increase coming from a paper-manufacturing industry that had rapidly consolidated during the previous four years. The price increases did not materialize, however, at least not to predicted levels; the advertising recession, combined with the threat of higher newsprint prices, forced newspapers to reduce print consumption sharply.

      Overall, the combination of an advertising pullback and the unpredictability of newsprint prices produced a sharp decrease in financial performance by newspapers. In the first half of 2001, American publicly traded newspaper companies saw revenues decline 4.7%, operating profits drop 30%, and profit margins contract nearly seven percentage points to 16.6%—albeit from record highs in 2000.

      Throughout the year newspapers responded to the economic distress with layoffs, employee buyouts, a cutback in the number of pages printed, and the elimination of sections no longer supported by advertising. The trend toward small physical page widths, which had begun in the late 1990s as a cost-saving measure, continued in 2001. Critics noted that while all economy-exposed media were undergoing turbulent times, the defensive nature of the newspaper response was similar to how newspapers responded to the previous economic recession in 1990–91. After that recession, newspapers lost advertising market share to targeted and measurable media such as direct mail, cable television, and local radio.

      In the U.S. the immediate cutbacks by newspaper companies provoked cries of corporate greed from quarters within the journalism community, notably by the publisher of the San Jose Mercury News; he resigned his prominent position within the industry instead of following through on cutbacks made by corporate giant Knight Ridder.

      It was against this backdrop that newspapers responded immediately to the September terrorist attacks in the U.S. Many newspapers in the Americas published extra editions in the afternoon of the attacks, some for the first time since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Newspapers worldwide published among the most memorable newspapers of all time the day after the attacks and subsequently boosted circulation. Newspapers also mobilized their large staffs in editorial, circulation, production, and marketing departments to produce unique print newspapers, Web-site updates, instant-message alerts, e-mail newsletters, and other ways to deliver the news. Newspaper Web sites, like other Internet ventures, saw record hit counts in the immediate aftermath of September 11.

      With the exception of Japan, leading industrialized countries saw a 1% annual decrease in paid daily circulation during much of the past decade. Analysts suggested that this downward trend might end because young people had become intensely interested in the news events, and they drove up circulation sales.

      Though newspapers reported record circulation sales in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, the same could not be said of advertising. Historically, advertisers pulled back media commitments in such situations for fear of being associated with negative news events. The pullback after September 11, however, was more severe because the economic foundation was already in place to encourage lower marketing expenditures.

      Meanwhile, traditional publishers continued to face a third consecutive year of rapid expansion from the newest publishing sector—free commuter newspapers. As Stockholm-based Modern Times Group (MTG) launched new editions of its advertiser-supported free newspapers aimed at subway and bus-system customers, traditional publishers launched competing products, with varying degrees of success. Europe remained the focal point of MTG strategy and subsequent countermeasures by traditional publishers, though expansions were also seen in Canada, the U.S., Argentina, and Singapore.

      “Convergence” remained a hot topic among newspaper executives in 2001, even if definitions varied. Though American newspapers struggled to get regulatory officials to abandon local cross-media ownership rules, newspapers in countries where such rules were nonexistent or less stringent began toying seriously with notions of re-positioning themselves as “information mills” with different distribution platforms—print newspapers, Web sites, e-mail, instant messaging, and even television, radio, and other venues. Publishers eyed the possibilities of future cost savings in news gathering as well as cross-media advertising packages. The allure of such future convergence was among the driving forces behind multimedia giant Tribune Co.'s purchase of Times Mirror properties in the United States and cable operator CanWest's purchase of Hollinger properties in Canada in 2000.

      After a blistering pace of newspaper ownership consolidation in the late 1990s, merger-and-acquisition activity slowed considerably in 2001. Over a 20-year period, the newspaper ownership landscape in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. changed dramatically, with similar trends—far fewer owners and far more public ownership of a constitutionally and legally protected industry. The daily newspaper markets for Australia and New Zealand, for example, were now dominated by two companies; those in Canada, by four companies. The U.K., with clear distinctions between regional newspapers and national newspapers, continued to see sharp contraction in ownership. In the United States 20% of the country's 1,500 newspapers, including almost all metropolitan dailies, were owned by publicly traded companies.

      In a challenging economic environment, newspapers continued to seek a more immediate return on investment from the high level of Internet activities started in the late 1990s. With the sharp downturn in the advertising market not supportive of Web-site profitability, newspaper managements turned to the more difficult issue of the degree to which readers should pay subscription fees. In early 2001 anecdotal evidence was mounting that providing free content on-line while charging for the same content in print was beginning to hurt print circulation. Two alternative models emerged—one required an individual to register for continued free access to content, another allowing free access to on-line content only to paid subscribers of the print newspaper. Many newspapers charged for access to archived materials.

      In late 2001 American newspaper offices were gripped by fear of anthrax attacks. After two New York Post employees tested positive for anthrax and several newspapers reported anthrax scares, many newspapers changed mail-handling procedures.

      The issue of copyright in the digital age challenged newspapers during the year. In a landmark decision the United States Supreme Court ruled that newspaper and magazine publishers broke copyright law when they failed to secure freelance writers' permission to include their works in digital databases—a decision that affected hundreds of thousands of articles stored in electronic archives as well as those republished in CD-ROM and other digital formats. In response to the decision and subsequent lawsuits by freelances, newspapers such as the New York Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune removed from their archives materials subject to review in light of the court ruling. Similar copyright issues faced newspaper publishers in Europe. In Germany the Bundestag (lower house of parliament) considered a European payment standard of between 10% and 30% for electronic reusage, outraging newspaper publishers.

      Though commercial concerns overwhelmed newspapers in 2001, other publishers struggled to maintain an environment in which they could publish. In South Korea the government of Pres. Kim Dae Jung charged and jailed three opposition newspaper owners on tax-evasion and embezzlement charges, which observers charged was a heavy-handed attempt to silence government critics. New press restrictions were adopted in Chile, Sri Lanka, Venezuela, Argentina, Malaysia, Mongolia, and Vietnam. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Iran, Liberia, and China remained the most oppressive enemies of a free press. Meanwhile, journalists working within Russia reported that a corrupt general environment, combined with actions by the government of Pres. Vladimir Putin, had created an atmosphere of deteriorating press freedom.

      Two prominent figures in the American newspaper industry died during the year, Katharine Graham (Graham, Katharine Meyer ), owner of the Washington Post, and John Bertram Oakes (Oakes, John Bertram ), an editorial-page editor for the New York Times. (See Obituaries.)

Earl J. Wilkinson

Magazines

      The magazine industry faced a bad year that got worse after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S. “The 11th” hastened the decline of an industry already suffering lowered revenues and resulted in the closure of some well-known magazines. During the first nine months of 2001, total ad pages declined about 10%, and revenue slipped slightly more than 1%. The good news for 2001 was that 2000 was an unusually healthy year (U.S. and worldwide advertising revenue rose by 13.5% and 4%, respectively), which meant that the decline in 2001 was probably not as precipitous as it appeared.

      The only winners were the newsweeklies. Newsweek increased its newsstand sales sixfold after the terrorist attacks, and Time and U.S. News & World Report tripled theirs. All three published special advertisement-free editions within days of the attacks. Fire Engineering was most directly affected by the tragedies. The 125-year-old magazine lost 10 of its contributors, nine New York City firefighters and one Port Authority officer, who had served as both writers and trainers at the magazine's fire department instruction conferences. Among the dead was Ray Downey, the battalion chief of the New York Fire Department special operations command and a key member of the magazine's advisory board.

      The implications of the attacks reverberated throughout the magazine industry, and several trade magazines, including Pit & Quarry, Convenience Store News, and Cheese Market News, covered the events and how their industries were affected. Later in the year, magazines were also involved in the anthrax scare. In early October Iowa police called Thomas Ryder, chief executive of Reader's Digest Association, Inc., after an Iowa subscriber notified police about a white powdery substance on her magazine. The residue was cornstarch, commonly used in the printing process to help ink dry faster and reduce static cling. A series of similar false alarms elsewhere forced some magazine printers, including R.R. Donnelley & Sons, to stop using cornstarch and search for a substitute.

      The Magazine Publishers of America (MPA) and the American Society of Magazine Editors moved their annual American Magazine Conference, scheduled for late October, from Phoenix, Ariz., to New York City. MPA president Nina Link explained that “many of our member attendees as well as speakers expressed their reluctance to leave their New York-based offices during such challenging times.”

      The most notable closure of the year was that of 66-year-old Mademoiselle, which ended its run with the November 2001 issue; subscribers were sent Glamour in its place. Conde Nast closed the 1.1-million-circulation magazine, stating, “Current economic conditions have produced a situation where … the magazine is no longer viable.” Other closures included Brill's Content, George, Working Woman, Expedia Travels, Family PC, Mode, Nova, Individual Investor, Lingua Franca, Asiaweek, Golf & Travel, Maximum Golf, The Industry Standard, Silicon Alley Reporter, and Woman's Realm. McCall's, a venerable title among the women's magazines, published its last issue in March, but its publisher, Gruner+Jahr USA Publishing, successfully relaunched it a month later as Rosie; by the end of June, it ranked 12th in total circulation. A prominent Russian news magazine, Itogi, was a casualty of the struggle between the new government of Vladimir Putin and oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky. (See Biographies (Gusinsky, Vladimir ).) After corporate shareholders aligned with Putin fired the editor in chief, Sergey Parkhomenko, most of the staff departed and Newsweek severed its partnership with the magazine; its last issue was dated April 17.

      O: The Oprah Magazine, launched in May 2000, became one of the most successful magazine launches in history. After two press runs the initial May–June issue sold out of 1.6 million copies on newsstands. By the end of June 2001, the average paid circulation reached 2.7 million—20th among all magazines.

      Making the rounds at The Nation, the most venerable left-leaning political magazine in the U.S., was a joke about its increase in circulation: “What's bad for the country is good for The Nation.” After George W. Bush became president, the magazine's circulation rose 4%. Mother Jones, another liberal magazine, increased its circulation by 6%, and two smaller left-leaning magazines, American Prospect and In These Times, also registered healthy increases. Likewise, conservative magazines had profited from the election of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The American Spectator had experienced a sevenfold circulation jump and National Review had increased its readership by 66% during the Clinton years.

      Internet publishing was another bright spot for publishers. On-line advertising grew faster than that in any other medium and continued to increase during times of recession, according to Danny Meadows-Klue, chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. At an October conference in Geneva, Meadows-Klue reported that sustained growth had more than doubled each year for three years.

      Hubert Burda, president of the Association of German Magazine Publishers, received the annual Freedom of Commercial Speech medal from the European Association of Communication Agencies at its October conference in Berlin. Burda had been a prominent champion of advertising and press freedom in Europe.

David E. Sumner

Book Publishing

United States.

      The American book-publishing industry was profoundly affected by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S. In the immediate aftermath local bookstores reported that they had become “de facto” community centres crowded with people seeking information, connection, and whatever comfort might be found. There was a surge in sales of books about Islam, including the Qur'an, as well as such topics as religious fundamentalism, terrorism, the Taliban, the Middle East, and biological and chemical warfare. Rutgers University Press, publisher of a pictorial history of the World Trade Center, was overwhelmed with orders for the book. Plans for stepped-up media exposure for upcoming books and their authors were derailed. Some books slated for fall publication had their publication dates pushed back until 2002, and a number of publishers used their Web sites (chat rooms, audio readings, and pictures) in an attempt to compensate for the lost face-to-face contact between authors and their audience.

      Even before the terrorist attacks, some publishing segments failed to live up to expectations, especially the electronic-book (e-book) market. Though a 2000 study had projected that under the right conditions the electronic publishing market for consumer books could reach $2.3 billion–$3.4 billion by 2005, accounting for 10% of all book sales, the e-book market was slowed by ongoing technical issues, including the lack of “interoperability.” The Association of American Publishers took the lead to develop open standards for the e-book marketplace in an effort to provide authors, publishers, retailers, and consumers with the widest possible array of choices in developing, selling, and utilizing information in digital form. Standards were developed in the areas of metadata and numbering, along with recommendations on digital-rights management standards. In April 2001 an agency was selected (Content Directions, Inc.) to register digital object identifiers, or DOIs, a system used by book publishers to identify and exchange electronic content.

      The issue of copyright protection, especially as it applied to digital information, remained paramount for publishers; two important copyright cases dealt with electronic rights. In June in New York Times Co. v. Tasini, the Supreme Court ruled 7–2 in favour of a group of freelance journalists who had sued newspaper and magazine publishers for copyright infringement. The plaintiffs objected to the defendants' reproduction and distribution in a database of their previously published print articles. The court found that the articles in an electronic database “as presented to and perceptible by” a database user could not be considered a permissible part of a “revision of a collective work,” as claimed by the defendants, because the articles were reproduced in the database “clear of the context” provided either by the original periodical editions or any revision of them.

      In Random House v. RosettaBooks, the plaintiff publisher sought to enjoin the defendant publisher from issuing e-book versions of works previously published by the plaintiff under contracts to “print, publish, and sell the work in book form.” The federal district court, however, denied the injunction request, finding that the contract language did not convey electronic rights to the plaintiff for the works at issue.

      Two of the industry's highest priorities—the protection of intellectual property and the defense of intellectual freedom—met head-on in a highly publicized court case. In May the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit overturned a preliminary injunction that had banned the publication of The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall. The case began in April when trustees of the Margaret Mitchell estate brought a copyright and trademark infringement action against the Houghton Mifflin Co. The complaint sought to enjoin publication of that book, which it claimed used elements of Gone with the Wind and was therefore a misappropriation of a copyrighted work. Randall and Houghton Mifflin maintained that the book, told from the point of view of a former slave, was a work of social commentary and parody protected by the First Amendment and allowable under copyright law. In the wake of the appellate court ruling, the book was published in June.

Patricia S. Schroeder

Europe, Asia, Australia.

      In the European book-publishing industry, consolidation was the byword in 2001. Bertelsmann AG, the giant German publishing company headed by Thomas Middelhoff (see Biographies (Middelhoff, Thomas )), announced in May that in an effort to compete with Amazon.com, it would integrate BOL.com, its on-line bookstore in 16 European countries, into its multichannel book club division.

      In August Vivendi Universal acquired Houghton Mifflin for about $2.2 billion, which included Houghton Mifflin's $500 million debt. The purchase greatly strengthened Vivendi's position in the English-language markets and propelled the company to the number two position (behind Pearson PLC) in worldwide educational publishing. (See also Television (Media and Publishing ).) Although Macmillan Publishers Ltd. of the U.K. bought from Pearson Education the right to use the Macmillan name in the U.S., it would continue to use Palgrave as its global academic imprint.

      The traditional balance of power between publishers and booksellers was threatened after a survey of 291 publishers in France revealed that although only 30% of titles originated from the top six publishers, these accounted for nearly 70% of total turnover. In response the 10-year-old Cahart agreements between French publishers and booksellers were revamped to give the latter more control over the number of books received and to include mass-market paperbacks in the formula for determining discounts.

      In May public sentiment was squashed when the Swedish Parliament refused to cut the value-added tax (VAT) on books from 25% to 6%. Elsewhere in Europe there was concern that e-books, which were not subject to sales tax in the U.S., would be treated as services rather than goods (printed versions were treated as goods) and attract VAT.

      The abolition of price-fixing on new editions and reprints began to show results in Denmark, where publishing houses Gyldendal and Cicero launched popular novels at half the customary price and the Dansk Supermarked sold low-priced versions of remaindered books under its own label. In Switzerland the royalty payment mechanism (rpm) was verging on collapse after it had been declared illegal by the antitrust authorities. Europe, nevertheless, remained as divided as ever on the virtues of rpm; Italy reimposed it in February but permitted discounts of up to 10% for trade books, and Belgium considered whether to follow suit.

      Copyright remained a vexing issue in a wide variety of contexts. In January police raids to stem rampant book piracy in India revealed the existence of modern, well-stocked bookshops in which not one single title was found to be original. The hope was expressed that piracy would be eliminated within two years. In Australia the Copyright Amendment (Parallel Importation) Bill 2001was passed. The bill amended the 1968 Copyright Act to allow the “parallel importing of books, periodicals and sheet music in both electronic and print form.” Meanwhile, agreement was reached on the wording of the European Union (EU) digital copyright directive, which sought to balance the rights of copyright owners with those of users. The directive harmonized the reproduction, distribution, and communication of digitally stored material as well as the legal protection of anticopying devices, including encryption. Copying by individuals for educational or private purposes remained legal. EU member states had only 18 months to convert the directive into national law.

Peter Curwen

▪ 2001

Introduction

television

      Rather than battle it out with the Internet, the television industry in 2000 opted for mergers. Also during the year, the technology needed to deliver the benefits of interactive TV to consumers had not yet been fully developed.

Organization.

      Two large-scale mergers kept European and U.S. regulatory agencies busy. The European Commission allowed Time Warner Inc. to proceed with its $165 billion merger with America Online, Inc. (AOL). The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was, however, slower to approve the merger, which would result in a company that would be one of the largest cable TV networks in the U.S. as well as the biggest provider of on-line services (unlike in Europe). AOL pledged to sever ties with Bertelsmann AG, the German media conglomerate that owned 50% of AOL Europe. In December the FTC approved the deal after first receiving assurances that the new alliance would not be used to limit competition.

      Earlier, the $34 billion acquisition of Canada's Seagram Co. Ltd. by French conglomerate Vivendi was approved following concessions by both companies to dilute their combined business in entertainment and telecommunications. Vivendi controlled Canal+ pay-TV, a telephone company, and the Havas publishing business. Seagram owned Universal music and film studios. As a result of the merger, Vivendi Universal owned an archive of 9,000 movies and 27,000 TV shows.

      Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. acquired the 21% share of Gemstar-TV Guide International, Inc., that was held by cable company Liberty Media Corp. News Corp. already owned 22% of Gemstar, publisher of TV guides and inventor of VCR Plus+, which allowed users to record programs by using a simple code. Murdoch also was strengthening his position to buy DIRECTV Inc., the largest satellite-TV group in the U.S.

      German media magnate Leo Kirch expanded his pay-TV's capital base by selling 3.2% to Saudi Prince al-Waleed ibn Talal ibn Abdul-Aziz and 2.76% to Capital Research & Management Co., a Los Angeles-based fund manager. The prince and Capital already were investors in KirchMedia, KirchGruppe's free TV. KirchPayTV operated in Germany and Austria and owned 40% of Swiss pay-TV station Teleclub AG.

      Philippine cable TV operator Sky Vision Corp. entered into a $100 million joint venture with Yes Television of the U.K., providing video-on-demand service and nationwide interactive TV. Commercial service included access to hundreds of movies, music videos, children's programs, travel services, sports features, and television comedies and dramas.

      With most of the American networks already part of giant corporations, the year's only network ownership change came when the Viacom Inc. entertainment conglomerate increased its stake in UPN, the fifth most popular network, from half to full ownership. In addition to control of two of the seven broadcast television networks, the move gave Viacom ownership of dozens of television stations throughout the U.S.

      Viacom also completed its purchase of the CBS television network during 2000. In November it added the cable channel Black Entertainment Television to its roster, buying the parent BET Holdings II, Inc., for $3 billion. The purchase in effect gave Viacom, already in charge of MTV and VH1, control of popular music on American cable television. While some observers decried the loss of one more independent voice in television, others were optimistic that BET's program offerings under Viacom would improve.

      Further signs of the trend toward consolidation came when NBC announced that it would rebroadcast its Nightly News with Tom Brokaw on stations of the upstart PAX TV network, in which NBC owned a 32% stake. The move, designed to draw maximum audience to the newscast, angered NBC's affiliates, which did not want their own network sending viewers elsewhere. Although the protest caused the network to cancel the plan, the episode signaled further erosion in the relationship between networks and their local affiliates.

      Networks became increasingly concerned about rising programming costs and the threat represented by cable. The rate of cable penetration leveled off between May 1999 and May 2000 at about 68% of American homes, but cable continued to increase its audience share, while that of network TV continued to decline. Such moves as NBC had planned with PAX would allow the network to get more bang for its programming buck. Similarly, ABC angered its affiliates by announcing plans to start a cable channel using the network's soap operas.

      In its battle for people's attention with home computers and the Internet, television overall got a boost when a November report from Nielsen Media Research showed that TV usage had remained stable over a one-year period in homes that also had computers and World Wide Web access. Earlier in the year Nielsen had reported that, despite the increased competition, television viewing levels were at an all-time high. Nielsen said in January that the average U.S. household kept its TV set on for eight hours 11 minutes per day.

Programming.

      The broadcasting of the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, was tape-delayed for as long as 24 hours by NBC (which paid $705 million for exclusive broadcast rights) owing to the great time difference between the U.S. and Australia. The International Olympic Committee banned radio play-by-play, live video, and dot-com journalists, even those from ESPN.com and SportsLine.com. Web broadcasts had to be done by TV affiliates.

      The Fédération Internationale de Volley Ball agreed to a $400 million, 10-year TV and sponsorship deal with five companies. The next world competitions were scheduled for 2002. Fox Sports struck a $2.5 billion, six-year deal with U.S. Major League Baseball, extending its contract to air play-off and World Series games beginning in 2001. On its first night broadcast over Viacom's newly acquired TNN cable TV network, World Wrestling Federation (WWF) Entertainment, Inc. weighed in as TNN's highest-rated premiere and the highest-rated entertainment in the network's 17-year history. More important, the WWF succeeded in attracting viewers of interest to advertisers, according to Nielsen Media Research.

      To protect young viewers, Brazil required stations to rate all programs and indicate on-screen throughout each show whether it contained sex or violence. Programs dealing openly with sex could be aired only between midnight and 5 AM.

      During the historic summit between North and South Korea in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, television coverage of the city was tightly controlled. South Korean media could file only pool reports and were barred from interviewing ordinary people. Street scenes were filmed from moving vehicles.

      Lázaro González and his family sued Fox Family Channel for its broadcast of The Elian Gonzales Story. Lawyers said that the TV movie did not accurately reflect what happened while Elián lived with Lázaro and his family in Miami, Fla.'s Little Havana.

      Serbian state TV was overrun by opposition forces on October 5 following massive objections to the disputed election of Yugoslav Pres. Slobodan Milosevic. The following day three government-owned TV stations, three state-owned radio networks, and Politika, a powerful media house run by an ally of Milosevic's wife, declared their loyalty to opposition presidential candidate Vojislav Kostunica. (See Biographies (Kostunica, Vojislav ).)

      In Russia Vladimir Gusinsky, owner of Media-Most, Russia's only independent national media empire, and a frequent critic of the Russian government, was imprisoned for fraud, a charge later dropped. At the sinking of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk and the loss of all of its crew, Arkady Momontov from state-owned RTR television essentially followed the military line (including suggestions, never substantiated, that a foreign vessel may have been involved), while Gusinsky's NTV broadcast stories that contradicted official pronouncements. Boris Berezovsky (see Biographies (Berezovsky, Boris )), one of Russia's best-known and most controversial businessmen, disclosed that he had been pressured to give up his 49% stake in Russian Public Television (ORT), a state-controlled TV station, after its “unsatisfactory” coverage of the Kursk incident. The government owned 51% of ORT, Russia's most-watched channel. Berezovsky planned to transfer his shares to members of the intelligentsia to prevent the station from becoming a government propaganda organ.

      Liberia detained members of Britain's Channel Four for espionage. The four detained employees were accused of filming in areas where they were not permitted to work. An apology from the chairman of Channel Four secured their release.

      On July 22, as thousands watched on TV, three men and a woman, all construction workers, were swept away by currents of Pachang Creek in southern Taiwan. The tragedy sparked a media frenzy questioning government responsiveness to public needs. Cable TV in New Delhi ceased transmission of 70 channels to upwards of 800,000 homes to protest a new law banning tobacco and liquor commercials and pornographic films.

      CNN International launched ebizasia, a weekly program on how the new economy was affecting Asia.

      At CNBC in October, Karuna Shinso replaced Dalton Tanonaka as anchor of CNN's two prime-time daily news programs produced in Hong Kong. They were Asian Edition, transmitted to a worldwide audience of 151 million households, and Asia Tonight, aired to CNN viewers in Asia-Pacific.

      According to Nielsen Media Research based on third-quarter results, CNBC, for the first time in its 11-year history, became the highest-rated news and information network on cable TV, ending CNN's long reign and crowning the efforts of three-year president Bill Bolster. Under Bolster, advertising rates had risen more than threefold and profits had more than doubled.

      The biggest story in American television during 2000 happened, uncharacteristically, during the summer. The runaway success of the reality series–game show hybrid Survivor (CBS) took television experts by surprise. Tens of millions of viewers stayed home on summer Wednesday nights to see the taped account of a band of American voluntary castaways on a South Pacific island voting one peer per week off the island until the survivor claimed a $1 million prize. The 13-week program's finale in August drew more than 51 million viewers, a record for a summer program and a viewership number second during the year only to the January broadcast of the National Football League's Super Bowl. The winner was Rhode Island corporate trainer Richard Hatch, who made no secret of his cunning during the show's taping. Most of the castaways became minor celebrities, appearing on talk shows and guest-starring in network series.

      The success of Survivor prompted the other networks to hurry to acquire rights to their own so-called “reality” series, a genre pioneered by the cable network MTV's long-running Real World series and characterized by nonactors in unscripted situations. At the year's end, however, no other such program had gained popularity. The Survivor sequel, set in the Australian Outback, was slated for broadcast beginning in January 2001.

      Based on a Swedish television concept, Survivor was American network television's second successive successful summertime launch of an idea imported from European TV. The previous summer had seen ABC introduce the U.S. version of the British game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Eventually telecast four nights per week by ABC, that series, hosted by American talk-show veteran Regis Philbin (see Biographies (Philbin, Regis )), went on to become the sensation of the 1999–2000 television season, claiming at season's end in May the three top slots among the year's most popular series. (The Survivor broadcasts took place outside the traditional television season.)

      The popularity of Millionaire led ABC past previous winner CBS to a victory in the 1999–2000 season. Up some 15% from the previous season, ABC won in both the overall households category, averaging about 9.4 million, and in the advertiser-coveted 18–49-year-old demographic group. NBC, which had won the ratings battle through much of the 1990s, finished in a second-place tie with CBS, although it was comfortably ahead of CBS among the 18–49 group.

      After its Olympic telecasts from Sydney, featuring no events presented live, were seen by small audiences compared with those of past Olympics, NBC opened the new season in trouble, canceling two of its new series before the end of one month. NBC's juggernaut Thursday night prime-time lineup continued to be popular, accounting for the network's continued lead in the key demographic group, but at a heavy price. After paying a record $13 million per episode for the hospital drama ER, it agreed in May to pay each of the six stars of the hit situation comedy Friends $750,000 per episode.

      As the 2000–01 season began, it was CBS, however, that seemed to be gaining ground. Many of its new series, including a situation comedy starring the movie actress and cabaret performer Bette Midler (Bette), drew relatively large audiences quickly. As of early November, the network was second in overall viewers and had pulled into a tie with the Fox network for third place among the 18–49 group.

      At ABC the network news department's ambitious globe-spanning turn-of-the-millennium broadcast as 1999 turned into 2000 had been a success. As the new season began, however, Millionaire's hold on the audience was beginning to slip, and the network scrambled to develop more traditional programming. Like NBC, ABC had cut back on its heavy reliance on prime-time news magazines, and with no new reality series taking hold, ABC needed new situation comedies and dramas.

      Rupert Murdoch's Fox Network, the fourth of the so-called “Big Four,” continued its pattern of executive tumult. Amid declining ratings, early in the year it let go of head programmer Doug Herzog, who had been brought in from cable's Comedy Central the previous year. Herzog left on the schedule one of the brightest new programs of the 2000 calendar year, the razor-sharp family comedy Malcolm in the Middle.

      At the more recent upstart networks, UPN, powered by a Thursday-night professional wrestling program and a target audience of young men, surpassed the ratings garnered by the WB network, with its target of young women. UPN's average of roughly 2.7 million households during the 1999–2000 season represented a 35% gain over the previous year. The WB, meanwhile, lost 19%, in large measure because its programming stopped running on national cable via Chicago-based “superstation” WGN.

      The Emmy Awards, television's highest honours, were won, in a change from tradition, by relatively young shows. A change in voting procedures allowed a wider range of members of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences to participate. The beneficiaries were, as best drama, NBC's The West Wing, a series about an idealized Democratic White House from playwright and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, and, as best comedy, NBC's Will & Grace, a snappy pop culture-savvy half-hour show about a friendship between a gay man and straight woman. Responding to protests in 1999 over a lack of ethnic diversity in their new prime-time programs, several of the networks as 2000 began formally agreed to increase diversity on the air. They especially sought to increase diversity in their executive ranks in the belief that this would lead to more diversity in their programming.

Technology.

      Japan's Sakura and Sanwa banks began providing TV banking services on digital broadcasting satellite screens in December. Four of Japan's largest electronic companies—Matsushita, Toshiba, Sony, and Hitachi—joined forces to create an industry standard for set-top boxes and programming for digital TV. Sony unveiled Airboard, which could be a conventional TV, video monitor, and Internet terminal, with the liquid-crystal display doubling as a touch screen.

      French telecommunications equipment maker Alcatel and U.S. internet software company Oracle Corp. began building a joint technology platform called Thirdspace that would allow telecommunications companies to offer interactive TV.

      Trading in stocks of the Italian Internet TV company Freedomland, which operated in Italy, Britain, and Spain, was suspended for false accounting and rigging of its stock price just as Virgilio Degiovanni, its chairman and founder, was to announce expansion plans. Degiovanni resigned as CEO in October.

      Microsoft Corp. introduced the Solo2 chip to operate its WebTV interactive television service. To be manufactured by Toshiba, Solo2 debuted in UltimateTV, Microsoft's answer to AOLTV. Failure to deliver the chip on time, however, forced Microsoft's customer, the Netherlands-based United Pan-Europe Communications N.V.—Europe's largest cable operator, with 8.4 million subscribers—to buy from Liberate Technologies just as Britain's second largest cable operator, Telewest Communications PLC, had done earlier.

      Dot-com advertising, which swept through the U.S. during the year, altered buying patterns of traditional advertisers. Radio and TV advertising was expected to be soft during the last quarter of 2000 and the first quarter of 2001.

radio

      On September 12 Washington, D.C.-based WorldSpace Corp. introduced satellite technology in Asia to provide an array of radio channels. CEO Noah Samara hoped that WorldSpace would do for radio what satellite and cable had done for TV. Late in 1999 WorldSpace had launched satellite-radio broadcasting services in Africa. From Egypt to South Africa, WorldSpace eventually provided more than 40 channels of music, entertainment, news, and educational programming. International content providers included the BBC, Bloomberg LP, CNN International, and MTV Asia's music programs in English, French, and local languages. Asian content providers included India's Menon Impex Ltd., Broadcasting Network Thailand, and Manila Broadcasting Corp.

      The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) licensed two companies to broadcast digitally—Sirius Satellite Radio, Inc., and XM Satellite Radio, Inc. Each company raced to launch its own satellite, set up digital radio studios, and establish ties with automobile manufacturers. In 2001 Sirius expected to be available in all Daimler-Chrysler and Ford models and XM in General Motors and Honda models. Digital satellite car radios promised to deliver 100 channels with a clear signal from coast to coast.

      Motorola unveiled its hands-free prototype called iRadio, which enabled drivers to download on-line music, real-time traffic reports, audio books, voice mail, and news and weather reports. This was achieved by means of satellite, digital, cellular, and FM sideband technologies.

      Launching of the wireless radio technology called Bluetooth was delayed. Technical challenges had been underestimated, and subsequent compatibility problems between Bluetooth products made by different manufacturers were not beginning to be fixed until late in the year.

      In U.S. radio the aftereffects of the past several years' massive consolidations continued to be felt. That path had been paved with federal deregulation in 1996, which lifted rules that had kept one company from owning more than 40 stations. Massive buying and selling frenzies resulted, and in 2000 one of those companies experienced the dark side of the rush to acquire. The nation's third largest station owner, Cumulus Media Inc. of Milwaukee, Wis., struggled to regain control of its more than 300-station empire after admitting to errors in earnings reports and suffering a more than 80% drop in its stock price. In three years the company had grown from nothing, taking on massive debt in the process. Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission approved the merger of the nation's two largest station owners, Clear Channel Communications, Inc., and AMFM Inc., conditional on the divestiture of 122 of the new entity's almost 1,300 American stations. As an example of what this concentration meant in one city, the 14 stations owned in Chicago by Clear Channel and Viacom's Infinity Broadcasting Corp., the nation's third largest station owner, collected nearly two-thirds of the region's radio advertising dollars.

      Partly in response to the cry for more diversity in radio broadcasting, the FCC began moving in 2000 on a controversial plan to license about 1,000 noncommercial, “low-power” radio stations nationwide. The National Association of Broadcasters filed suit to block the plan, claiming the signals of between 10 and 100 w each would interfere with the signals of existing stations. The FCC disputed that claim.

      In radio programming the popular syndicated commentator Paul Harvey signed a 10-year contract to continue his relationship with ABC Radio Networks. Harvey, heard six days a week on more than 1,200 stations in the U.S., was 82. Popular but controversial syndicated radio talk-show host Laura Schlessinger launched a television talk program, Dr. Laura, in September, but it was struggling to draw viewers. In November the CBS-owned stations announced that they were moving her show to late nights or dropping it altogether. Advertisers on Schlessinger's radio and TV programs had been targeted by activists in response to remarks she made condemning homosexuality.

Ramona Monette Sargan Flores; Steve Johnson

NEWSPAPERS

      Freedom of the press was a major issue throughout the world in 2000. Panama's newspapers began the year by celebrating the end of two laws that limited press freedom. The nation's new president, Mireya Moscoso, signed an order ending a requirement that journalists be licensed and ending the imposition of a $2,500 fine for reporting that discredited the government. Iranian newspapers were not so fortunate. During a two-month period, Iranian courts ordered the closing of 19 newspapers for publishing stories that violated Islamic principles. Three journalists were imprisoned on such charges as insulting Islam. A newly elected parliament, dominated by reformers, failed to end a campaign against the press when Iran's leader Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei killed a bill that would have allowed limited press freedom. By August the last major reform newspaper, Bahar, had been forced to close.

      In China 27 newspapers were punished for having published stories that officials said contained political errors and fabrications. No details were released about the punishments or how many of the newspapers were shut down. In Malaysia the government cut the publishing schedule of the opposition newspaper, run by the fundamentalist Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, from twice a week to twice a month.

      The Swazi Observer, one of the leading newspapers in Swaziland, was closed by the government after the newspaper reported about conflicts between King Mswati III's cabinet ministers. In Angola Pres. José Eduardo dos Santos's government proposed that journalists who published news that attacked his government be jailed for two to eight years. This followed a government campaign against the media, including the arrest and intimidation of foreign journalists. In Zambia the government charged 11 journalists with espionage after the independent daily The Post reported that Zambia was not prepared to deal with an attack from Angola.

      The changing nature of the newspaper business led to closings, sales, mergers, and investment in the Internet. L'Unità, once a major left-wing newspaper in Italy, closed. The newspaper was $33 million in debt and had a declining circulation of about 50,000.

      As content-rich newspapers moved to develop on-line communities of readers, publishers invested in the Internet, regarding it as a publishing tool with low overhead and no printing costs. In the U.K., for example, industry leader Trinity Mirror PLC invested £150 million (£1 = about $1.45) in Internet operations. Newsquest PLC, controlled by the Gannett Co. of the U.S., launched Fish4, a World Wide Web site that featured listings for home and automobile sales along with job openings. Clients included such newspaper groups as Trinity Mirror and Regional Independent Media. London's Financial Times expanded its Web product, FT.com, and posted 1999 revenues of £6 million. The television and publishing group United News & Media announced a £370 million investment in the Internet.

      In the U.K., newspaper groups fought to control the regional newspaper business as they sought to lower costs and create larger advertising bases. Trinity Mirror paid £285 million for Southnews, a London-based publisher that owned the Croydon Advertiser and the Harrow Leader. For £444 million Gannett bought Newscom, which published the Southampton Southern Daily Echo, among other titles. Trinity Mirror sold the Belfast Telegraph for £300 million to Independent News & Media, a Dublin-based chain that controlled most of the daily newspapers in Ireland.

      Major changes took place in Canada, where convergence—the combination of print, Internet, and television journalism—ruled. CanWest Global Communications purchased the Canadian newspapers owned by Hollinger, the international media group controlled by Conrad Black, owner of the Daily Telegraph and the Chicago Sun-Times, for Can$3.2 billion (about U.S. $2.3 billion) in cash and shares.

      With an eye toward building an Internet empire, the Thomson Corp. of Canada announced in February that it would sell 54 of its 55 daily newspapers and all of its more than 75 nondaily newspapers in the U.S. and Canada. By midsummer Thomson had sold all but one of its American daily newspapers: Gannett bought 21 of them with a combined circulation of 466,000 for $1,125,000,000; Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc., of Alabama paid $455,000,000 for 17 dailies with a combined circulation of 260,000, which gave it a total of 112 newspapers with a combined circulation of 1,100,000; and Media General bought five dailies and six weekly newspapers for $237,000,000. Gannett also acquired Central Newspapers, Inc., for $2,600,000,000. The deal included the Arizona Republic and the Indianapolis (Ind.) Star, the flagship newspapers of the Pulliam family, owners of Central.

      Another dynasty to fall was the Chandler family, which had controlled the Los Angeles Times since 1882. In March the Tribune Co., publisher of the Chicago Tribune, announced a record-setting $6,460,000,000 deal for the purchase of the Times Mirror Co., which included the Los Angeles newspaper. Total assets of the new company exceeded $11.7 billion. Executives of the Tribune Co. said that the merger would allow them to converge the content of the newspapers with television, cable, and Internet operations. The new company had a nationwide newspaper circulation of 3.6 million (third highest in the nation); its television stations broadcast to more than 38.4 million homes; and its Internet news outlet received more than 3.4 million visitors each month.

      Gannett, the largest chain by readership, owned 99 newspapers, including the nation's largest, USA Today, with a combined circulation of about 7.8 million. The 31 newspapers of the second largest chain, Knight Ridder, had a combined daily circulation of four million.

      In San Francisco a federal judge ruled in July that the Hearst Corp.'s $660 million purchase of the San Francisco Chronicle did not violate antitrust laws. He also allowed the sale of Hearst's San Francisco Examiner to the Fang family, publishers of a dozen free newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Chronicle's circulation of 464,943 was more than four times that of the Examiner. To rid itself of the Examiner, Hearst agreed to pay as much as $66 million of Fang's expenses for three years.

      In May the Denver Post, owned by MediaNews Group, and the Denver Rocky Mountain News, both in Colorado and owned by E.W. Scripps Co., entered a joint operating agreement that merged advertising sales, production, and distribution, while the editorial departments remained independent. The News had lost $123 million since 1990 in its circulation war with the Post. If approved, each paper would publish a separate edition Monday through Friday, the Post would publish a Sunday joint edition, and the News would publish a Saturday newspaper. The Denver arrangement would be the first American joint operating agreement in 11 years. The two newspapers together employed more than 3,600 people.

      Each of the Denver newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the tragedy at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999 that left 12 students, one teacher, and two student gunmen dead. The Post was honoured in the breaking news category, and the News won for breaking news photography. Other Pulitzer Prize winners included Mark Schoofs of the Village Voice, an alternative weekly published in New York City. He spent six months in Africa researching the AIDS epidemic by visiting remote villages and documenting the devastation there. He later was hospitalized with a drug-resistant form of malaria.

      The Internet continued to have a great effect on newspapers. In a study by Middleberg & Associates, a public relations and marketing agency, about two-thirds of American print reporters revealed that they were on-line continuously, looking for information. About two-thirds said they used the Internet to read publications on-line, and almost 90% said that they used the Internet to research stories.

      Two major newspapers complained about a talent drain to on-line publications. The Philadelphia Inquirer said that it lost six reporters to Web sites such as CNN's, while the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News complained that it had lost 11 people to Internet companies. For many newspapers the Internet was a revenue loser, with Knight Ridder, Tribune, the New York Times, and McClatchy Newspapers reporting losses ranging from $8 million to $20 million a year on their Internet products.

      On July 4 the Hartford (Conn.) Courant apologized in a front-page story for having made a profit during the 1700s and 1800s on advertisements for the sale and recapture of runaway slaves. The newspaper, the longest continuously published daily newspaper in the U.S., was founded in 1764. Such ads were common in newspapers of the time, when slavery was legal in many states.

      In February cartoonist Charles M. Schulz (Schulz, Charles Monroe ), creator of Peanuts, a syndicated strip that ran in 75 countries, died of colon cancer a few hours before his last Sunday cartoon ran. The last cartoon carried a signed farewell: “Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy . . . how can I ever forget them. . . .” Jeff MacNelly (MacNelly, Jeffrey Kenneth ), a syndicated editorial cartoonist who won three Pulitzer Prizes, also died during the year. The New York Times said he “was regarded as one of the nation's foremost political cartoonists, a profession that calls for the combined talents of artist, social critic, political analyst and humorist.” (See Obituaries.)

      In a survey of press freedom in the U.S., the First Amendment Center reported that 51% of respondents believed the press had too much freedom and 20% said that the government should be allowed to approve what newspapers publish. When asked to name one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution—freedoms of press, speech, religion, and to assemble and to petition the government—37% could not do so.

Glen Bleske

MAGAZINES

      American magazine advertising revenues surpassed $10 billion during the first nine months of 2000, up 16.4% over 1999. The president of the Magazine Publishers of America, Nina Link, commented that the extraordinary results also extended to dot-com advertising, which “has shown phenomenal growth this year so far with a 320 percent increase year to date.” Modest circulation gains in 1999 were fueled largely by growth among smaller, niche magazines; some of the magazines with the highest circulation experienced declines. Spending on magazine advertising reportedly increased 6% worldwide in 1999 to $40 billion.

      Magazines reportedly took in 12.9% of the worldwide expenditure for advertising in 1999, compared with 13.9% in 1988. Media ad spending on magazines ranged from a high of 52% in India to less than 2% in Uruguay and Venezuela. American magazines averaged 12% of total media ad spending.

      The American magazine with the fastest-growing readership in 1999 was Maxim, a “beer-and-babe” title targeted to men; it doubled its 1999 circulation to 2.1 million over 1998 and had increased its readership fourfold (from an initial base of 450,000) since its 1997 launch. Growth in the competitive men's category, however, was mixed. Though GQ, Men's Journal, and Men's Fitness averaged more than 10% circulation gains in 1999, Playboy, Penthouse, and Men's Health all lost ground.

      New magazine launches in 1999 totaled 864, down from 1,065 in 1998; it was only the second time since 1986 that a decrease had been recorded. The largest category among the new launches was media personalities, with 108 titles, followed by sports with 95.

      Time Inc. ended publication of its 64-year-old Life magazine in May 2000, explaining that the monthly's advertising base was no longer strong enough to maintain it. The company planned to keep the brand alive, however, by expanding its presence on the World Wide Web and publishing commemorative issues of Life to mark important milestones. Among many other magazines that ceased publication were Mirabella, a fashion magazine, and two sports-related ones: Sport and Women's Sports & Fitness.

      Two magazines celebrated milestone anniversaries. Harper's mounted yearlong festivities in honour of its 150th anniversary, and The New Yorker marked its 75th anniversary in print.

      Making their debut were two American magazines geared toward women: O: The Oprah Magazine, which offered self-help articles as well as recipes and musings of television star Oprah Winfrey, and Real Simple, a heavily illustrated magazine dedicated to “streamlining, refining and distilling” women's lives.

      Publishers Clearing House paid more than $18 million to various U.S. states to settle claims that it had used misleading sweepstakes promotions. The settlement placed several restrictions on company promotions, including preventing it from putting “you-are-a-winner” statements on its mailings unless equal prominence was given to qualifying conditions.

      Americans reportedly spent more time reading in 2000 compared with 1999. The time that consumers spent watching television, listening to radio, and using the Internet all decreased, but their time spent reading increased by an average of 29% across all print media, and magazines led the way with a 39% increase.

      Inside.com, which covered the media and entertainment industries, joined several other on-line magazines in launching a print publication. “One of the things we've discovered about the Web is that it's an incredibly fast way to build up an audience,” said Michael Hirschorn, Inside.com editor and former editor of Spin. Another World Wide Web-to-print launch in 2000 was Space.com Illustrated, from Space.com, run by former CNN anchor Lou Dobbs. World Magazine Trends reported that in the U.S., “Internet publishing and the new media are not viewed as threats to print but rather as complements, which offer great potential for magazine brand extensions and transactions.”

      The Chinese government's decision to ban English-language names and logos on magazines created worries among foreign publishers. Fairchild Publications terminated its licensing agreement to publish its fashion magazine W in China owing to the restrictions. Most American publishers disguised their covers with logo-free wraparounds. China also tightened its law on Internet firms and issued new regulations in October.

      A 2000 survey of 4,585 Japanese households revealed that 24.4% of those in the market for a personal computer used magazines as their chief information source when they went to purchase a PC. The percentage relying on television was 7.6%, followed by newspapers with 5.9%.

      In an effort to control the press, the Russian Press Ministry declared that all magazines and newspapers in the country had to be licensed. Per R. Mortensen, president of the London-based International Federation of the Periodical Press, joined 10 other delegates of the Russian Press Freedom Support group, which represented six leading international free-press organizations, to express the international media community's deep concern over what it considered a serious deterioration of press freedom in Russia.

David E. Sumner

Book Publishing

      In 2000 the worldwide buzz in book publishing was “e-publishing”—the publication of books in various electronic formats, usually together with paper-and-ink books but sometimes exclusively in “cyberpublished” versions. American suspense novelist Stephen King, for example, serialized his short novel The Plant—ironically about a vine that threatens to take over a publishing house—on his World Wide Web site. King asked each fan to send in one dollar after downloading the newest chapter; if enough readers did not do so, King said, he would discontinue the postings. King maintained that the novel had attracted a half million readers and grossed about $600,000 before he suspended postings late in the year. Several top American publishers—including Time Warner, Random House, Simon & Schuster, Modern Library, and McGraw-Hill—announced their intention to embark upon e-publishing. The International eBook Awards, with a top prize of $100,000 and five $10,000 awards, were given out for the first time in Frankfurt (Ger.) during the annual book fair held there in October.

      Hardware and software manufacturers contended to develop universal standards for reading devices onto which e-books could be downloaded from a Web site or read from a portable storage medium. The Microsoft Reader software was popular for hand-held devices, while Acrobat from Adobe Systems Inc. was the choice for reading on desktop or laptop computers. Thomson Multimedia introduced a new line of dedicated hand-held readers in September starting at $300.

      Publishers in the U.K. were busy digitizing the content of their backlists for the new e-book readers as well. The question of whether established publishers would be obliged by agents to negotiate separately for e-rights on new books was under negotiation—publishers feared that their titles in print would face direct competition from the same titles in e-format. The European Commission proposed that a value-added tax be levied on e-books, whereas printed books currently carried either zero or reduced VAT rates in European Union member states.

      Web sites were being developed to market publishing rights on-line. Houghton Mifflin Co., which brought out the fourth edition of its American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, was equally interested in licensing the new dictionary to Web sites and other electronic users. Creating an efficient on-line distribution network was increasingly a requisite for survival; Wolters Kluwer saw its stock tumble by more than 25% in March because of its lack of a viable Internet strategy. Reed Elsevier's purchase in June of eLogic, an applications service provider, signaled that new approaches were needed. Bertelsmann AG agreed to pay $250 million to AOL to be its “preferred provider of media content and e-commerce” for a four-year period. AOL, in turn, took out an option to buy Bertelsmann's 50% stake in AOL Europe and AOL Australia after 2002. Bertelsmann also rolled up Internet interests such as BOL.com and its 40% stake in BarnesandNoble.com into a new e-commerce group.

      Publishers' eyes were riveted on the legal attack to shut down Napster, the company that provided the opportunity to download recorded music from the Internet without observing copyrights. (See Computers and Information Systems .) In Tasini v. The New York Times, a group representing the interests of freelance writers brought suit against the New York Times Co. and other large publishers, alleging copyright violation because of the publications' resale to electronic databases of materials that had been provided by the authors for onetime print use.

      The restructuring and merger activity at Bertelsmann, including the splitting up of Bertelsmann Buch, led to major changes in the list of top 10 publishers by domestic sales in Germany. New entrants included BertelsmannSpringer (first), Verlagsgruppe Bertelsmann (third), Süddeutscher Verlag Hüthig (fifth), and Weltbild (eighth). The legitimacy of retail price-fixing in Germany was reconfirmed in February. A separate fixed-price law modeled on the French loi Lang came into effect in Austria for an initial five-year period. Because 80% of Austrian books were imported from Germany and German publishers feared the potential for cheap reimports, the latter were also covered by the new law if the reimport was intended solely to undercut fixed prices in Germany. LION.cc, an on-line site belonging to Libro, initially challenged the latter aspect of the new law by offering 20% discounts but four weeks later withdrew the offer after German publishers cut off supplies. The European Commission then began investigating whether German publishers had colluded in boycotting Libro and whether Libro's restoration of fixed prices was an illegal restriction of competition.

      At the end of April, the Danish Competition Council ruled that book prices would be liberalized, with fixed prices permitted for first editions but not for new editions or reprints. It also ruled that beginning on Jan. 1, 2001, the monopoly of booksellers over the sale of books would be abolished for titles priced over 155 kroner ($18).

      In February British Butterworths Tolley agreed to buy Eclipse Group Ltd. Nelvana Ltd., an animation house based in Toronto, announced plans in April to buy Klutz Inc., a California children's book publisher, for $74 million. In March Pearson bought troubled Dorling Kindersley (DK), which had heavily overstocked Star Wars-related publications, for roughly $460 million. Pearson then axed DK's CD-ROM publishing division and set up its own digital-media division. Scholastic Inc. acquired Grolier, Inc., a major publisher and direct-mail marketer of children's reference books and encyclopaedias, for about $400 million in June. That same month British publisher David & Charles accepted an offer from American F&W Publications, and Bloomsbury paid $25 million for A&C Black. HarperCollins bought Fourth Estate in July, while in August there were rumours of links between Bertelsmann and Reader's Digest. In March it was announced that the two largest American book clubs, the Literary Guild (controlled by Bertelsmann) and the Book-of-the-Month Club (of Time Inc.), would be combining efforts. Also during the year, Pearson agreed to pay $129 million for the U.S.-based FamilyEducation Network.

      J.K. Rowling's fourth best-seller in the Harry Potter series of books about a youthful magician swept markets around the world. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire sold half of its one million initial printing on its first day in German bookstores. In March American novelist Nancy K. Stouffer filed suit against Rowling and American publisher Scholastic Inc., as well as movie and toy companies that stood to profit from the phenomenon, charging that plots, characters, and language in the Potter books had been taken from her 1984 work The Legend of Rah and Muggles. Judging that the books presented witchcraft in too positive a light, a school district in Zeeland, Mich., sought to ban them in elementary and middle schools.

      The 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, while the general nonfiction prize went to John W. Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, the 1999 National Book Award winner. The NBA fiction prize went to In America by Susan Sontag, and the nonfiction award went to Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters was awarded to science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury. In children's literature, the Newbery Medal went to Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis (see Biographies (Curtis, Christopher Paul )), and the Caldecott Medal for illustration went to Joseph Had a Little Overcoat by Simms Taback. Waiting by Ha Jin (see Biographies (Jin, Ha )), the 1999 NBA fiction winner, was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award. According to Publishers Weekly, the top hardcover fiction best-sellers in 1999 were The Testament by John Grisham (2,475,000 copies sold) and Hannibal by Thomas Harris (1,550,000); the nonfiction leaders were Tuesdays with Morrie (1997) by Mitch Albom (2,500,000) and The Greatest Generation (1998) by Tom Brokaw (1,968,597).

Peter Curwen; Editor

▪ 2000

Introduction

Television

      In recent years there had been increased competition between television and the Internet, but by 1999 TV saw the Internet as crucial to improving its own reach. In addition, on-line firms used TV advertising as a way to bring their names to consumers.

Organization.

      In January Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch announced that he was “very, very bullish” about prospects in Asia, despite the region's economic slowdown, but skeptical about the potential of the Internet. Creator of STAR TV Richard Li of Singapore disagreed, putting up Pacific Century Cyberworks to deliver superfast Internet and video services throughout Asia. Pacific's new home would be Cyberport, a Hong Kong government-approved technopark. Subscribers flocked to Taiwan's Hoshin Gigamedia Centre, which offered news, entertainment, financial information, and free shareware on home personal computers, following placement of an islandwide network involving two dozen cable TV operators. The service included CNN, MSNBC, Koo Group's Chinese Television Network, and Formosa Television. Pacific Cable & DTU Systems, Inc., offered the first direct-to-user digital satellite TV service in the Philippines, and it became the first company to be awarded a congressional franchise to operate such a service.

      The U.K. cable company NTL Inc. launched digital TV services, signaling the eventual creation of a telephone, TV, and Internet-access platform. NTL, formerly the third largest cable company in the country, became Britain's largest cable operator after it acquired the more than $13 billion in assets of Cable and Wireless Communications PLC. In reaction to the move, BSkyB (British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC) chief executive Tony Ball warned against creating a “Frankenstein” cable giant and called for a level playing field for digital TV at the International Broadcasting Congress in Amsterdam. He also asked regulators to force all broadcasters to supply “culturally relevant” programming to all platforms, a subtle jibe at Independent Television, which withheld Britain's highly popular Channel Three station from BSkyB's digital service.

      TV manufacturer Skyworth of Hong Kong played the Internet card, creating its own World Wide Web page as a way of enticing potential clients overseas and using Internet live-video conferences to discuss design aspects with importers. Customer service improved with direct e-mail service between clients and representatives. By year's end Skyworth was selling to mainland Chinese on-line, particularly “set-top boxes,” which turned TVs into computers by using Microsoft Corp.'s “Venus project” technology.

      Singapore's Advent Television Ltd. developed Aviation, Internet-based technology enabling people to buy and place their own TV ads. Aviation would create the ads by means of digital image-processing tools, place them according to the advertiser's own schedule, and automatically collect revenues for the TV station.

      Competitive Media Reporting, an advertising monitoring service, noted that Internet companies were flooding TV outlets and other forms of old media (newspapers, magazines, and radio stations) with more than $1 billion worth of advertising. E-retailers, who spent $323 million in 1998 on TV advertising, placed about $400 million worth of TV ads in the first half of 1999 alone.

      In the U.S., television continued its drive toward consolidation and conglomeration, a result of the deregulatory climate created by the U.S. Congress and the Federal Communications Commission three years earlier. Leading the way was CBS, a network that at the start of the year was considered too dependent on its core business. First, the onetime “Tiffany Network” announced in April that it would buy television's most successful syndicator, King World Productions, Inc.; the $2.5 billion deal announced was approved by King World shareholders in November.

      In the biggest media merger to date, cable and entertainment giant Viacom, Inc., announced in September that it would buy CBS Corp. for $36 billion in stock. Viacom's holdings included the Paramount Pictures movie studio and such established cable channels as Nickelodeon, MTV, and VH1. Although Viacom purchased CBS, and the new company would retain the Viacom name, the new management structure suggested more of a merger. The move gave CBS a major content-producing partner with which to attempt to create corporate synergies. CBS was the last of the “Big Four” networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox—to acquire a major cable channel. The merger was not expected to take effect until late 2000, pending federal rulings on such issues as Viacom's 50% stake in the sixth-place broadcast network, UPN, and the new entity's ownership of television stations reaching 41% of the population. Government rules prevented one company from owning two networks or television stations that reached more than 35% of the American people.

      Nine days after the CBS-Viacom announcement, NBC said that it was buying a major interest in Paxson Communications, the corporate parent of the newest English-language television network, seventh-ranked Pax TV. NBC's 32% stake in Pax TV, which had been trying to build an audience with “family-friendly” programming, was the precursor to a plan to take operational control of Pax TV in 2002, pending federal approval. NBC coveted Paxson's 72 stations as a second outlet for its programming and a second chance at generating advertising revenues from that programming. The major competitor to a network, beyond other networks, remained cable television. Although cable's viewership had again increased, its rate of penetration into American homes was slowing. By the end of August, 68% of households with TV sets viewed cable, up from 66% 10 months earlier.

      Some analysts contended that cable had come close to reaching its saturation point; those who wanted cable had cable. Others wondered if the uncertainty of the television market, with high-definition TV (HDTV) and Internet-based telecasting on the horizon, meant that potential new customers were adopting a wait-and-see attitude. For continued growth major cable companies were counting instead on adding nontelevision businesses, specifically Internet access and telephone services, to their menus of offerings.

      To that end telecommunications giant AT&T in March completed its reported $55 billion acquisition of cable giant Tele-Communications, Inc., and became the nation's second largest cable provider. In April it moved to become the largest, announcing a planned $58 billion purchase of MediaOne Group, the number four player. That sale was awaiting regulatory approval at year's end.

      In November the chief rival to cable for delivery of signals into American homes got a major boost. New federal legislation allowed direct satellite broadcasting services to include local network affiliates' signals in their packages, something they had previously been precluded from doing except in special circumstances.

      This change removed the major programming advantage cable television had over the satellite companies. Led by DirecTV, with 7.8 million subscribers as of late November, and EchoStar, with 3 million subscribers, the satellite-based providers immediately moved to make local stations available in major cities for additional charges of $5–$6 per month. Digital and “digital-ready” television sets began appearing in American consumer-goods stores, but at prices reaching into five digits. In addition, the availability of costly sets did little to clear public confusion over the beginnings of digital broadcasting.

      That consideration did not stop NBC from broadcasting its popular The Tonight Show in the new wide-screen and more photographically detailed HDTV format, which was designed to take advantage of digital TV's richer data stream.

Programming.

      The rebroadcasting of communist Czechoslovakia's favourite TV detective, Major Zerman, who chased lawbreakers and bourgeois agitators, put public Czech television in hot water. The backers of the show claimed that they merely wanted to open badly needed dialogue on the 42 years of communist rule. Each of the 30 shows was followed by a documentary on the real-life events that had been distorted by the screenwriters.

      “MTV Mandarin Music Awards” was shown on Chinese TV six months after Viacom suffered the anti-Western backlash following NATO's mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugos. Millions of MTV viewers worldwide tuned in to Celebrity Deathmatch, which pitted celebrities against their rivals: Hillary Clinton against Monica Lewinsky or William Shakespeare versus rapper Busta Rhymes for the title greatest poet of all time. “Deathbowl '99,” broadcast during the Super Bowl's halftime show, featured Mike Tyson losing (once again) to Evander Holyfield.

      Qing dynasty emperor Yonzheng, played by Tang Guoqiang, became an unlikely prime-time hero from the moment the 44-part made-in-Taiwan series Yonzheng Dynasty (1723–1735) appeared on Chinese TV. Graftbuster Yonzheng executed family members, foes, and subordinates alike. Malaysia added to prime-time medics with The Unfinished Struggle of Dr. Kamal, about a village doctor who becomes one of the country's top politicians. Patterned after the life of Prime Minister Dato Seri Mahathir bin Mohamad, the 16-part series was partly sponsored by administration-linked companies.

      When Singaporean Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong lambasted TV comedies popularizing “Singlish” (a local brand of English mixed with Malay, Tamil, and Chinese idioms), the writers for the hit sitcom Phua Chu Kang Pte. Ltd.made a script change. The kind but uncouth contractor Phua, played by Gurmit Singh, had to learn to speak proper English or his married younger brother would move out of their family home to protect his son from the uncle's bad example. A Tokyo Broadcasting System program allowed foreigners living in Japan to ask locals about their idiosyncrasies. This Is What's Wrong/Funny with You Japanese was fronted by comedian and movie director Kitano (“Beat”) Takeshi.

      The MTV show It's My Life followed the lives during 1999 of seven young lucky Asians—wanna-be musicians, models, writers, and actors—living in six cities. Ari Wibowo, the leading man in a hit Indonesian TV soap opera produced by Multivision Plus Group, wanted to quit after 58 episodes but was held to his 104-episode contract.

      Susana Alves, Brazil's leading sex symbol, insured her trademark buttocks, knees, and ankles for $2 million with Unibanco, which signed her for their billboard ads. The former Playboy model and popular TV show host on Tiazinha, who wore high heels, a Zorro mask, and a thong bikini, doled out weekly sadomasochist punishment with a riding crop to enthusiastic teenage studio guests.

      When Disney began a cartoon channel on the Kirch Group's digital DF1 system in Germany, Thomas Haffa, the founder and CEO of EM.TV, did not worry about his own partnership with the Kirch Group, called Junior.TV. Instead, he sold Disney 1,000 hours of programming for three years. Meanwhile, TNT & Cartoon Network launched a search for five Asian children it would turn into cartoons. The kid toons, part of the “Get Tooned” initiative, would begin airing in 2000.

      American-born Ruby Wax, the outrageous host of the BBC TV series Ruby Wax Meets, crossed the Atlantic for Ruby from Lifeline, her first American TV series. British rebel disc jockey John Peel was transformed into TV's favourite social commentator with John Peel's Sounds of the Suburbs on Channel 4. Cuban-born Cristina Saralegui (see Biographies (Saralegui, Cristina )) celebrated 10 years as the host of her Florida-based talk show.

      Italian TV executives debated about cutting back on sex and violence during the upcoming yearlong millennium celebrations at the Vatican, a notion quickly drowned out with cries of censorship. After public complaints, however, Thailand's public relations department ordered TV stations to cut the number of homosexual and transvestite characters on shows. The department also announced a ban on skimpy clothing on TV. In South Africa an antirape TV ad featuring actress Charlize Theron was temporarily pulled because it offended South African men.

      In the U.S. the big story was the triumph of the traditional. CBS, relying on the broadest-based, most familiar programming lineup of all the networks, took first place in overall viewership during the 1998–99 television season. With such series as the sentimental Touched by an Angel and venerable 60 Minutes leading the way, the CBS win ended three consecutive years of first-place finishes for NBC and marked CBS's first season victory since 1993–94. NBC, however, retained first place among the 18–49-year-old demographic group advertisers most coveted, while CBS remained in fourth.

      The year's programming sensation also recalled the early days of network TV. For 13 successive nights in August, ABC aired Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, an American version of a popular British quiz show. Daytime talk-show personality Regis Philbin served as the host, and Millionaire did surprisingly well in August and was brought back during the highly competitive November “sweeps” ratings period for 18 successive nights, where it again proved to be a juggernaut. One Thursday night it even drew more viewers than NBC's theretofore unbeatable comedies Frasier and Friends.

      As the 1999–2000 television season began, the new programs that were catching on with viewers tended to be dramas about adults for adults, a marked contrast to previous years' waves of series about beautiful teenagers typified by the offerings of the upstart WB network. Among the series catching viewers' fancy were ABC's Once and Again, a show about romance after age 40, CBS's Now and Again, a science-fiction romance, NBC's The West Wing, about White House doings, and CBS's Judging Amy, about a judge and her mother.

      The two networks that started the year badly both targeted younger demographics. In the first 10 weeks of 1999–2000, the WB's viewership was down 12% from the same period a year earlier, and Fox's was down 17%. ABC was only holding steady, despite the success of Millionaire.

      Pax and NBC viewership was up, but the season's real success appeared to be UPN. Thought to be near death in the previous season, the network reinvented itself as a programming service targeting young men. The cornerstone of its new efforts was a two-hour professional wrestling showcase on Thursday nights, WWF Smackdown! Overall in late 1999, UPN viewership was up 30% over the beginning of the previous season.

      In the big picture, though, the Big Four networks continued to lose market share. The 1998–99 season was the first in which none of those networks averaged at least 10% of American TV households watching in prime time. Collectively, the Big Four dropped from an average 55% share of prime-time viewers the previous season to a 54% share in the 1998–99 broadcast season. Over that same period the market share for basic cable during prime time rose from 38% to 41%.

      Among the networks only NBC made a profit during the 1998–99 season; however, advertising sales continued at a robust pace. The $7 billion of 1999–2000 advertising time the networks sold during the spring 1999 “upfront” market represented a record. Although the size of the audiences that networks were able to amass was shrinking, it was still a bigger and broader audience than other advertising media could attract and therefore, paradoxically, more valuable.

      At the same time, networks were paying even more for programming, with the exception of relatively cheap fare like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. CBS in November agreed to pay more to continue broadcasting the National Collegiate Athletic Association men's basketball championship tournament than it had agreed to pay the previous year for rights to National Football League games, including some Super Bowl telecasts.

      The $6 billion, 11-year NCAA contract, the second richest in sports media history, ran from 2003 to 2014 and, significantly, included Internet rights to the tournament. The sensation of the 1999 Emmy Awards was a series made for cable. Although not in the end a big winner, HBO's The Sopranos, a gritty look at suburban mob life, garnered a pack-leading 16 nominations in its first year on the air; it was also said to be the first HBO series that actually drove new subscribers to HBO.

      The grand prizes for best series went to hour-long programs about Boston lawyers produced by David E. Kelley. His Ally McBeal (Fox) won best comedy, and his The Practice (ABC) took best drama honours. HBO won the most Emmys overall, its 23 statues beating NBC's 17.

      During the 1998–99 season, cable gurus took over the programming reins at two of the Big Four networks. Doug Herzog at Fox had brought Comedy Central to prominence, programming such attention-getting series as the outrageous South Park, and Scott Sassa at NBC had been a top executive in Ted Turner's cable empire.

Radio

      Internet technology made the personal computer the best medium for accessing the broadcasting range of thousands of radio stations around the world that offered their programs on-line as well as Internet-only “stations” that distributed digital audio content. Numerous Web sites provided content guides as well as original radio-style programming. Faster Internet connections would eventually allow compact-disc-quality audio streaming over the Web.

      Meanwhile, as the BBC celebrated 75 years of language broadcasting, it took a broader view of even the most common languages. Listeners learning French, for example, heard how it was spoken in Africa, Guadeloupe, and Canada.

      Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney accused the BBC of banning the newly released song of his late wife, Linda, because of profane lyrics. He bought ads in newspapers to state that parents, not radio, should decide what their kids heard. BBC deejay John Peel denied that there was such a ban.

      The BBC allowed presenter Johnnie Walker to return to Radio 2 even though he pleaded guilty to cocaine possession; he had sought help for his addiction.

      Dance enthusiasts in the Philippines could enjoy ballroom music, dance trivia, and live interviews with dance celebrities on Dance Sport with Becky Garcia for two hours on Angel Radio (1026 AM). The host of the show, which was broadcast nationwide by National Broadcasting Corp., was the president of the Dance Sport Council of the Philippines.

      The Indian government planned to permit the establishment of private FM radio channels, a prospect that excited many investors: advertising on FM was inexpensive but gave value for its money. Local FM stations could challenge AIR (All India Radio), which had a nationwide reach and was dedicated to education and public service as well as to the broadcasting of popular music. Bidders for licenses included such newspaper groups as the Times of India, India Today, and Indian Express, as well as such firms as Mid-Day and Malayala Manorama; Zee Telefilms, which dominated satellite TV in India; BPL India, the country's largest maker of TV sets; and Nimbus Communications, which sold airtime. Veteran actor Sanjay Khan and former tennis star Vijay Amrithraj were also planning to run radio stations.

      In July a New Zealand tribunal ruled that under the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, the Maori were granted not only fishing and forestry rights but also ownership of radio frequencies in the two-gigahertz range. The decision gave the Maori an economic stake in the global telecommunications business.

      Deregulation fever also affected U.S. radio, and the industry continued to be involved in a frenzy of deals. In October the largest owner of radio stations, Clear Channel Communications Inc. (formerly Chancellor Media Corp.), and the second largest, AMFM Inc., announced that they would merge in a $23.5 billion deal. Clear Channel would buy AMFM in a stock and debt transaction. Their combined holdings of 955 stations reached more than 100 million listeners daily, but federal antitrust rules meant that the new company would have to purge itself of about 125 of those stations. The Chicago Tribune pointed out at the time that 125 stations would constitute the nation's third largest station group, with the radio holdings of the new CBS-Viacom company in second place.

      The AMFM-Clear Channel merger announcement followed 1998 deals in which the two companies subsumed three other large radio station groups between them. Radio programming had already been homogenized for decades, but the homogenization of radio ownership raised cries of protest even louder than the ones that had greeted recent television ownership consolidation deals.

      Critics of such media consolidation, including social activist the Rev. Jesse Jackson, contended that it put too much power in one company and limited the chances for minorities to gain ownership of powerful media outlets. In an attempt to favourably influence its pending merger with Viacom, CBS Corp. told the Securities and Exchange Commission it would probably need to divest as many as 12 radio stations in five cities. CBS, through its controlling interest in Infinity Broadcasting, owned 160 stations nationwide.

      Another buying spree was engaged in by Cumulus Media Inc., a Milwaukee, Wis., radio company. In November it made the latest in a series of deals that would bring its holdings up to 299 stations, the second most in the country but concentrated in smaller markets.

Ramona Monette S. Flores; Steve Johnson

Newspapers

      In 1999 consolidation ruled in Great Britain, where one of the country's biggest newspaper groups was formed when Trinity PLC purchased the Mirror Group PLC for £1,240,000,000 (nearly $2,000,000,000). The newly named company, Trinity Mirror PLC, would publish city newspapers, such as the Liverpool Echo, along with the nation's third largest newspaper, the Mirror. Analysts predicted that the takeover would lead to lower costs and a stronger advertising base.

      In recent years regional newspaper groups such as Trinity had increased profits, whereas competition between national newspapers had led to price slashing. The tabloid Mirror, which led the nation with a circulation of 5 million in the 1960s, sold 2.3 million copies and trailed the Sun (3.6 million) and the Daily Mail (nearly 2.4 million).

      Other newspaper buyers included Britain's fifth largest regional newspaper group, Johnston Press, which spent more than $400 million to control the remaining 83% of Portsmouth & Sunderland Newspapers. Gannett Co., the publisher of USA Today and owner of 74 newspapers, planned to purchase Newsquest PLC, the third largest regional newspaper company in Great Britain, for about $1.5 billion.

      With more than two-thirds of U.S. newspapers owned by chains, other U.S. companies looked abroad for financial opportunities. The publishers of The Wall Street Journal became partners in creating Vedomosti, a Russian-language newspaper that aimed to be an independent voice in a country of partisan newspapers; the partnership included Dow Jones & Co., Financial Times owner Pearson PLC, and Independent Media, the Dutch-owned publisher of the Moscow Times, Russia's leading English-language newspaper.

      Partners in Russia were also rivals in the competitive market for business news in Europe. Dow Jones found a German ally to battle Pearson's Financial Times for the English-language business news in Europe by trading shares with Germany's biggest daily business newspaper, Handelsblatt. The German paper, which had 100 editorial employees, received a financial interest in The Wall Street Journal Europe. The two newspapers would share the news from each paper as well as report, translate, and publish each other's work on the same day.

      Meanwhile, the Financial Times teamed up with the German magazine publisher Gruner + Jahr to begin a German-language version of its newspaper. The Wall Street Journal Europe reported that its circulation was about 70,000, with about 57,000 of that number outside Britain. The Financial Times disclosed a circulation of about 367,000, with 113,000 outside Britain.

      Much of the world remained a dangerous place for reporters and a free press; the international authors group PEN reported that during the first six months of the year, 34 writers and journalists were murdered, 22 disappeared, 5 were kidnapped, 19 received death threats, and 164 were jailed. In East Timor, for example, Dutch journalist Sander Thoenes, who was working for The Christian Science Monitor and the Financial Times, was killed by armed men who pursued his motorbike.

      In Zimbabwe Pres. Robert Mugabe attacked the independent press when an editor and a reporter of the Standard, a weekly newspaper, were beaten, tortured, and nearly drowned after being arrested by the military. They had reported a plot to overthrow the Mugabe government but refused to divulge their sources for the story.

      The editors and reporters of Neshat, a reformist Iranian newspaper that had been forced to close, published a new daily, Asr-e Azadegan. Similar to Neshat, the paper was the fourth that the reformist group had published since 1997. Salam, another pro-reform paper, was shuttered in July for five years, and its publisher was found guilty of defamation, publishing insulting language, and lying to the public; he was suspended from journalism for three years. The closure sparked the worst student protests since those that erupted during the 1979 Islamic revolution. On a positive note, Faraj Sarkuhi, an exiled Iranian editor and writer living in Germany, won the 1999 Golden Pen of Freedom award given by the World Association of Newspapers.

      In Hong Kong the editor of the South China Morning Post, the city's leading English-language newspaper, was fired after the newspaper continued to criticize the Chinese government, which had assumed control over Hong Kong in 1997. British editor Jonathan Fenby maintained that he was not told why he was fired after more than four years at the helm. The offices of The Apple Daily, a Hong Kong tabloid, were raided by the government on November 29.

      Newspaper advertising of tobacco products was another hot topic; a ban in Great Britain was delayed by a high court injunction granted to tobacco firms. In the United States the New York Times snuffed out tobacco advertising, citing the harmful effects associated with smoking; only about a dozen U.S. newspapers banned such advertising. Most American publishers argued that a free press was obliged to print advertising of legal products.

      The issue of newspaper credibility was a major concern in newsrooms after the 1998 release of a $1 million study conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE). Following the findings—that newspapers were suffering from a credibility gap because they made too many spelling and grammatical errors, sensationalized the news, slanted the news, did not demonstrate respect for readers and communities, and had values that conflicted with readers' values—eight papers, in cooperation with ASNE, began testing strategies and innovations for addressing the problems. In addition, the Pew Research Center surveyed 552 journalists and news media executives and found that 55% of journalists working for local media thought that factual errors and sloppy reporting had increased; in 1995 40% of journalists had thought so.

      Various incidents surrounding the integrity of reporting highlighted the credibility quotient. The Indianapolis Star suspended one of its television columnists for having plagiarized a story written by a writer at another newspaper; the editor of the piece recognized the story before it was published. A columnist for the Arizona Republic was fired after editors said they were unable to locate some of the people whom she had quoted; she denied charges that she had fabricated the stories. A San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News columnist who wrote about Silicon Valley technology was suspended indefinitely after she made a profit of $9,000 on a stock deal not available to the general public. A Kentucky reporter was fired after revealing that she had lied in her newspaper columns about having cancer and AIDS. Mike Barnicle, who was forced to resign in 1998 from the Boston Globe after charges were made that he misused the work of other writers, was hired by the New York Daily News to write a weekly column.

      The Los Angeles Times printed a front-page apology after management failed to tell its staff and readers that the newspaper shared advertising revenues from a special section about the Staples Center with the owners of the new sports arena. The Times followed with a major investigation by media reporter David Shaw who wrote, “But many in the Times newsroom see the Staples affair as the very visible and ugly tip of an ethical iceberg or ominous proportions—a boost in the profits, drive-the-stock-price imperative that threatens to undermine the paper's journalistic quality, integrity, and reputation.”

      The Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, a U.S. law designed to preserve competition in two-newspaper towns, failed to save papers in three cities. Analysts noted that changing readership habits combined with higher production costs and increased competition for advertising revenue led to the failures. The San Francisco Chronicle, owned by the same family for 134 years, was sold for an estimated $660 million to the Hearst Corp., publisher of the rival San Francisco Examiner. The Chronicle, a morning paper with a circulation of 482,000, was the nation's 12th largest newspaper, whereas the Examiner, an afternoon paper, had a circulation of only about 114,000; though the latter was for sale, observers doubted that anyone would buy it. The newspapers had been run under a joint operating agreement since 1965, but pressure from the Hearst Corp., one of the richest media groups, led to the sale.

      A decision to close the Honolulu Star-Bulletin because of declining circulation and lower revenues was blocked by a federal judge in response to antitrust suits filed by Hawaii's attorney general and angry readers. The paper was expected to remain open until at least September 2000. Management for the afternoon paper had decided to terminate the joint operating agreement with the Honolulu Advertiser, a Gannett Co. morning paper, in exchange for a reported $26.5 million payment. The papers shared some business and production departments, but reporters and editors operated separately. The last issue of the Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times was published, despite the operating agreement it had with its rival. In 1878 the nearly bankrupt newspaper had been bought by 20-year-old Adolph S. Ochs, who borrowed $250 for the purchase. Thirteen of his great-grandchildren ceded control of the paper to the Chattanooga Free Press. The 130-year-old Indianapolis (Ind.) News, an afternoon newspaper, also closed. Management cited a decline in readership to 33,175, down from 111,000 in 1989.

      USA Today announced plans to sell colour advertising at the bottom of its front page, a move that, it was predicted, would net more than $5 million in revenues. The paper became the largest daily newspaper (1,758,477) in the United States, exceeding the circulation of The Wall Street Journal (1,752,693).

      Cartoonist Charles Schulz announced on December 14 that he would stop drawing Peanuts, the comic strip he created in 1950 and which became a beloved mainstay in newspapers in 75 countries. The last original daily strip was to appear on Jan. 4, 1000.

      The Pulitzer Prize for public service was won by the Washington Post for a series reporting that District of Columbia officers shot and killed more people per resident than any other large city police force. The staff of the New York Times won for national reporting for its series of articles disclosing the corporate sale of American technology to China. The Miami (Fla.)Herald was honoured for the investigative work of a team of reporters who uncovered hundreds of fraudulent ballots in the 1997 mayoral race, which led a judge to nullify the election of Xavier Suarez.

Glen Bleske

Magazines

      In 1999 publishers won a major victory when the European Parliament initialed an amendment to the Copyright Directive that would outlaw random, illegal copying of material on the Internet. The move came after the Telecom companies proposed to weaken the entire copyright regime for content providers.

      A trade war between Canada and the United States was averted in June when the two nations signed an agreement that ended a long-running dispute involving magazine advertising. The centre of the controversy was the proposed Canadian Bill C-55, which was passed by the House of Commons in March and banned all split-run editions (a Canadian edition of a foreign magazine that varied little in editorial content and that could run Canadian ads at bargain rates); some 80% of magazines sold from Canadian newsstands were foreign, most of them from the U.S. The compromise allowed a three-year phase-in period, in which advertising in split-run magazines would be capped at 12% the first year, 15% the second year, and 18% the third year. The bill faced a major revision before heading to the Senate. Industry observers in Canada feared that Canadian magazines—competing with U.S. split-run editions that filled 18% of their ad space with low-rate Canadian ads—would lose their entire ad base.

      In 1998 The Netherlands maintained the highest magazine readership level of European countries; magazines reached 97% of the adult population in 1998. France was a close second with a 95% level. Overall, magazine readership declined in Europe; Spain's level dropped to 52%, Italy's fell to 66%, and Portugal's slipped below 50%. Readership in the United Kingdom and the U.S. hovered around 80%.

      The magazine industry experienced moderate growth in 1999. Circulation rose an average of 4.3% for the top 200 consumer magazines during the first six months of 1999, and total advertising revenue was up 11.7% through the first nine months of 1999 compared with the same period in 1998. In the past three years, business-to-business magazines had become the fifth largest medium, following network television, spot television, newspapers, and consumer magazines. During 1998 it was reported that 18,606 magazines were published, an increase of 32% since 1990, and that 1,067 new magazines appeared, up from 852 in 1997.

      Worldwide spending in 1998 for magazine advertising was up 5% to $38.2 billion. China, which experienced a 45% increase in its advertising market, surpassed South Korea as the largest market in the Asia-Pacific region outside Japan.

      Rolling Stone magazine launched a new monthly edition of its magazine for the Czech Republic and Slovakia and in October issued another in Spain, bringing the number of international editions to five. The Czech version, which hit newsstands in April, was published through a licensing agreement with Stratosfera. The Spanish Rolling Stone was published by Progresa, the magazine-publishing division of Grupo Prisa, a Spanish newspaper publisher. In addition, Rolling Stone planned to expand its Argentine edition, which was launched in 1998 and had a circulation of 70,000. Beginning in April 2000, the title would be distributed to nine additional South American countries.

      Among the most notable new magazines launched in 1999 was Tina Brown's Talk. The first issue, which guaranteed advertisers a circulation of 500,000, came out in August and was aimed at the same literary set that read Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, the two titles that Brown had edited and revived while at Condé Nast Publications. The magazine was a joint venture of Hearst and the Disney Co. Hearst also announced that in the spring of 2000 it would launch Oprah: The Magazine, aimed at women 25–54 and patterned after Oprah Winfrey's television program.

      Vanity Fair took the top award for General Excellence for magazines with over one million in circulation in the National Magazine Awards announced in May. Other winners included Condé Nast Traveler, Fast Company, and I.D. Magazine, in smaller circulation categories.

      Publishers Clearing House was sued in separate actions by Florida and Arizona, alleging that the sweepstakes giant used deceptive tactics to lure consumers into purchasing magazine subscriptions. Several other states filed similar suits. In responding to the complaints, Magazine Publishers of America adopted guidelines in February that called for easy-to-find “no-purchase-necessary” statements and clear disclosure of all sweepstakes terms and conditions.

      In May more than 700 top international magazine publishers attended the 32nd World Magazine Congress in Hamburg, Ger. The event was sponsored by the International Federation of the Periodical Press (FIPP). Thomaz Souto Corrêa, vice chairman and editorial director of the Abril Group, Brazil, was elected the new FIPP chairman.

      Nina B. Link, former president of publishing and interactive software for the Children's Television Workshop, became president of the Magazine Publishers of America in November, succeeding Donald D. Kummerfeld, who retired after having held the position since 1987.

David E. Sumner

Book Publishing

      In July 1999 the outgoing European Commission failed by a slight margin to muster the majority needed to proceed with measures that would outlaw the 110-year-old price-fixing agreement that controlled the book trade in Germany, Austria, and other Germanic countries. Incoming competition commissioner Mario Monti stated, however, that he regarded the agreement as a cartel, and he vowed to continue his predecessor's efforts to have it struck down.

      The heavy price discounting on best-sellers sold over the Internet spread from the U.S. to the U.K. In June 1999 the Internet division of WH Smith, the U.K.'s largest conventional bookseller, announced that it would discount by 50% the 20 best-selling books in hardback. Amazon.com promptly responded by offering the same discount on the top 40 best-sellers in any format available on its U.K. Web site, and Bertelsmann AG followed suit with the top 10 titles on its European Internet bookselling operation, BOL.com. Although on-line book sales had yet to take off in the U.K., these discounts were expected to lift sales but were unlikely to improve profitability.

      Some publishers continued to seek salvation in the realm of electronic publishing, but many large publishers failed to meet the challenge. Reed Elsevier, one of the world's leading publishers, was forced in June 1999 to issue its third warning in six months about sagging profits; the company attributed the decline largely to competition from Internet publishers.

      With the 1998 acquisition of Random House as well as the 1999 acquisition of Springer Verlag, Germany's leading scientific and medical publisher, for about $600 million, Bertelsmann AG—a German conglomerate that already owned the American publishers Bantam Doubleday Dell—became the largest publisher not only in the U.S. but also in the world. In September Bertelsmann released its sales figures—total U.S. revenues reached $5 billion, 35% of the conglomerate's revenue. Rumours that Bertelsmann was also interested in acquiring Simon & Schuster were quickly scotched; the company would risk running afoul of antitrust violations if it carved out more market share in the U.S.

      Under the new management, Random House was reorganized into four new publishing groups, effective July 1. The former Bantam Doubleday Dell publishing groups were split up into the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group and the Bantam Dell Publishing Group. Anchor Books was merged with Vintage to form a new trade paperback division in the Knopf Publishing Group. In addition, the religious imprint WaterBrook was pulled into a newly formed Doubleday Religious Publishing group.

      In another major acquisition, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. purchased for an estimated $180 million the Hearst Book Group, which included William Morrow and Avon Books, from the Hearst Corp. The group was folded into News Corp.'s HarperCollins subsidiary and thereby became the second-largest trade publisher in the U.S. In the process 74 jobs and 17 imprints were eliminated.

      The acquisition of Hodder Headline by WH Smith was poorly received in the financial markets. It was argued that the heavy premium paid as part of the $296 million takeover bid could be justified only if Hodder proved capable of providing the bookseller with a high proportion of exclusive content, which would thus restrict sales to other retailers.

      In May 1999 U.K. media group Pearson announced several sales: Appleton & Lange to McGraw-Hill for $46 million, Jossey-Bass to John Wiley & Sons for $82 million, and Bureau of Business Practice to Wolters Kluwer for $16 million. In June Pearson sold Macmillan Library Reference to Thomson for $86 million and Macmillan General Reference to IDG Books for $83 million. Pearson divested itself of these holdings so that the U.S. Justice Department would support Pearson's acquisition of Simon & Schuster.

      Harry Potter, a young British wizard in training, was the book character that captured much of the reading public's interest and the attention of publishers. The first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, by J.K. Rowling (seeBiographies), (Rowling, J.K. ) was released in the U.S. in September 1998, after having made its 1997 debut in Great Britain as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and immediately climbed best-seller lists, amazing industry pundits who disbelieved that there was a market in children's hardcover fiction. Impatient for the next installment, American readers began ordering Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in its British version from on-line publishers well in advance of its scheduled U.S. release date. American publisher Scholastic moved up the release date for the second book from September to June. A similar happy fate met the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The series captured the top three spots on the hardcover best-seller list of the New York Times at the same time that the paperback edition of the first book held the top spot on the fiction paperback list. Scholastic reported in November that there were 8.9 million copies in print of the three hardcovers and one paperback. The fourth book in the series was scheduled to appear in the U.S. in 2000—simultaneously with the British edition. The Potter phenomenon, which in general prompted a new interest in children's hardcover fiction, helped increase sales and critical attention for the entire genre.

      Noted author Edmund Morris, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Theodore Roosevelt, astounded the literary community with the publication of the controversial Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. He had signed (1985) a $3 million advance with Random House to write the biography of Reagan, the first ever authorized by a sitting president. Expectations for a scholarly work were high, owing to Morris's intensive research and unprecedented access to Reagan. Morris, however, found himself stymied by Reagan's elusive personality. In order to bring him to life, Morris inserted fictionalized characters, including a fictionalized version of himself, and presented them as real. The resulting controversy pitted those who disapproved of the outrageous liberties taken by Morris against those who felt that his presentation was a brilliant way to capture the essence of such an unknowable figure. Adding to the controversy was the fact that Random House had sent out early manuscripts only to publications that agreed to sign a confidentiality agreement not to review the book until its official September 30 publication date. A New York Times writer secured a copy, however, and broke the story on the front page of the paper on September 18.

      The 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to Michael Cunningham for The Hours, and the prize for nonfiction went to John McPhee for Annals of the Former World. The National Book Award for Fiction was won by Ha Jin for Waiting, and the nonfiction award went to John W. Dower for Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. The top fiction best-sellers for 1998, reported by Publishers Weekly, were The Street Lawyer by John Grisham, with 2,550,000 copies sold, Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy, 2,000,000, and Bag of Bones by Stephen King, 1,496,520. Nonfiction best-sellers were The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom by Suze Orman (see Biographies (Orman, Suze )), 1,470,865, The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw, 1,423,863, and Sugar Busters! by H. Leighton Steward, 1,201,000. According to the Association of American Publishers, book sales in the U.S. increased 6.4% in 1998 to $23,030,000,000.

Peter J. Curwen; Beth Levine

▪ 1999

Introduction

TELEVISION

      Organization. AT&T stunned the telecommunications world in June 1998, agreeing to purchase the largest American cable operator, Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), for $48 billion. The deal gave the long-distance telephone company what it most needed—direct access to millions of homes. Using the same technology that allowed several operators to begin offering high-speed access to the Internet, AT&T hoped to piggyback telephone service over cable's coaxial network,

      Cable continued its inexorable rise. As of October 30, according to Paul Kagan Associates, cable subscribership reached 65.8 million, 66.3% of all U.S. homes with TV. As subscribership grew, however, so did cable rates—at two to three times the rate of inflation.

      DirecTV and United States Satellite Broadcasting, which shared broadcast satellites and reception equipment, were the market leaders in satellite TV with 4.2 million subscribers as of October 30, according to SkyTRENDS. Primestar was second with 2.2 million homes and Echostar third with 1.7 million.

      Pax TV debuted August 31 with a smattering of original programs and a heavy dose of family-friendly reruns such as "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" and "Touched by an Angel." Along with those two shows from CBS, Pax also hired CBS's former entertainment chief, Jeff Sagansky, to head the network. Pax TV was the brainchild of Home Shopping Network cofounder Bud Paxson, whose business plan included running a "lean and mean" operation with much of the marketing, programming, and accounting handled not at the station level but from his West Palm Beach, Fla., headquarters. In that way, Paxson said, the network could be profitable with a relatively small rating—a 1 rating in prime time, compared with the 9.7 average of number one NBC in 1997-98.

      Pax TV was generally ranked seventh among the broadcast networks, following ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, the WB, and UPN. Some, however, placed it behind two Spanish-language networks, Univision and Telemundo. The former dominated the Spanish-language TV business in the U.S. and owned the top-rated TV station in Miami, Fla.

      On Oct. 29, 1998, former U.S. senator and astronaut John Glenn was relaunched into space, and television was relaunched as a digital medium. A handful of television stations (24) broadcast Glenn's lift-off in high-definition television (HDTV) to the handful of sets that could receive a digital signal. It marked the beginning of the new digital broadcast TV service that most expected would gradually expand throughout the U.S. during the next several years.

      With digital television (DTV), programs were delivered as bits of data. As a result, broadcasters could carry more information than with current analog technology. Most broadcasters planned to use that extra capacity to transmit HDTV, with its superior resolution. Others planned to deliver several channels and other information services. Still others sought to provide a mix of the two, broadcasting multiple channels for some part of the schedule and broadcasting prime-time shows, movies, or sports events in HDTV. At a minimum, broadcasters were required to deliver at least one stream of programming that was equal to or better than their current analog signal.

      According to the Federal Communications Commission, which was overseeing conversion to digital, "most Americans will have access to DTV [programming] by 1999 and everyone in the country will have access by the year 2002." Traditional analog service would continue side-by-side with digital until 2006, after which broadcasts would be only in DTV. Affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox would have to be delivering a digital signal in the top 10 markets (about 30% of the country) by May 1, 1999, and in markets ranked 11-30 (another 53% of the country) by Nov. 1, 1999. All commercial stations would have to be delivering digital service by May 1, 2002. To receive a digital program, viewers would have the option of buying a converter for their existing sets or purchasing a digital set. By late 1998 some stations had launched digital channels, but the HDTV programming needed to fill them remained a scarce commodity.

      As the year neared its close, delivering TV programming over World Wide Web sites (termed "streaming") was still in its infancy, with pictures often small and jerky, a function primarily of bandwidth limitations rather than underpowered computing. Most homes used telephone lines for Internet access at either 28.8 kbps (kilobits per second) or 56.6 kbps. Video optimally needed 500 kbps-2 megabits to run fluidly. Nonetheless, cable and telephone companies were working to provide high-speed digital lines to the home, and broadcast and cable executives continued to increase their Web output. An International Data Corp. (IDC) study revealed that 780,000 Internet-TV devices were activated in 1998. Using these devices, consumers could browse the Web or chat with friends while watching the Super Bowl.

      Dutch TV production company Endemol entered the British market through Guardian Media Group (GMG), publisher of The Guardian newspaper. The partnership with GMG's Broadcast Communications, one of the largest independent producers in the U.K., was the latest move by Endemol to enter European countries outside its main markets of Germany and The Netherlands. A month earlier Endemol had bought 45% of the Italian entertainment group Aran. Exploiting entertainment formats in other markets by forming local partnerships with production companies accounted for 15% of the company's total revenues.

      Italy's state broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) changed its chairman and entire board of directors, appointing seasoned industry professionals rather than people with political connections. Pier Luigi Celli, formerly chief of personnel for ENEL, the Italian national electrical utility, became the new director general. The new leaders faced RAI's serious loss of audience to the private Mediaset networks of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's former prime minister. For the first time, Mediaset Channel 5 overtook RAI's flagship evening news in the ratings war. RAI's lead weekend variety show "Fantastico" was also overtaken by an old-fashioned Mediaset variety show.

      BBC launched News 24, a 24-hour news service, in late 1997. BBC Worldwide's Rupert Gavin spearheaded the change (and increase in revenues) by recycling materials from the network's massive archives. Commercial broadcasters complained about the misuse of public funding and pointed out the unfair competition, as BBC was a public-sector, taxpayer-funded corporation.

      The 20-strong European Commission unanimously vetoed on May 27 an alliance involving German media giants Bertelsmann and the Kirch Group, together with Deutsche Telekom. Karel Van Miert, the European Union's (EU's) competition commissioner, said that the merger would create in German digital TV a monopoly that newcomers would be unable to challenge, largely because of the three firms' control of the set-top decoders.

      JSkyB, Rupert Murdoch's digital satellite multichannel service in Japan, merged with PerfecTV, a competitor. JSkyB, jointly owned by News Corp., Sony, Softbank, and Fuji TV, had yet to start services, and PerfecTV, whose shareholders included Japan's leading trade companies, had been struggling to gain more subscribers.

Programming.

      In the U.S. the broadcast networks and dozens of cable channels continued to fight for a fragmenting television audience in 1998. The combined prime-time viewership of the big three broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, and NBC—continued its precipitous slide, mustering 47% of the TV audience in the 1997-98 season, compared with 61% only five years earlier.

      Skyrocketing programming costs and the decreasing audience shares caused network executives to ask their TV station affiliates for help in paying for sports rights; the networks also told the stations that they could no longer afford to pay them to carry their programming. Almost all network executives agreed that one of the keys to remaining competitive was to persuade the affiliates to allow "repurposing" of network shows. ABC, for example, was testing the delivery of its soap operas on cable, where they could air in the morning, in prime time, and on weekends for viewers who could not watch them on weekday afternoons. Networks were also increasingly trying to produce more of the programs that they aired and to earn a greater share of the profits earned by programs produced for them by others.

      A major reason behind the networks' cries for help was the almost $18 billion that broadcast and cable TV networks agreed to pay for rights to the National Football League for the eight years ending in 2005. The networks were even more concerned when the initial ratings for those football packages were less than stellar. For the month of September, ESPN's ratings were down 18% compared with former rights holder TNT; ABC was down 15%; Fox was down 3%; and CBS's ratings were flat compared with those of former rights holder NBC a year earlier. Disney Co. Chairman Michael Eisner said that broadcast affiliates of Disney-owned ABC had to share the cost of NFL football and give up "compensation" payments from the network. If they did not do so, he said, ABC might move its programming to cable.

      One network that did not have to worry about paying for football was NBC, which lost the rights to the American Football Conference games to an aggressive bid by CBS. Also out of football was Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting System, which was outbid by rival cable network ESPN.

      Although NBC was saving money on football, it was paying dearly to retain its Thursday- night anchor program, "ER." To keep the top-rated hospital drama on the schedule, the network agreed to pay the show's producers $850 million over the next three years. Consequently, each episode would cost the network $13 million, compared with the $1.5 million-$1.8 million the show had been commanding.

      One reason that NBC was willing to pay so much for "ER" was that it was losing its other top Thursday night performer, "Seinfeld," after nine seasons and an estimated $350 million-$400 million in earnings. The network had reportedly offered to boost Jerry Seinfeld's salary from $1 million-plus to $5 million per episode to keep the show on the air, but the star, who would collect hundreds of millions from the show's syndication run, chose to draw the curtain on "the show about nothing."

      The show about fighting, also known as "The Jerry Springer Show," was another TV program much in the news in 1998. While critics and the producers of the syndicated talk show continued their tug-of-war over how much fighting the show featured and how much of it was staged, Springer (see BIOGRAPHIES (Springer, Jerry )) continued to achieve higher ratings than those of his competition. Thanks in part to its change to a no-holds-barred style that put more emphasis on action than talk, Springer had gone from not even cracking the top 50 shows in syndication in the 1996-97 TV season (according to Nielsen Media Research) to the 10th-most-watched syndicated show in 1997-98. For the first eight weeks (September through October) of the 1998-99 season, it was the top-rated talk show, surpassing longtime talk queen Oprah Winfrey, and was the seventh-ranked syndicated show.

      NBC continued to dominate the ratings race in 1997-98, but its attempts to expand its power base beyond Thursday night were not so successful. The network had the top four shows: "Seinfeld," "ER," "Veronica's Closet," and "Friends"—but they were all on Thursday night, as was newcomer "Union Square," the eighth-ranked show of the season. CBS came in second in households, helped by shows, such as "Touched by an Angel," that appealed to older people. The network finished fourth, however, in the coveted 18-49-year-old demographic group. ABC placed third in households with sitcoms such as "The Drew Carey Show" and "Spin City." Fox finished fourth in households, but its edgy programming pushed it into second place in the 18-49 group for the first time. Helping it overtake ABC were the animated "King of the Hill" (see Photoessay (Adults 'Toon In )) and the quirky hit "Ally McBeal." The WB got strong performances from "Dawson's Creek" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" to help push it past UPN into fifth place. It was the only network whose average rating did not decline compared with the 1996-97 season, posting a 12% increase on the strength of its programming and a station lineup bolstered by defections from rival UPN. By contrast, UPN was in a rebuilding year, repositioning itself with shows like "Love Boat: The Next Wave" from an urban-targeted to a more middle-American audience.

      For the first five weeks of the 1998-99 season, the major networks continued their ratings slide. NBC was down 20% in household ratings, followed by ABC, down 4%, and CBS, down 3%. Of the big four, only Fox showed growth at 3%, although that was in part due to its coverage of the World Series. Although the series (a four-game blowout of the San Diego Padres by the New York Yankees) recorded its lowest ratings ever, they were enough to boost Fox's fortunes. Of the small networks, UPN was down an alarming 38%, whereas the WB continued in the plus column, up 14%. In the face of its ratings drop, NBC shook up programming executive suites in October, replacing NBC Entertainment's president, Warren Littlefield, with station group head Scott Sassa.

      U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton's relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky dominated TV news from its first reports in early January to the impeachment hearing that was being conducted at the year's end. In between, it powered cable news channels to some of their highest-ever ratings and filled the broadcast airways with subject matter that would have been unheard of—except on shock jock Howard Stern's radio and TV shows—only a few years earlier.

      For the fourth year in a row NBC dominated the Emmy awards, winning 18, including 4 for "Frasier." ABC was second with 16, and HBO third with 14, including 3 for Tom Hanks's multipart epic "From the Earth to the Moon," and, finally, one for comedian Garry Shandling (see BIOGRAPHIES (Shandling, Garry )) after 19 nominations. One of the ceremony's biggest surprises was the three awards for ABC's "The Practice," which was produced by David E. Kelley. (See BIOGRAPHIES (Kelley, David E. ).) One was for best drama, in a category that included such critically acclaimed shows as "ER" and "NYPD Blue."

      One cable program that became recognized as an innovator and ratings power featured four foul-mouthed third graders animated in a style that could best be described as early construction paper. Comedy Central's "South Park," described by Broadcasting & Cable editor John Higgins as a "twisted version of Peanuts," debuted in the summer of 1997, but it did not attract a large following until late in the year. In October 1997 it was averaging a 1.6 rating, but by February 1998 the show was the top-rated program on cable, with a 6.4 the week of February 2-8, and had become a cultural phenomenon. The catchphrase "Oh my God, they killed Kenny," a reference to the fact that the character Kenny died in almost every episode, was threatening to become a part of the vernacular.

      Though it gained audience share, cable continued to demonstrate its greatest strength in a limited programming range. Aside from the big-ticket movies and occasional hit series, cable was dominated by major sports, wrestling, and children's shows, with those three programming types claiming 23 of the top 25 cable programs, according to the October 19 Nielsen ratings. Recognizing the need to broaden their programming base, the cable networks pledged to spend hundreds of millions on original programming with high production values. USA Network, for example, spent more on the two-part original "Moby Dick" ($20 million) than on any other program in its history, and the show returned the investment by achieving the highest-ever ratings for original entertainment on basic cable, an 8.1 (or an average 5.9 million households).

      TV soap-opera addicts were cheered by University of Oxford professor Michael Argyle's claim that people who watched soaps were happy people. The results of his 11-year study, analyzing thousands of questionnaires, were revealed late in 1998. The key to happiness, Argyle told the Sunday Telegraph, was to have one close relationship and a network of friends. Through TV watching, Argyle theorized, people made imaginary friends.

      A Vietnamese soap opera with sympathetic HIV-positive characters was aired to reverse early propaganda and misconceptions about AIDS. Funded by the EU and provided with technical assistance by Australia, CARE International Vietnam taped several episodes of "Wind Blows Through Dark and Light" and aired them until mid-June.

      "Mirada de mujer" ("A Woman's Gaze") became a hit for Mexico's TV Azteca in late 1997 despite protests from family-values groups complaining that the program promoted adultery. A petition drive to cancel it was welcomed by Ricardo Salinas Pliego, Azteca's chief executive. The controversy added to the 40% prime-time audience share taken from rival Grupo Televisa, Mexico's one-time TV monopoly and the world's largest producer of Spanish-language TV programming. Azteca in 1998 owned the top-rated evening news broadcast and crime newsmagazine show.

      "Teletubbies" Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, and Po from the hills of Teletubbyland were introduced in Britain in 1997 and began to air in the U.S. on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in April 1998. Each Teletubby head carried an antenna, and the characters' stomachs beamed in video clips of real children in the real world, which triggered criticisms in both countries that viewing children were being hooked on TV before they had the language skills to protest. British creator Anne Wood referred to her work as a kind of "Sesame Street" primer.

      A BBC documentary on the life of Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, turned out to be a bitter disappointment, especially to the members of the Kitchener family. Dwelling little on his achievements, "Kitchener—the Empire's Flawed Hero" portrayed him as obstinate and brutal, using snippets of interviews with relatives, veterans, and historians to debunk his reputation.

      The French commanded and controlled TV coverage of all 64 matches of the 1998 World Cup. Broadcasting from Paris, "France 98" was watched by a cumulative worldwide audience of 37 billion people. Also in regard to soccer, England's Premier League rejected in May a proposal by BSkyB to televise the next season's games live on a pay-per-view basis. With soccer as a key attraction to subscription, BSkyB had hoped to use live pay-per-view matches to persuade customers to sign up for its new digital TV service.

      Greece was singled out in May for immediate action by the World Trade Organization for having failed to crack down on rampant theft of TV programming. Some 150 Greek stations continued to broadcast American films and television programs without paying American copyright holders.

Technology.

      China planned to beam TV into every village in the nation by the end of the century, according to the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television. Because of China's vast territory and complex terrain, satellite broadcasting was used by the government-controlled China Central Television as well as by 26 provincial-level TV stations. China's financial capital of Shanghai recently set up a new satellite TV station, Shanghai Broadcasting Network, to beam programs across China and Asia.

      The Philips Flat TV—lightweight, totally flat, and only 11.4 cm (4.5 in) thick—was introduced during the year. Philips boasted that the set "duplicates every detail of the ultimate cinema experience." Sharp reportedly wanted to develop a way to give parents control over their children's TV-viewing habits by means of a View Timer switch, which restricted viewing time and controlled TV usage, and a Direct Access button that could set program restrictions.

RADIO

      Five manufacturers, Bosch/Blaupunkt, Clarion, Grundig, Kenwood, and Pioneer, offered digital car radios for sale in Britain in 1998. They featured improved sound and stronger reception and, unlike bulkier early models, fit in the same space as standard car radio sets.

      Providing radio broadcasts to China's 1.2 billion population was greatly assisted during the year by the government's investment in infrastructure. At the end of 1998, China had 1,630 radio stations, serving 86% of the people, according to the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television.

      In the U.S. the much-ballyhooed Telecommunications Act of 1996 seemed to have failed to spark the promised competition between local cable TV and telephone companies, but it triggered a major restructuring of the radio business. By eliminating the national restrictions of radio station ownership and drastically loosening the local ones, the law caused an unprecedented wave of buying and selling. The deal making was capped in October 1998 with the $4.4 billion merger of Clear Channel Communications and Jacor Communications. At the closing the surviving company, Clear Channel, had 454 stations in 101 markets. The deal was the second biggest in radio history, surpassed only by CBS's purchase of Infinity Broadcasting for $4.9 billion in 1996.

      When the stock market began cooling and the transactions started slowing in the fall, Chancellor Media emerged as the U.S.'s largest radio group, with 488 stations and estimated annual revenue of $1.8 billion, according to Broadcasting & Cable and Duncan's American Radio. By revenue, CBS ranked second with $1.7 billion and Clear Channel third with $1.2 billion.

      The large-station groups spawned their own programming services. In January Chancellor's AMFM Radio Networks signed one of radio's best-known personalities, Casey Kasem. His "American Top 40" show was a longtime radio staple. Although the signing gave AMFM a boost, it also landed the service in court. Westwood One, Kasem's former home, sued AMFM, claiming that Kasem had two years to go on its contract when he made the jump.

      Howard Stern, the self-proclaimed "King of All Media"; Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing political pundit; and Dr. Laura Schlessinger, radio's hard-edged answer to Ann Landers, were radio's biggest talk stars, drawing the largest national audiences. Art Bell, however, was the medium's most mysterious personality. His announcement in October that he was immediately quitting his overnight UFO-oriented show owing to a "threatening, terrible event" had millions of fans speculating that it was all due to some extraterrestrial plot. Within a fortnight, however, Bell was back on the air.

RAMONA MONETTE S. FLORES; HARRY A. JESSELL; LAWRENCE B. TAISHOFF

Amateur Radio.

      In 1998 the amateur radio (ham) community in the U.S. was grappling with the most sweeping restructuring of amateur radio licensing since 1989. In July the American Radio Relay League proposed reducing the number of classes of licenses from six to four and streamlining the examinations needed to obtain the licenses. Instead of six license classes, there would be four: technician, general, advanced, and amateur extra. Lost in the reform would be the novice and technician-plus grades. In August the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asked for comments on the four-class plan, noting that there "appears to be unnecessary overlap" between licenses in the existing six-class regime.

      Just as it did with commercial AM and FM services, the FCC got tougher on amateur radio scofflaws. Acting on complaints from ham operators, the agency levied a $7,500 fine on a New Jersey licensee for operating an AM station that interfered with ham broadcasts. It fined a Florida ham $2,500 for causing "malicious interference" with business radio. In Connecticut a ham team led authorities to a man believed to be using ham equipment to jam local police and fire frequencies.

      Throughout the year hams were on the scene of natural disasters and other trouble to lend a communications hand. They helped provide vital communications when the floodwaters rose in central and southern Texas, when Hurricane Georges threatened Florida, and when Hurricane Mitch struck with deadly and prolonged force in Honduras and Nicaragua. In early September a ham team in Arizona worked through the night with other volunteers to find a two-year-old boy who had wandered off. They contributed to a happy ending; after a 15-hour ordeal the boy was found in a cornfield just 3.2 km (2 mi) from home.

HARRY A. JESSELL; LAWRENCE B. TAISHOFF

NEWSPAPERS

      The Independent, the London newspaper founded in 1986 to provide an independent, nonpartisan voice on news issues, gained a new lease on life in 1998 as Anthony J.F. O'Reilly took control in March. O'Reilly, who headed Independent Newspapers, a chain of some 200 newspapers throughout the world, shared ownership with the tabloid Mirror Group. On March 13 Andrew Marr, reinstated as editor in chief, said in a letter to readers "[We] have been told in simple terms to make the paper steadily more intelligent and serious. During an era when most papers are dumbing down, it came as an unusual and exhilarating instruction." The Guardian, so renowned for its misprints and typos it was dubbed "The Grauniad," introduced a column late in 1997 headed "Corrections and Clarifications." A runaway hit, it attracted a hard core of loyal fans who read it before they read anything else in the paper. The satirical magazine Private Eye noted, "The Grauniad's corrections are far, far more interesting than the original articles."

      The Financial Times of London cut its newsstand price in the United States by one-third, from $1.50 to $1. The price cut was part of an effort by its owner, the Pearson group, to more than double its North American circulation to 100,000 readers by 2000.

      In April Canada's Southam chain, controlled by Conrad Black's Hollinger International, Inc., announced plans to launch a new national daily newspaper. Southam in July agreed to trade four Ontario newspapers to Sun Media in exchange for Sun's 80% interest in the Financial Post. That paper was then merged into the National Post, which debuted in October. Based in Toronto, the National Post extended Black's newspaper empire across the country to a total of 57 of Canada's 105 dailies.

      Journalism continued to be a risky business for reporters in Latin America. Between October 1997 and March 1998, 11 journalists were murdered, 5 in Colombia, 4 in Brazil, and 2 in Mexico. Because the reporters had written about the trade in illegal drugs, it was thought that drug traffickers were responsible for their deaths.

      The addition of business news supplements boosted the earnings of many South American newspapers. The most successful was the Wall Street Journal Americas, a section of The Wall Street Journal's business news translated into Spanish, or for Brazil, Portuguese. Some 20 South American papers published this supplement, which in 1998 reached approximately 2.2 million readers. Knight Ridder, Inc.'s Miami Herald became the top-selling English-language newspaper in Latin America, where it had 10 printing plants and appeared on newsstands in many cities. Ironically, the publisher of the Herald, David Lawrence, resigned in August because of eroding circulation numbers in Miami. He was succeeded by Alberto Ibarguen, publisher of the Herald's Spanish-language newspaper, El Nuevo Herald. The growth of Miami's Spanish-speaking population, for whom El Nuevo Herald was designed, was thought to have hurt the Herald's circulation.

      Cuba allowed the Associated Press to reopen its news bureau there after a delegation of senior AP officials visited the country in November. The AP bureau in Havana had been closed since 1969, when Cuba expelled its last permanent correspondent. A rare public disturbance took place in Havana two weeks later when about a dozen protesters demonstrated against the trial of an independent journalist. Mario Viera, head of the tiny and unauthorized Cuba Verdad press agency, was charged with defaming a government official in an article posted on Cubanet, an Internet page based in Miami.

      In Iran a pro-democracy newspaper defied two orders by the nation's Justice Department to shut down and continued publishing under a third name. Originally called Jameah, it was ordered to cease publishing on July 25. The editor, Mahmoud Shams, renamed the paper Tous and continued publishing. Militants then assaulted Shams and threatened to kill him, and also attacked two AP reporters who arrived on the scene. Ordered to shut down Tous, Shams renamed the paper Aftab'e Emrooz ("The Sun Today") with the lead story being an account of the attack. In Nigeria the government-owned Daily Times announced it was cutting its staff by almost half because of financial difficulties. The Times group, one of the largest and oldest newspaper publishers in Africa, was heavily in debt, and efforts to increase circulation had not been successful.

      China launched a new government newspaper in July. The Beijing Morning Post made its first appearance with the banner headline "China Will Clone Giant Panda." It sold out within hours.

      In the U.S.The Wall Street Journal turned technicolor on March 20 with the addition of a new full-colour lifestyle section called Weekend Journal. Delivered every Friday, it focused on culture, travel, and personal finance. It featured columns on expensive houses and automobiles, home decorating, antiques, and fine wines, and even included a crossword puzzle. The U.S. circulation of The Wall Street Journal fell about 1% in 1998 to 1.8 million. On the Internet, however, in the last two years the newspaper picked up 250,000 subscribers, who paid $29 or $49 per year depending on whether they also subscribed to the print version. In 1998 The Wall Street Journal had the largest subscription base of any on-line publication and made additional gains by selling associated services from its World Wide Web site.

      USA Today, part of the Gannett Co. chain, also changed its weekend format. The paper's Life section on Fridays expanded by 14 pages and split into two sections, Life Weekend and Life Destinations and Diversions.

      The Nashville (Tenn.) Banner, an afternoon daily, announced in February that it was closing down after 122 years of publication because of declining circulation. Since 1937 the Banner had operated under a joint agreement with its main competitor, the Gannett-owned Tennessean, in which the latter, a morning daily, handled the business arrangements, including marketing, printing, advertising, and circulation for both newspapers; the editorial and reporting staffs, however, remained independent.

      Another battle between morning and afternoon newspapers with joint business and production operations heated up in San Francisco. The morning San Francisco Chronicle, founded in 1865 by Michael H. de Young and still family-owned, was under siege by the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner, an afternoon daily, to merge, sell out to the Examiner, or face head-to-head competition in the morning. Although the Chronicle had a circulation of 484,000 compared to the Examiner's 120,000, the Hearst Corp. was one of the country's largest and richest media companies with 12 daily and 7 weekly newspapers, a number of magazines such as Esquire and Cosmopolitan, and television stations and cable interests. As the conflict continued, chains Knight-Ridder, Inc., Gannett Co., McClatchy Newspapers Inc., Medianews Group Inc., and the New York Times Co. bought out newspapers in nearby towns and captured readership in the surrounding suburbs.

      The Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times Co., lost two of its major columnists during 1998. In June Patricia Smith was forced to resign for having fabricated characters and quotations in her columns, and in August Mike Barnicle was ousted for wrongly using jokes by comedian George Carlin in his columns.

      Mike Gallagher, a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, was fired in June, accused of stealing voice mail messages from Chiquita Brands International Inc. during a yearlong investigation of the banana company's business practices. The Enquirer immediately retracted the report, and in September Gallagher pleaded guilty to two felony charges.

      "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." This was the operating principle of the City News Bureau of Chicago, noted for its insistence on accuracy and fact verification. In October, however, the bureau announced that it would close down. This famous boot camp for reporters opened June 19, 1890, funded by 10 daily newspapers to provide round-the-clock coverage of police stations, city hall, and anywhere else there might be a story. Its alumni include Charles MacArthur, who wrote about it in the play The Front Page; Chicago columnist Mike Royko; and novelist Kurt Vonnegut. With only two newspapers, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, left to sustain it, the bureau planned to shut down in March 1999.

      The Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald won the Pulitzer gold medal for public service for its coverage of the blizzard, flood, and fire that devastated the city, including its own presses. The New York Times won three Pulitzers: for beat reporting—Linda Greenhouse on the U.S. Supreme Court; for international reporting—the newspaper's staff for a series of articles on drug corruption in Mexico; and for criticism—Michiko Kakutani. The Los Angeles Times won two awards: for feature photography showing the plight of children whose parents are addicted to drugs—Clarence Williams; and for breaking news—the staff of the Los Angeles Times for its coverage of a spectacular shootout during a bank robbery. Bernard L. Stein of the Riverdale Press, Bronx, N.Y., won the honour for editorial writing. Other winners included: investigative reporting—Gary Cohn and Will Englund of the Baltimore Sun on the hazards involved in the dismantling of old ships; national reporting—Russell Carollo and Jeff Nesmith of the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News for their exposé of the military health care system; commentary—Mike McAlary of the Daily News, New York City, on the brutalization of a Haitian immigrant in a police station; explanatory journalism—Paul Salopek of the Chicago Tribune on the Human Genome Diversity Project; feature writing—Thomas French of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times on the murder of a mother and two daughters vacationing in Florida; spot news photography—Martha Rial of the Pittsburgh (Pa.) Post-Gazette for her images of Hutu and Tutsi refugees in Tanzania; and editorial cartooning—Stephen P. Breen of the Asbury Park Press, (Neptune, N.J.).

ANNE ROBY

MAGAZINES

      London's Gramophone magazine, the voice of classical music, marked its 75th year in April 1998 with a look back at some of its less-than-stellar reviews. Of renowned opera singer Maria Callas, the reviewer noted "I have no doubt that Maria Callas will do a great deal better than this in the future." The review of Leonard Bernstein's first Brahms recording concluded "He fails to give this symphony the greatness we know it to have." Like the subjects of those early reviews, the magazine achieved distinction as the best of its kind and in 1998 boasted 60,000 readers in 100 countries.

      Germany's Bertelsmann, the largest media company in Europe, appointed a new chief executive. Thomas Middelhoff, who took over on November 2, was expected to make major changes. In contrast to U.S. media companies, which strove to use their content or product in as many ways as possible over the range of their media outlets, Bertelsmann's businesses had been run as independent entities concerned with their own profitability rather than that of the company as a whole. Middelhoff vowed to change this practice. (See Sidebar (Bertelsmann—the German Giant ).)

      U.S. magazines were successful during the year in their expansion into Latin America. The greatest hit was Seleções, a new Portuguese-language edition of Reader's Digest for Brazil that followed the magazine's Spanish-language edition, Selecciones. Sales of both publications in Latin America by mid-1998 totaled 1.7 million copies per month. Surpassed only by Veja, a long-established Brazilian daily, Seleções became Brazil's second-best-selling magazine. The Spanish edition was the best-selling magazine in Chile with 150,000 copies per month and in Argentina with 250,000 copies. In addition to Seleções, Brazil embraced Portuguese-language editions of both Time and Fortune magazines, which were being distributed as newspaper supplements. Spanish-language editions of Newsweek, Glamour, Discover, People, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone also gained success.

      In 1998 magazines in the United States continued to grow and proliferate, with more than 800 new titles covering a wide variety of subjects. ESPN Magazine, a joint venture of Disney Co. and Hearst Corp., owners of the popular ESPN sports cable TV channel, was a biweekly competing with Sports Illustrated. Teen People, a spin-off publication of People magazine, was aimed at teenagers. More, published by Meredith Corp., was targeted to women over 40. Blaze, published by Vibe/SPIN Ventures, catered to teenagers who liked hip-hop music. Gear, published by Guccione Media, was a fashion and pop culture magazine aimed at young male adults, and Brill's Content, published by Steven Brill, the founder and former owner of the American Lawyer, assessed the credibility of all media.

      In addition to the new titles there were numerous mergers and acquisitions during the year. Among the most notable were the acquisition of TV Guide by the television-based United Video Satellite Group; the purchase of Wired magazine, one of the leading new media magazines, by Condé Nast Publications; and the purchase of Cowles Business Media and Cowles Enthusiast Media by PRIMEDIA Inc. (formerly K-III Communications).

      Magazine advertising, the major contributor to profit for most magazines, continued to grow in 1998, with revenues up about 9% over 1997. Declines in major advertising categories such as automotive products, computers, and drugs were more than offset by strong growth in direct-response advertising, business and consumer services, and food products.

      Magazine circulation continued to increase in 1998 at a modest rate consistent with the growth of the U.S. adult population. A new development during the year, however, threatened magazine subscription marketing. This was the attack on the use of sweepstakes offers in selling magazine subscriptions. A suit brought by 20 state attorneys general against the subscription agent American Family Publishers alleged that AFP and other agents misled consumers by causing them to think they were sweepstakes winners when in fact they were not. The suit was settled, but the negative publicity in the press caused a severe decline in responses to sweepstakes offers. Some magazines, most notably Reader's Digest and TV Guide, announced during the year that they would slash the circulation they guaranteed to advertisers—17% by Reader's Digest and about 8% by TV Guide.

      Magazines continued to evolve into global enterprises, with dozens of U.S. titles launching foreign editions, usually in partnership with local magazine publishers. During the past year new foreign editions of American magazines included National Geographic in Italy, Prevention magazine in Poland, and Harper's Bazaar in Australia.

DONALD D. KUMMERFELD

BOOK PUBLISHING

      The controversy over resale price maintenance (rpm) in Europe was not resolved in 1998. It resurfaced in Germany as a result of a complaint to the European Commission (EC) by Austrian retailing group Librodisk concerning the cross-border fixing of book prices in Germany and Austria, which was first introduced in 1993. The EC decided to open an investigation in January 1999, but even if it decides that the complaint is justified, the inevitable ensuing appeal to the European Court of Justice should serve to preserve the existing structure for as many as five years.

      In the U.K. the issue was no longer rpm itself but sales over the Internet. U.S.-based Internet booksellers were supplying British customers with books licensed for sale in the U.S., and it was claimed by the U.K. Publishers Association that this was unfair (though clearly not to consumers, given widespread discounts) and illegal. The existence of the Internet also caused European publishers to publish in Europe at the same time as in the U.S. Interestingly, the boom in electronic selling coincided with a severe decline in electronic publishing, with publishers throughout Europe cutting back on plans to produce CD-ROMs. In the face of a worldwide trend toward increasingly fierce protection of rights, the New Zealand government surprisingly amended the 1994 Copyright Act in May 1998 so as to permit the parallel importation of copyrighted products lawfully produced elsewhere, regardless of who had acquired exclusive rights for New Zealand.

      In March the year's largest proposed merger, between Reed Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer, was terminated. The merger was announced in October 1997, but the opening of a full inquiry by the EC in December, fueled by fears over potential dominance in the field of tax and legal titles, resulted in an unsuccessful attempt by Kluwer to renegotiate terms. Reed Elsevier did, however, finally rid itself of its remaining consumer book interests, including the sale of Reed Children's Books to Egmont of Denmark in April and of Octopus-Reed Illustrated to management in August. In April it offered to pay Times Mirror $1,650,000,000 for U.S. legal publisher Matthew Bender together with its 50% interest in Shepard's Co. In its turn, Wolters Kluwer successfully bid for Plenum Publishing, medical publisher Waverly, the Capitol Publishing Group, and Le Point Vétérinaire.

      Also in March Bertelsmann AG of Germany, the world's largest book publisher and third largest media group, offered roughly $1.5 billion for Random House. The purchase elicited fears in the industry that the new conglomerate, to be called Random House Inc., would emphasize glitzy best-sellers and doom the already-struggling midlist titles. Authors were concerned about another decline in the amount of places to sell their works. The Federal Trade Commission looked into possible antitrust violations but approved the acquisition in May. (See Sidebar (Bertelsmann—the German Giant ).)

      Pearson PLC, the British media group that owned the Financial Times, became the world's largest educational publisher in May by acquiring Simon & Schuster's education, reference, and business and professional divisions from Viacom for $4.6 billion, after which it sold all but the education division to Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst of the U.S. for $1 billion. The education group joined Pearson's Addison Wesley Longman group and was called Pearson Education. Meanwhile, HarperCollins lost credibility as a publisher of contemporary nonfiction by withdrawing its offer to publish Chris Patten's text on Hong Kong.

      Approximately 30% of the output of French titles was accounted for by Havas (a subsidiary of Vivendi since March), which acquired Quotidien Santé and 51% of both La Découverte and Syros in May and Grupo Anaya in September; Hachette, which in August agreed to buy 70% of Orion; and Groupe Flammarion. In East Asia the economic crisis exacted a heavy toll on book publishers. In Indonesia, for example, 90% of them ceased operations.

      The Internet during the year had a major impact on the way that books were sold. Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com, on-line bookstores, continued to grow, although there were concerns about their profitability; despite huge sales Amazon.com's operating loss for the first half of 1998 was more than $25 million. Borders, the national book chain, went on-line in May, and smaller on-line bookstores such as Books.com and Alt.Bookstore struggled to compete. Sales through the on-line sites rose so dramatically that independent book retailers complained that they were having problems stocking reorders of popular titles. The Intimate Bookshop, a small southern chain, filed a lawsuit against Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Amazon, claiming antitrust violations.

      In July Modern Library caused a minor flap with the release of a list of 100 best English-language novels published in the 20th century. Even two of the judges, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and novelist William Styron, publicly expressed dismay with the final list. The most common criticism was that the list reflected the homogeneous nature of the judges, a predominantly elderly white male group. Modern Library promised to revamp its process when it picks the 100 best nonfiction books.

      The sex scandal that threatened the presidency of U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton began with a book connection; literary agent Lucianne Goldberg urged friend (and government worker) Linda Tripp to start taping her phone conversations with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The tapes led to the affair being revealed nationally. Pocket Books, PublicAffairs, and Prima Publishing all released books based on special prosecutor Kenneth Starr's behemoth investigative report of the scandal. All three publishers enjoyed good sales despite the fact that the full text of the report was readily available on the Internet. Jeffrey Toobin, a former assistant U.S. attorney and author of a best-selling book on the O.J. Simpson murder trial, was signed by Random House to write a book on the scandal and its impact on the nation. Lewinsky herself accepted a $600,000 advance from St. Martins Press in November for a book tentatively titled "Monica's Story."

      The 1998 Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded to Philip Roth's American Pastoral (Houghton Mifflin) and the prize for nonfiction went to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (W.W. Norton). Fiction best-sellers for 1997, as reported by Publishers Weekly, were The Partner by John Grisham (2,625,000 copies sold), Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (1,458,280), and The Ghost by Danielle Steel (1,161,121). Nonfiction best-sellers were Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt (1,650,000), Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach (1,462,663), and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt (1,300,799). Total book sales in the U.S. increased 2.4% in 1997 to $21,280,000,000.

PETER J. CURWEN; BETH LEVINE

      See also Literature .

▪ 1998

Introduction

Television

Programming.

      Television flashed the first news of the automobile accident that took the life of Diana, princess of Wales, on Aug. 31, 1997..) (Diana, princess of Wales ) The BBC replaced regular programming with round-the-clock coverage. Six billion viewers in 44 countries watched the funeral in London on September 6 through BBC and Independent Television (ITV) News, the only two networks allowed inside Westminster Abbey. Both were forbidden to shoot close-ups of the royal family.

      A week later Roman Catholic nun Mother Teresa, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, was interred in Calcutta amid the pomp of a state funeral that was televised live internationally) (Teresa, Mother )A month to the day after her death, Mother Teresa's life was dramatized on International Family Entertainment (IFE) Inc.'s Family Channel cable network. Completed months before her death, the TV movie Mother Teresa: In the Name of God's Poor was written by French journalist and author Dominique Lapierre.

      The British handover of Hong Kong to China on June 30/July 1 was widely reported live. The BBC covered everything from the departure from Government House of Gov. Chris Patten to the lowering of the U.K.'s flag and the raising of China's, as well as Patten's departure with Prince Charles aboard the royal yacht Britannia.

      With six highly competitive broadcasting networks and more than 30 viable national cable networks, the 98 million American homes with TV sets had a wide variety of programming from which to choose—and they were promised even more. Dozens of small cable networks looked for space on cable systems, and, perhaps more important, two aggressive entrepreneurs laid plans for what might become the seventh and eight broadcast networks. Fox Network co-founder and Home Shopping Network chairman Barry Diller bought some of the assets of Universal Television, including its television production operations and two established cable networks—USA and the Sci-Fi Channel. The production operations could help Diller create a TV network that combined some national programming with a heavy dose of local programs. Meanwhile, Paxson Communications Corp. chairman Lowell ("Bud") Paxson revamped his earlier plans for an infomercial-style network and set his sights on launching his own "family values" network, to debut in fall 1998.

      The big three broadcasters—ABC, CBS, and NBC—watched their shares of TV viewership in prime time continue to erode from the competition provided by the other broadcast networks and the proliferating cable networks. (A rating is the percentage of the TV households tuned to a show. The share is the percentage of households with sets in use during that time period that were watching it.) For the end of the 1996-97 season, which extended from September through May, the big three's combined share dropped to just 49%. The other three broadcast networks—Fox, UPN, and Time Warner Inc.'s the WB—attracted 21%. That left 30% for the Public Broadcasting Service and cable networks like Nickelodeon, TNT, and ESPN. Unlike the big broadcast networks, which reached nearly all TV homes, cable networks covered only 66% through more than 11,000 local cable systems.

      NBC won in the 1996-97 TV season ratings, again on the strength of its powerhouse Thursday night, which was anchored by "Seinfeld" and framed by "Friends" and "ER." Jerry Seinfeld's decision to leave the airwaves at the end of the 1997-98 season, however, left NBC scrambling for replacement programming. CBS narrowly beat out ABC for second place with the Sunday-night help of such strong performers as "Cosby" and "Touched by an Angel," a drama whose religious theme effectively counterprogrammed the more sensationalistic fare elsewhere. In the fall ABC was hoping the return of "The Wonderful World of Disney" and well-received comedies like "Dharma & Greg" would boost it out of third place.

      NBC and HBO were the big winners at the Emmy awards ceremonies in September. NBC won 24 statues, despite what proved to be a virtual shutout for its "ER," the year's most nominated show. The acclaimed medical drama received only 3 technical Emmys. HBO was second with 19 trophies, including 5 for its TV movie Miss Evers' Boys. Although HBO's "The Larry Sanders Show" had garnered 16 nominations, a record for a sitcom, it failed to claim a single award.

      NBC's "Frasier" won for best comedy series for the fourth year in a row, whereas the surprise winner for best drama was the network's "Law & Order," a perennial runner-up to ABC's "NYPD Blue." In the comedy category NBC claimed best actor (John Lithgow, "3rd Rock from the Sun") and best actress (Helen Hunt, "Mad About You"), whereas ABC could claim best actor in a drama (Dennis Franz, "NYPD Blue") and Fox could boast best actress in a drama (Gillian Anderson, "The X-Files").

      Arguably the highest-profile cable channel to be launched in 1997 was CBS's Eye on People, which debuted March 31 with 14 original programs and about two million subscribers. In the year's other big cable programming news, News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch and his partner at Fox Kids Worldwide, Inc., Haim Saban, paid $1.9 billion for the Rev. Pat Robertson's Family Channel. The goal was to fill the channel with kid shows and compete with Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and the Disney Channel.

      Women figured prominently in some of the high-profile programming stories of 1997. Hollywood's worst-kept secret became official on the evening of April 30 when the character played by comedian Ellen DeGeneres ) (DeGeneres, Ellen ) on the ABC sitcom "Ellen" admitted she was gay. The episode earned a 23.4 rating and a 35 share, according to Nielsen Media Research. In September talk show queen Oprah Winfrey made happy men of Roger and Michael King, the brothers whose King World Productions, Inc., distributed her syndicated TV show (a program distributed directly to stations rather than via a network). On September 15 she announced that she had renewed her contract for two more years.

      News programming began to make its way into prime-time TV in numbers too big to ignore. "Dateline," the NBC news magazine, increased its frequency to four times a week. CBS wooed departing "Today Show" cohost Bryant Gumbel to the network to anchor his own newsmagazine, "Public Eye," and ABC's "20/20" could have been rechristened "40/40" as it added a second weekly airing. The reason for the proliferation was that such shows usually generated strong ratings while costing far less than entertainment offerings.

      ABC News started the year on a downbeat in January when a federal jury in North Carolina ordered it to pay $5.5 million to the Food Lion supermarket chain. A month earlier the same jury had found that ABC had committed fraud and trespass in securing its information for an investigative report on meat-handling practices. What troubled many journalists was that the accuracy of the story was not challenged. Although a district court judge eventually reduced the fine to $315,000, the "terrible precedent" remained, as one news producer put it.

      Fox Network, which celebrated its 10th anniversary during the year, played host to its first Super Bowl, including what may have been the world's longest pregame show (5 hours 18 minutes). The show gave the network its best-ever ratings, with a 43.3 rating and a 65 share. Each 30-second advertisement in the game cost more than $1.2 million.

      Fox may have had the Super Bowl, but it was a Tiger that gave broadcasters one of their biggest sports stories. Generating record ratings for his record-setting win at the Masters golf tournament, Tiger Woods) (Woods, Tiger ) gave a boost to the Professional Golfers' Association tour and to golf on TV. Women also reached a new milepost in television sports. NBC became the first broadcast network to provide weekly coverage of a professional women's sports league when it inaugurated coverage June 21 with a women's professional basketball game between the Los Angeles Sparks and the New York Liberty. In November NBC and Turner Sports (a unit of Time Warner) retained the TV rights to the National Basketball Association for four more years. They had to pay $2.6 billion, however, more than double what they had been paying under their previous contracts.

      With a glance at the upper lefthand corner of their TV screens, viewers in the U.S. could quickly gauge whether a program was suitable for their families. Under pressure from the government and children's advocacy groups, most broadcast and cable networks in January began labeling their shows with a ratings system based on the familiar movie-ratings system. For example, instead of an R rating, TV programs with the most explicit sex or violence would carry a TV-MA (mature audience) rating.

      Advocates of ratings were still unhappy, however. They kept the heat on, and in October broadcasters and cable programmers modified the ratings to include specific content warnings. Thus, the TV-MA rating might also include one or more of the letters S for sex, V for violence, and L for inappropriate language. Insisting that the ratings violated their First Amendment rights and despite threats from the government, NBC stood alone among major networks in refusing to go along with the content ratings.

      In other developments, after five years of self-imposed exile in Europe, Li Nam-ok, the 31-year-old "adopted" daughter of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, made her first television appearance in London before CNN World Affairs correspondent Ralph Begleiter. Li confirmed that she fled Pyongyang in 1992 when "Papa" cut off the food supply to the household after being angered by the drunken behaviour of son Kim Jong Nam.

      A BBC documentary uncovered Swiss national bank documents showing "intent to deceive" over coins stamped with prewar dates to disguise their origins. The coins were reportedly produced from gold stolen from Jews, including gold teeth and possessions of Nazi concentration camp victims.

      Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Party, and Ulster Unionists, Northern Ireland's main Protestant British party, held their first live TV debate. They were represented, respectively, by Martin McGuinness, a former commander of the IRA, who rejected a Parliament seat won in May because it required an oath of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II; and Ken Maginnis, a retired British army major who had sat in Parliament since 1983.

      A Brazilian soap opera "Xica da Silva" continued winning viewers for TV Manchete, Brazil's third largest network. Walter Avancini, the director of "Xica," was credited with having raised Manchete's ratings by using sex, violence, and history. "Xica" star Taís Araújo's nudity onscreen three days after her 18th birthday created an uproar because the scenes were apparently taped while she was still a minor, which violated an existing ban. France's most controversial TV anchorman, Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, or PPDA, as he was better known, promoted his book "Lettre ouverte aux violeurs de vie privée," in which he accused colleagues of succumbing to an "Anglo-Saxon disease"—gutter journalism.

      Islamic Taliban police in Afghanistan arrested the European Union's Emma Bonino, commissioner for humanitarian affairs, and 18 of her companions, including aid workers, CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour, and other journalists. The police had been "enraged by the presence of news cameras" in a women's hospital in Kabul. Taliban policy forbids photography of a woman by an unrelated man. Bonino and her delegation were released unharmed after three hours.

      BBC's 24-hour news service, "News 24," initially planned for digital TV, was launched November 9 on cable. Because the service was free, News Corp.'s British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) Group PLC, Britain's biggest pay-TV company, which ran "Sky News," a similar 24-hour news service, complained to the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport, especially after cable companies made plans to drop "Sky News" for "News 24."

      Embattled Pres. Alberto Fujimori of Peru took over Lima TV channel Frecuencia Latina on July 13 after it reported that government security agents were tapping phones. Hours later, station owner Baruch Ivcher, an Israeli-born businessman, was stripped of his Peruvian citizenship. Since foreigners could not own local media, pro-government minority shareholders Samuel and Mendel Winter took over the channel.

      Television stations in 60 countries linked up on October 19, World Food Day, for the first TeleFood global telecast based on the theme "Food for All." Organized by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in collaboration with Italian broadcasting company RAI International, the show ran for 8 hours on RAI and was relayed via the RAI International satellite.

Organization.

      Central European Media Enterprises Ltd., controlled by former U.S. ambassador to Austria Ronald S. Lauder, claimed that Hungary's National Radio and Television Commission gave broadcast licenses to lower bidders. They included CLT-Ufa, Europe's biggest broadcasting group, and a media consortium consisting of Scandinavian Broadcasting System and MTM Communications, the largest TV production company in Hungary.

      Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. agreed to trade satellite assets (including a valuable orbital slot he controlled with MCI) for a nonvoting minority stake in Primestar, a cable-controlled satellite broadcaster in which Time Warner owned 31%. Primestar cable partners MediaOne, Comcast, and Cox approved of the deal because it made News Corp. an ally instead of a competitor.

      Compagnie Générale des Eaux SA sold control of its cable TV unit to Canal Plus SA, Europe's biggest pay-TV company. Canal Plus thus raised its stake in Compagnie Générale des Videocommunication to 76% from 20%. Générale des Eaux maintained a 15% interest.

      Pierre Lescure, chief executive of Canal Plus, in March bought troubled Amsterdam-based digital pay-TV NetHold for $1.2 billion. His challenge was to turn around NetHold's Telepiu channel in Italy, which lost $190 million in 1996. Canal Plus also faced new competition at home from AB Sat and Television Pay Service.

      Britain's most successful and popular association football (soccer) club, Manchester United, on September 30 announced the fall 1998 launch of a channel with BSkyB and Granada. This reinforced BSkyB's broadcast of Britain's major soccer matches.

      Flemish socialist MP Louis Vanvelthoven dealt a blow against tobacco advertising and promotions in Belgium. Although tobacco ads on TV had been forbidden there for 20 years, Vanvelthoven's new initiative ended tobacco sponsorship of sports, many of which were telecast.

      The European Association of Advertising Agencies urged international channels to create a reliable database similar to those used by many national broadcasters. Pan-European channels did little audience research except for the European Media and Marketing Survey, which showed that apart from Eurosport, international European channels like European Business News, NBC Super Channel, Euronews, and MTV Europe lost some of their audience in 1997.

      In November William Kennard took over the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the first African-American to do so. Kennard, who had been the regulatory agency's top lawyer, was expected to continue the policies of his predecessor, Reed Hundt, pushing for specific public-interest obligations that broadcasters had to meet in exchange for their TV and radio licenses. In this regard, Hundt's legacy was a requirement that TV stations air three hours of educational children's programming each week. The requirement went into effect on September 1.

Technology.

      The German alliance of Kirch Group, Bertelsmann AG, and Deutsche Telekom AG allowed existing pay-TV channels—analog Premiere and digital DF-1—to broadcast cable digital programming beginning in October. Since digital compression provided for more channels than analog, broadcasters in Britain—among them Cable & Wireless Communications, British Digital Broadcasting, and Flextech, a subsidiary of the U.S.'s Tele-Communications Inc.—were expected to begin using this new technology.

      Tokyo Broadcasting System, Inc., bought a 10% stake in PerfecTV Corp., Japan's first digital satellite broadcasting venture, developed by Itochu Corp., Nissho Iwai Corp., Mitsui and Co., and Sumitomo Corp. Murdoch persuaded Sony Corp. and Fuji Television Network to invest in Japan Sky Broadcasting (JSkyB) Co. Ltd. Hughes Electronics Corp. hoped to develop an antenna and decoder system that would work with all three digital satellite services to shore up DirecTV, Hughes's consortium with Matsushita Electric and Tokuma Shoten Publishing Co. All three companies had to compete with the semipublic Japan Broadcasting Corp., which operated the world's only high-definition television (HDTV) service, the advanced analog format offering the wide-screen pictures, rich colours, and movielike detail that many once believed would become the worldwide standard.

      The FCC in April opened a new era in TV broadcasting in the U.S., tentatively awarding each of the nation's nearly 1,600 TV stations in the country a second channel for digital broadcasting. Most broadcasters planned to use the channel for HDTV, but some, notably the ABC and Fox networks, were also interested in using their extra channels for multicasting—that is, the broadcasting of several channels of standard-definition TV, wide-screen pictures with resolution little better than that of conventional television. By late fall most broadcasters said they would broadcast HDTV during some parts of the day and multicast during others.

      In any event, consumers were reminded that there was no need to throw out their conventional analog TV sets or to rush to buy digital TVs, which were expected to cost several thousand dollars when they reached retail stores in 1998. The government ruled that TV stations could keep their analog channels and continue broadcasting their existing services until 85% of homes in their markets had digital receivers. Most industry observers believed that this decision delayed the digital-only date by at least a decade.

      Australia's major media group Publishing and Broadcasting Ltd. became an entrant to the Internet. It teamed up with Microsoft Corp. to form Nine MSN to provide on-line news, sports, entertainment, and weather shows, as well as financial and retail services.

      Interactive TV, the next generation of television sets, was launched in 1997 by H. Thomas Telesis. It acquired 6.8 million subscribers in the U.S., 10 million in Japan, and 21 million in Western Europe, using direct-to-home television broadcast via satellite. It also reached Malaysia, the Middle East, and Latin America. New markets being targeted included the Philippines, Taiwan, China, South Korea, Indonesia, and India.

Radio

      Just before the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China, radio shows in Hong Kong gave mainland Chinese a taste of freedom of speech and other democratic ways by giving them a chance to say things they never could on government-run radio at home. From these Chinese callers, people in Hong Kong gained insights into life on the mainland. Radio Television Hong Kong considered itself editorially independent and wanted to remain so under the "high degree of autonomy" China had promised Hong Kong.

      Vietnam announced it would step up internal vigilance and increase domestic propaganda to counter broadcast plans by U.S. radio station Radio Free Asia. A commentary in the Communist Party's Nhan Dan newspaper described the U.S.-funded station as "an assault tool of the hostile forces."

      In June consumer electronics leaders Hitachi Ltd., Panasonic (Matsushita), Sanyo, and JVC announced agreements with WorldSpace, headquartered in Washington, D.C., to develop and mass-produce a new generation of portable radios capable of receiving broadcast programs directly from satellites. WorldSpace was founded in 1990 to provide direct satellite delivery of digital audio communications services to the emerging markets of the world.

      In the U.S. it was the year of Thomas Hicks in radio. The Dallas investor went on a radio station shopping spree and by November owned or had agreed to buy 418 stations, more than any other radio operator in the nation. Hicks's binge was part of a rapid consolidation of the radio industry that began in 1996 after the government effectively eliminated most radio ownership limits. At midyear Broadcasting & Cable magazine found that 13% of the nation's 10,273 commercial radio stations were in the hands of the 25 largest station groups. The consolidation of the industry did not escape the notice of government regulators concerned not so much with how many stations a company owned nationwide but how many it owned in a single market. In November the Justice Department filed suit in federal court to block a deal that would have given a Hicks-owned company control of four stations serving New York's Long Island, which together accounted for 65% of the advertising revenue in the market.

      Driving all the buying and selling was the healthy advertising market, a reflection of the strong overall U.S. economy. According to the Radio Advertising Bureau, August was the 60th straight month of increased advertising sales. Sales for the month were 12% greater than in August 1996.

      Although it may have seemed to some that the U.S. marched to a rock beat, radio studies continued to find that country music was the most prevalent and popular radio format. According to Simons Research, some 43 million Americans 18 years or older tuned in to country each week. The runners-up were adult contemporary (36 million weekly listeners) and news/talk (31 million). The average American in 1997 listened to radio each week for 3 hours 24 minutes on weekdays and 5 hours 51 minutes on weekends, according to SRI Radio.

RAMONA MONETTE S. FLORES; HARRY A. JESSELL; LAWRENCE B. TAISHOFF

Amateur Radio.

      Despite the rise of the Internet, more than two million people throughout the world in 1997 continued to communicate over the air as amateur radio operators. Most of these hams—nearly 700,000, by the FCC's count—were in the U.S. The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) reported that it started off the year with 175,000 members, the most in its 83-year history. Hams used their radios mostly for personal communications, but on occasion they were called on to provide emergency communications, as was the case in 1997 with the flooding in the western U.S., and to provide backup communications, as they did for the New York City Marathon. The hams also provided educational opportunities. In the fall NASA scheduled amateur communications between schools and astronaut and ham David Wolf aboard the troubled Mir space station.

      Despite the number of enthusiasts and their well-documented good work, hams in the U.S. fought a seemingly never-ending battle to preserve the radio frequencies they used. In 1997 the threat came primarily from proposed low-Earth-orbiting satellites. In addition to guarding spectrum in Washington, the ARRL also successfully worked to water down a bill in Congress that would have restricted the use of scanners and affected the manufacture of amateur radio equipment.

HARRY A. JESSELL; LAWRENCE B TAISHOF

      See also Business and Industry Review: Advertising (Business and Industry Review ); Telecommunications (Business and Industry Review ); Performing Arts: Motion Pictures (Performing Arts ); Music (Performing Arts ).

      This article updates broadcasting.

Newspapers

      The death of Diana, princess of Wales ) (Diana, princess of Wales ), in a high-speed car crash in Paris on Aug. 31, 1997, generated more press coverage than any other news event in the 20th century. In the month following the accident, 35% of British news stories were devoted to Diana. In contrast, the biggest events of World War II, including the final defeat of Nazi Germany, earned only 27%.

      Photojournalists worldwide were attacked in the backlash of public outrage against the paparazzi who had given chase to the car and were thought to bear responsibility for the accident. Amid talk of legislative curbs, British newspapers called for self-restraint and self-regulation. They also agreed to respect the privacy of the young princes, at least until they reached the age of 18.

      The British newspaper industry continued to consolidate, with larger chains buying smaller ones rather than individual newspapers. This trend accelerated, spurred by the need to cut costs in order to offset higher paper expenses and reduced advertising. Mirror Group, publisher of the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror and owner of other publishing and broadcasting interests, in July acquired Midland Independent Newspapers.

      Conrad Black, head of Hollinger International, Inc., had in 1996 taken control of half the daily newspapers in Canada when he bought out the Southam family chain. Across Canada the Southam's 32 papers, which included the Vancouver (B.C.) Sun, the Calgary (Alta.) Herald, the Hamilton (Ont.) Spectator, and the Montreal Gazette, shifted content, style, appearance, and editorial point of view. The Ottawa Citizen, the flagship paper, which had been owned by the Southam family for 100 years, had offered light and local stories in a traditionally liberal city. The new Citizen featured long analytic articles, international news, extensive parliamentary coverage, an expanded editorial section, and a deeply conservative editorial board.

      Journalists in Latin America were concerned with staying alive. In the last nine years, more than 170 journalists had been assassinated in the region. In Argentina José Luis Cabézas, a photographer for Noticias, was gunned down after taking the first known photograph of a businessman who had been accused of being a mafia chief but also had close ties to Pres. Carlos Menem. Ten months later high-tech telephone traces revealed 100 calls between the businessman and the minister of justice, who was forced to resign. Cabézas's killing was widely seen as an attack on a free press—an attack on journalists trying to expose public corruption. The publisher of Noticias, Hector D'Amico, stated, "People stop me in the street constantly with stories they are afraid to bring to police or a judge. We're being asked to do the job of investigators. And it's not a small group of people who are afraid. It's everyone." Mexico was one of the most dangerous nations in 1997; three journalists were killed, four kidnapped, 20 physically attacked, and three threatened with death.

      Russian Telegraph, first published in September, became the 14th daily newspaper in Moscow. Owned by Vladimir Potanin's Uneximbank, Russia's most powerful financial group, which already had a large stake in Komsomolskaya pravda and Izvestia, the new paper aimed to be respectable, be conservative, provide strong business coverage, and, according to its young editor, Leonid Zlotin, offer "no reports of mafia shoot-outs." Russia's best-selling newspaper remained Argumentiy i faktiy ("Arguments and Facts"). The weekly, which had become prominent during the glasnost era, continued its straightforward style with short, factual articles, interviews, and advice columns. Its circulation of 3.1 million was almost three times that of its nearest competitor.

      Journalists in Hong Kong reported that whereas there had been no overt crackdown on the press since the British colony reverted to China in July, there had developed self-censorship, a concern that accurate reporting on China would bring forth reprisals. For example, the mass-circulation newspaper Apple Daily, which had been critical of China, was denied accreditation to cover news from mainland China. The paper was also not allowed to cover a reception organized by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, which was held in Hong Kong in September. A. Lin Neumann, Asia program coordinator of the Committee to Protect Journalists, reported deep concern about self-censorship in Hong Kong, noting its place as "the principal safe haven for professional, independent Chinese-language reporting about the internal political and economic affairs of the People's Republic."

      In the United States 1997 was a good year to own a newspaper. Advertising revenues showed great gains—by October classified ads had gained 12.5% over 1996, retail ads were up 5.7%, and national ads had gained 14.2%. Share prices of newspaper stocks also took part in the "irrational exuberance" of the U.S. stock market climb. The bull market generated a windfall of financial services ads. In 1996 mutual funds and brokerages spent a record $255.4 million to advertise in the country's 50 biggest markets, a record many expected to be broken in 1997. In addition to the booming economy, newspapers themselves added such efficiencies as clustering their markets, developing niche publications, and building networks to make national advertising easier. The cost of newsprint, which had been expected to rise, instead dropped from $700 a ton in 1996 to $500 a ton. Even the anticipated postal increases were delayed until 1998.

      Although circulation remained stagnant or dropped off to a small extent, this was often offset by increases in the prices of newspapers. In some instances the papers themselves chose to stop distributing in outlying areas.

      Day in and day out, sports stories remained the most popular news events. Among the trends that became more explicit in 1997 was the propensity of media moguls to purchase baseball teams. Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the News Corp., declared that sports, more than anything else, attracted subscribers. In Great Britain sports routinely constituted 23% of news coverage.

      The New York Times made itself over in 1997. No longer the "Old Gray Lady," the newspaper moved to full-colour production in September. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, chairman and chief executive of the New York Times Co., retired in October, passing the leadership of the company to his son Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., already the publisher of the paper. The elder Sulzberger stated that his biggest news decision came in 1971 when he decided to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam War. That resulted in the Supreme Court's ruling that upheld a newspaper's right to publish free of a government's prior restraint.

      The Wall Street Journal began publication of a WSJ Special Edition in German. The weekly edition appeared in Der Tagesspiegel, a Berlin newspaper. Published in 11 languages, The Wall Street Journal by 1997 was being sold in 28 countries.

      The New York Daily News, then under the leadership of Pete Hamill, created an immigration desk in order to cover the city's various ethnic groups. The industry trend toward immigrant coverage was an attempt to gain new readers for mainstream papers and also to provide papers with access to news stories in different communities.

      Still ethnic in any language, the Forward marked its 100th anniversary during the year. Begun as a Yiddish daily that could speak to the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in their own language about life in the U.S., the Forward by 1997 had become a weekly published in three separate editions in three languages—Yiddish, directed toward its original audience; Russian, for more recent immigrants; and English.

      With few independent papers standing alone, the industry trend of larger chains' buying smaller chains continued. Knight-Ridder, Inc., purchased the Kansas City (Mo.) Star, the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram, and two smaller papers from the Disney Co. for $1,650,000,000. Second in size only to the Gannett chain, Knight-Ridder moved against the trend toward diversification into other media. It had sold its broadcast units in 1989 and its share in a cable system in 1996 and planned to sell its on-line information services. The strategy of clustering groups of papers to generate more revenue was exemplified by Conrad Black's expansion in the Chicago area. With the addition of the Gary (Ind.) Post-Tribune, Black owned the Chicago Sun-Times, Daily Southtown, Star Newspapers, and the Pioneer Press chain of weeklies for a total of at least 68 papers in the metropolitan area.

      While ever-fewer U.S. cities offered more than one daily newspaper, San Juan, P.R., grew to a six-daily city. During the year each of the three existing papers expanded to launch a new morning paper. The San Juan Star, the only English-language daily, launched a Spanish version; El Nuevo Dia offered Primera Hora; and El Vocero produced El Nuevo Mundo.

      In a lawsuit brought by U.S. freelance writers that challenged the practice of newspaper and magazine publishers' reproducing their articles in electronic databases and on CD-ROMs without the writers' permission or additional payment, a U.S. District Court judge ruled against the authors. The judge noted that "copyright law may not have kept pace with today's technology" and that congressional legislation might be necessary. A similar case involving the Canadian Copyright Act was filed by writers in Canada but at the year's end had not been decided.

      Construction began in Bloomfield, Mo., of a museum for Stars and Stripes, the nation's paper for those in military service. The paper was first published in 1861 by Union troops during the U.S. Civil War. It was revived during World War I, was reborn in World War II, and since then had been published continuously.

ANNE ROBY

Magazines

      The World Trade Organization in January 1997 ruled that Canada could not try to ban American magazines by imposing an 80% tax on split-run editions, those in which U.S. titles are reprinted in Canada with a few pages of Canadian content added in order to attract Canadian advertising. Canadian publishers had argued that the U.S. titles were a form of dumping—selling foreign products at less than their actual cost—since the costs of production had been covered in the American market. An appeal panel in July again turned down the tax and also overturned a postal rate subsidy for Canadian magazines. Almost half the magazines circulated in Canada and some 80% of those on newsstands were American, and the Canadian government's efforts to protect its own industry were viewed by some as protecting the cultural sector from Americanization. And, as the Globe and Mail reported, "For Canadians, culture is a nation-building exercise. In the United States, it is simply an enormous industry."

      Cultural differences showed up in a different way in Great Britain. Even as the American magazine Wired won a National Magazine award for general excellence, the British edition ceased publication. Such British computer magazines as Loaded, .net, Internet, and Stuff thrived by offering practical, factual consumer information. Wired's revolutionary rhetoric and its brand of pop futurism did not set well with the British, who mostly wanted to know how the new technology worked. The Guardian noted that "U.S.-style digital elitism was out of place in a very different British magazine culture."

      Founded in 1947, the German magazine Der Spiegel marked its 50th year of publication. (SeeSidebar (Der Spiegel at 50 ).) Brazil introduced Brazil Raca, the country's first magazine directed toward people of colour. Its first run of 250,000 copies sold out in two days. Articles focused on such topics as mixed marriages and job discrimination along with profiles of successful black Brazilians.

      The World Wide Web offered an ever-growing number of newspapers and magazines on-line. While many of the sites were free to all, some charged for information or, in some cases, offered only brief teasers, with most of their content protected by firewalls. The leading U.S. newspapers, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, charged nothing. The Journal set two tiers of fees for access, depending on whether one already subscribed to the print edition. Britain's The Economist allowed subscribers to access back editions, using codes on its mailing labels. The Medline database, which offered medical articles from around the world, announced that its information would be shared freely with all. How long the idea of free flow of information across the Web would prevail remained a question.

      The American magazine industry seemed to offer something for everyone in 1997. Capitalizing on the interest in sports, three new entries for women were launched. Time-Warner published two trial issues of Sports Illustrated Women/Sport, the first in April. Copies were sent to all the women's names on the subscription list of Sports Illustrated. The new magazine, like its counterpart for men, was tailored to the young adult who was more likely to be a spectator than a participant in sports. Jump, launched by Weider Publications in August, was designed to appeal to teenage girls. Sports for Women, introduced by Condé Nast in September, was directed toward the sports participant or sports-minded woman of any age.

      Old favourites expanded in foreign editions to new markets. Overseas editions of Cosmopolitan appeared for the first time in Italy, Turkey, Russia, Hong Kong, and Japan. With 33 Cosmopolitan editions, the Hearst Corp. expected that international profits would account for 50% of the magazine's earnings within a few years, double the current 25%. Condé Nast Traveler started a British edition, titled Traveller, in October. Reader's Digest during the year published 48 overseas editions in 19 languages; they were sold to 27 million readers, nearly double the magazine's 15 million U.S. readers. In one major change the magazine began selling space on its back cover in an effort to increase advertising sales.

      Nowhere was change more evident than at the National Geographic Society. Beginning in 1888, National Geographic published long, leisurely articles that might take months or even years to develop. By 1997, however, "having the commitment to wait 21 days for a gorilla to take a bath" had given way to more and shorter articles. The society became a for-profit organization and began exploring other media, including full-length feature films, cable and television broadcasting, and CD-ROMs.

      Highly specialized niche magazines continued to grow. No matter what one's interest might be, it seemed almost certain that there was a magazine devoted to it, especially in such fields as health and computers. ) (Computers and Information Systems )

ANNE ROBY

Book Publishing

      The global book market continued its process of consolidation in 1997. A notable deal involved Pearson PLC, which bought Putnam Berkley for $336 million from MCA, the media group controlled by Seagram, and thereby made Pearson's Penguin subsidiary the second largest English-language trade-book publisher in the world. Reed Elsevier was particularly intent upon restructuring with a view to specializing in a limited number of markets. To this end it bought Tolley Publishing from Thomson Corp. at the end of January and promptly followed this up by selling to Random House for approximately $20 million the trade-book division of Reed Books, which included such long-established imprints as William Heinemann, Secker & Warburg, and Methuen. On a somewhat smaller scale, in April the leading Swiss art and architecture publisher BirkhŠuser acquired a substantial stake in Princeton Architectural Press of the U.S.; Penguin bought the Victor Gollancz children's list from Cassell; and the German publishers Econ and List and Südwest Verlag GmbH agreed to merge.

      The annual output of new titles and reprints in Great Britain exceeded 100,000 for the first time. This was accompanied, predictably, by a sharp increase in returns as well as reports of widespread financial difficulties among publishers.

      There were further repercussions from the European Union Directive that in January 1996 had extended the duration of copyrights to the life of the author plus 70 years. Under Britain's Duration of Copyrights and Rights in Performances Regulations, for example, publishers could do anything with copyrighted works as long as they served notice and paid reasonable royalties to the authors. In March Penguin announced that it had agreed to pay substantial royalties to deceased authors' estates, but Oxford University Press and Wordsworth claimed to be exempt from payment of royalties on works for which they had "existing arrangements" before January 1996.

      The multimedia scene remained confused, and there were no signs of European collaboration to compete with the U.S. In Britain multimedia CD prices were falling, and many publishers were leaving the business, but those that remained were publishing more titles as booksellers became more receptive. Restructuring was evident elsewhere in Europe. In Germany, Bertelsmann closed down B Electronic Publishing at the end of 1996 after only six months in existence, and in May 1997 the Holtzbrinck group acquired from Burda a majority stake in the loss-making German CD-ROM publisher Navigo Multimedia. The intention was to merge it with Systhema.

      Publishers in France encountered difficult trading conditions for the third consecutive year. According to the French Publishers' Association, unit sales had not declined but the average price had fallen, which indicated that the public was willing to wait for cheap editions to appear before buying. In May, Maxi-Livres/Profrance, a publisher, distributor, and bargain bookseller previously thought of as highly successful, collapsed suddenly. In contrast, Hachette Livre prospered after acquiring strategic minority interests in Anne Carriere, Michel Lafon/Ramsay, and Mille et Une Nuits.

      Worldwide exports of English-language texts, especially those in the educational field, continued to be buoyant and were likely to remain so because information systems and computers normally use English. (See English-Language Imperialism. (English Language Imperialism )) European publishers were, nevertheless, trying to break into new markets. For the first time in China, Bertelsmann acquired a 49% stake in a publishing joint venture with Shanghai Scientific and Technical Publishers and launched a book club.

      A fire at the Calcutta Book Fair in February destroyed hundreds of stands set up by small Bengali publishers who normally did half their annual business there. Few of them were insured.

PETER J. CURWEN

      Janet Dailey, author of 93 romance novels that had sold 200 million copies in 98 countries and 19 languages, shocked her fans in August when she admitted to having plagiarized the work of Nora Roberts, also a best-selling romance writer. In May a reader noticed the similarities between two of the authors' novels and posted her findings electronically on America Online, where Roberts saw them. When confronted, Dailey admitted guilt and added that she had purloined prose from two other Roberts novels as well. Roberts announced her intention to sue Dailey for copyright infringement, adding that any money she won would be donated to Literacy Volunteers of America. She claimed to have discovered plagiarized passages in six of Dailey's novels.

      Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative writer, also had his professional behaviour called into question when it was revealed late in the year that some of the documents he was planning to use in his book The Dark Side of Camelot, scheduled to be released shortly thereafter, were fake. The documents contained alleged proof that U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy had annulled a first marriage, had contact with Mafia mobster Sam Giancana, and agreed to bribe actress Marilyn Monroe to be quiet about their purported affair. ABC-TV's newsmagazine "20/20" revealed that some of the documents were forgeries. Hersh claimed that he knew this and had decided not to use them, a statement some questioned, since he had already been given $2 million for the rights to develop a documentary based on the material. Little, Brown, the publisher, proceeded with the November publication, minus the questionable passages.

      HarperCollins came in for its share of criticism when it announced in June that it was canceling 106 books that it had planned to publish, 36 of which were ready for publication and had been featured in the fall catalog. Anthea Disney, HarperCollins president, said the decision was not a financial one but based on her need to "refocus" the company. HarperCollins had a poor financial year, with earnings for fiscal 1997 down 60% as of March. The authors of the canceled books were not required to return their advances and would be paid in full for those that were outstanding. In September HarperCollins' parent organization, News Corp., announced that HarperCollins and the corporation's U.S. magazine and on-line publishing divisions would be combined into the News America Publishing Group.

      The year was also notable for the "Oprah effect." Television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey began an on-air Book Club on her successful show. (See Sidebar (Der Spiegel at 50 ).)

      The 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to Steven Millhauser for Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (Crown), and Richard Kluger won the general nonfiction prize with Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War (Alfred A. Knopf). The National Book Award for fiction went to Charles Frazier for Cold Mountain (Atlantic Monthly Press), and the award for nonfiction went to Joseph Ellis for American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (Alfred A. Knopf). Fiction best-sellers for 1996, as reported by Publishers Weekly, were The Runaway Jury by John Grisham (2,775,000 copies), Executive Orders by Tom Clancy (2,371,602), and Desperation by Stephen King (1,542,077). Nonfiction best-sellers were Make the Connection by Oprah Winfrey and Bob Greene (2,302,697), Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray (1,485,089), and The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams (1,319,507). Total book sales in the U.S. increased 4% in 1996 to more than $20 billion.

BETH LEVINE

      See also Literature .

      This article updates publishing (publishing, history of).

▪ 1997

Introduction

TELEVISION

      The television industry focused its plans for expansion on digital pay television in 1996. Old players and relative newcomers formed partnerships that were ostensibly aimed at sharing digital-TV development costs. In the U.S., cable TV stocks foundered despite a marked increase in subscribers to basic cable.

Organization.

      Europe's biggest pay-TV operators—France's Canal Plus SA, British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) Group PLC, and Germany's Bertelsmann AG—aligned forces. BSkyB later withdrew and joined Germany's Kirch Group. Canal Plus acquired Nethold NV, a pay-TV venture in The Netherlands, to create one of the largest television companies, serving 8.5 million subscribers in France, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, the Benelux countries, and Germany. Nethold's parent companies, Richemont SA of Switzerland and MIH Holdings Ltd. of South Africa, acquired 6.1 million shares of Canal Plus and $45 million. MIH retained former Nethold operations in South Africa, the Middle East, Greece, and Cyprus.

      Canal Plus and Nethold signed an agreement with DirecTV, a subsidiary of General Motors Corp.'s Hughes Electronics Group, and with Grupo Prisa (Spain) and Cisneros Group (Venezuela) to offer digital TV to Spain and Venezuela. Galaxy Latin America was launched in both Brazil and Mexico.

      Nethold NV's Benelux unit merged with TeleSelect, a joint pay-TV venture of two leading operators of cable television networks, Philips Electronics NV and Royal PTT Nederland NV. Together the alliance claimed a near monopoly of pay-TV in The Netherlands. PTT Nederland, the parent company of Casema BV, was the largest cable-TV operator, with access to 60% of Dutch households. Philips Electronics, together with United International Holdings Inc. of Denver, Colo., owned UPC, the Amsterdam-based cable operator in The Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, and Israel.

      Bertelsmann and Deutsche Telekom AG pulled out of Multimedia Betriebs GmbH digital pay-TV consortium. Other members were Canal Plus, German commercial broadcaster RTL, and public broadcasters ARD and ZDF. The rival Kirch Group began broadcasting digital pay-TV by satellite in July. Deutsche Telekom, a state-run telephone utility with a monopoly of the cable TV infrastructure, emerged as Europe's single largest broadcaster by becoming an independent distributor of digital-TV programs.

      Bertelsmann remained Europe's largest free-TV broadcaster by merging with Compagnie Luxembourgeoise pour la Télédiffusion SA (CLT). The German Federal Cartel Office referred the Bertelsmann-CLT pact to the European Commission, which had blocked other mergers—among them, the CLT, Endemol Entertainment BV, and VNU NV (a Dutch publisher) merger; the merger between Deutsche Telekom AG, Kirch Group, and Bertelsmann to provide cable TV in Germany; and the Nordic Satellite Distribution alliance. CLT later pulled out of its plans with Bertelsmann to develop the German Club RTL channel into a digital pay-TV channel, deciding to focus instead on Premiere, another pay-TV venture.

      Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was tried for corruption on January 17 in Milan. The owner of Fininvest (which included three TV networks and several publications), Berlusconi was accused of having bribed members of the Italian financial police in order to avoid tax inspection.

      Hungary's media law, passed in December 1995 after four years of political dispute, paved the way for the privatization of two national TV stations. According to the regulatory body, Orszagos Radio es Televizio Testulet (ORTT), only consortia were to bid, no single company would be allowed more than a 49% stake, and Hungarians would hold a minimum of 26%. Luxembourg's CLT expressed interest in the prospective acquisition, having already started TV stations in Poland and Finland.

      Malaysia's Measat Broadcast Network Systems began operating 22 TV channels and 8 radio channels that could be received via a 60-cm (2-ft)-diameter satellite dish. The Broadcasting Act of 1988 needed an amendment to exempt the Measat satellite dishes from the general ban on such dishes. On July 26 three-year-old Indovision pay-TV began operating under StarTV management following an agreement between Rupert Murdoch and Indovision-owner Peter Gontha in 1995 to launch 15 channels, including several in the Bahasa Indonesian language. Early in 1996 Sir Run Run Shaw, China's most famous filmmaker, sold 6.9% of Hong Kong Television Broadcasts (TVB) Ltd. to British Pearson PLC for $1,290,000,000.

      On February 8 U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton signed into law the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The first major rewrite of communications law since 1934, the law would permit, among other things, cable TV companies and local telephone companies to compete with one another in offering services. The president and the congressional authors of the measure promised that such competition would yield lower prices, innovative services, and thousands of new high-paying jobs.

      At the year's end, the promises accompanying the act had not been fulfilled. Telephone and cable companies, which had claimed to be eager to explore new frontiers, discovered significant technological, regulatory, and financial obstacles. Rather than explore possibilities in the telecommunications industry, cable companies spent much of the year looking over their shoulders at direct broadcast satellite (DBS) companies. In May Denver-based EchoStar Communications Corp. joined DirecTV and United States Satellite Broadcasting in offering satellite-to-home TV, an alternative to cable that required a 46-cm (18-in) "dish" antenna and satellite receiver. EchoStar entered the market as a low-cost option, offering dishes for $199 (plus installation) and $19.95 a month for the basic programming package.

      Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and long-distance giant MCI forged yet another DBS venture. ASkyB, as they dubbed their service, would be available in the late 1990s. To make the service more attractive, ASkyB planned to offer not only the usual lineup of cable programming but also local broadcast signals.

      Partly because of the DBS competition, cable had a miserable year on the stock market. A $100 investment in leading cable stocks on January 1 was worth just $100.89 on November 1, according to the Bloomberg Cable Index. To resuscitate the stocks, cable executives gave assurances that they would follow through with promises to introduce digital-TV technology and high-speed data modems with many of their systems. Digital TV would close the gap with DBS by making room for additional channels and improving the quality of their pictures. With computer owners demanding faster access to the Internet, the modems had the potential to be the lucrative new business cable companies had long sought.

      There were also during the year an increase in the number of basic cable subscribers, a loosening of federal rate regulations, and increased advertising revenue in the cable industry. According to the Nielsen ratings, cable subscribership rose 2.7% between January and November, topping off at 67 million homes—69% of all TV homes. The growth occurred despite an estimated 7% increase in cable rates. The additional subscribers and higher rates combined to drive up cable subscription revenue nearly 9% to $23.7 billion. The Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau gave cable investors hope by projecting that cable advertising sales would top $6 billion for 1996, up 13% from the previous year's $5.3 billion.

      Broadcast TV had a solid year as revenue totaled nearly $35 billion, up 8% over 1995. Taking advantage of relaxed ownership limits in the Telecommunications Act, Murdoch's Fox Broadcasting cut the year's biggest station deal when it purchased the New World Communications Group, Inc., for $2.5 billion. With New World's 10 stations, Fox's portfolio increased to 20 stations and its reach to more than 40% of all homes with TVs, an industry high. Reaching 32% of all TV homes, Westinghouse/CBS was the second largest station group.

      Complaints about TV programming prompted the federal government to regulate on-screen violence and to mandate educational programs for children. Congressional Democrats inserted a provision in the 1996 Telecommunications Act that required inclusion of so-called V-chip technology in all TV sets within three years. The V-chip would enable parents to adjust their TV sets to black out particular programming. In December the networks announced a rating system—similar to the one used for movies—that they planned to start using early in 1997. The ratings were: TV-Y, suitable for all children; TV-Y7, designed for children 7 and above; TV-G, for general audience; TV-PG, parental guidance suggested; TV-14, parents strongly cautioned; and TV-M, mature audience only.

      The Clinton administration played a key role in ensuring adoption of Federal Communications Commission rules requiring that TV stations each air at least three hours of educational programming for children every week. Reed Hundt, the Clinton-appointed chairman of the FCC, pressed hard for the rules but was blocked by other commissioners sympathetic to broadcasters' complaints that the rules violated their First Amendment rights. Clinton, who favoured the rules, called for a second summit on children's TV in late July. By the time the second conference was set to begin, however, broadcasters had withdrawn their opposition, and the FCC adopted the proposal within a month.

Programming.

      NBC won the 1995-96 prime-time ratings war on the strength of its powerful Thursday night lineup, which included the season's four top-rated shows ("ER," "Seinfeld," "Friends," and "Caroline in the City"). Rounding out the 10 top-rated shows were "NFL Monday Night Football" (ABC), "Single Guy" (NBC), "Home Improvement" (ABC), "Boston Common" (NBC), "60 Minutes" (CBS), and "NYPD Blue" (ABC).

      For the season NBC posted a 11.7 rating and 19 share. ABC finished second at 10.6/18, CBS was a disappointing third (9.6/16), and Fox was fourth (7.3/12). Significantly, Fox beat CBS among the 18-49-year-olds, a key demographic group for advertisers.

      NBC also scored big during TV's usually lacklustre summer with marathon coverage of the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Ga. The games attracted record audiences, which probably justified the $456 million the network paid for the TV rights.

      The 1996-97 TV season started off in mid-September just where the 1995-96 season had ended—with NBC leading the ratings race. Through October NBC retained its prime-time lead, posting a 10.9 rating and 18 share. Although Fox continued in fourth place for the season, it boasted its first weekly win. With the help of an exciting World Series—the New York Yankees came from behind to beat the Atlanta Braves—and the debut of its much-hyped science-fiction series, "Millennium" to accompany its popular "X-Files" (see Sidebar (RADIO: The Boom of Science-Fiction TV )), Fox was the number one network for the week of October 21 (15.8/26).

      The erosion of the broadcast audience that began in the late 1970s continued at the start of the 1996-97 season. According to the Nielsen ratings, the 41 top cable networks' share of the prime-time audience during broadcasting's premiere week increased from 32 to 35. The broadcast networks posted a commensurate decline, 77 to 74.

      Cable TV's strength in the ratings was underscored at the 48th annual Emmy awards in September, where it picked up an unprecedented 26 statuettes. With 14 awards HBO was the top cable winner and the second largest overall. Only prime-time champ NBC garnered more, with 20 overall. ABC won 12 Emmys and CBS 11. Award winners from NBC included Helen Hunt from "Mad About You" (best actress, comedy) and John Lithgow from "3rd Rock from the Sun" (best actor, comedy). Dennis Franz (see BIOGRAPHIES (Franz, Dennis )), from ABC's "NYPD Blue," won for best actor in a drama; and Kathy Baker, of CBS's "Picket Fences," won for best dramatic actress. Ironically, Baker's award came after CBS had canceled the show.

      MSNBC, a joint venture between NBC and computer software powerhouse Microsoft, launched a cable news show in July in hopes of rivaling CNN. It was followed in October by Fox Cable News, an all-news entry from Rupert Murdoch.

      Broadcasters and manufacturers of TV sets had hoped the FCC would set a new technical standard for digital TV based on the so-called Grand Alliance system that they had jointly developed and presented to the agency in late 1995. The standard would permit stations to broadcast high-definition television (HDTV)—crystal-clear, wide-screen pictures with high-fidelity stereo sound—and air several additional channels with pictures similar to those achieved with current technology. In late December the industry's detailed proposal was granted FCC approval.

      The news was good for broadcasters in their efforts to secure a second channel for digital TV. Each TV station needed a second channel so that it could simultaneously air both the new digital signal and the conventional TV signal. (Not airing the conventional signals would render obsolete every TV set currently in use in the U.S.) The new Telecommunications Act required the FCC to assign each station the second channel. Some officials hoped to reverse the policy in 1997 so that broadcasters would have to pay for their extra channels.

      Sydney, Australia-based but Hong Kong-controlled Television Shopping Network (TVSN) was beamed to Japan, North and South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Philippines around the clock. TVSN would eventually extend from the Mediterranean to Hawaii and from northern Japan to New Zealand.

      Wharf Cable Ltd. opened a 24-hour shopping channel in Hong Kong in late 1996 even as it challenged Hongkong Telecom's new interactive video-on-demand (VOD) service, which included a teleshopping component. Hong Kong's Office of Telecommunications Authority (OFTA) decided that VOD—the practice of providing movies and programming to homes through telephone lines and charging a fee—would not be considered pay-TV.

      It was discovered during the year that a 1989 interview of lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto—in which he criticized the Aum Shinrikyo cult—was allegedly shown in 1996 by Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) to members of the cult responsible for the 1995 gas attack on Tokyo's subways. The lawyer, his wife, and his infant son were found dead several months after the attack.

      The Roman Catholic Church activated its own cable TV channel, Faith Asian Network (FAN), on Thai Sky satellite August 15. Beamed to Southeast Asia, South Korea, Japan, China, and India, FAN began with broadcasts in the Thai language but planned to eventually broadcast multiple audio channels that would provide the information in other languages.

      A 10-year contract between the U.S.-based satellite operator PanAmSat Corp. and China Central Television (CCTV), the country's main broadcaster, was scheduled to provide six digital channels of programming to be broadcast to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, in addition to Asia and North America.

      In Jakarta, Indon., a proposed law would allow private TV networks to broadcast news subject to government censorship. The proposal also would require all TV stations to slash imported program content to 20% of total airtime. The government advocated a large dose of local programs to prevent TV stations from becoming "trumpets of foreign interests." The imam (high priest) of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, Sheikh 'Abd ar-Rahman as-Sudeiss, marked the end of the annual Muslim pilgrimage with a veiled criticism of "the cultural, intellectual and moral invasion" by Western culture via satellite TV received in Islamic countries.

      In Mexico, Televisa's telenovelas, tearjerkers that were dubbed and sold to 100 countries, accounted for 6% of the company's total revenues ($1,380,000,000). The most popular telenovela in Asia was "Marimar," led by actress-singer Thalía (Ariadna Sodi Miranda) and Eduardo Capetillo. The show's popularity, along with its female lead's star power, was displayed in a concert on September 21 in Manila.

      The Cartoon Network and Children's Television Workshop developed "Big Bag," a weekly preschool program without commercial interruption that aired first in the Philippines on September 7. The Philippines' Department of Education, Culture, and Sports (DECS) encouraged both city and municipal mayors in the national capital region to install TV monitors in public elementary-school classrooms to propagate TV-assisted instruction. TV sets were donated by ABS-CBN, producers of some of the children's programs that had been made mandatory viewing.

      County Cork, Ireland's premiere recording studio, invested in state-of-the-art technology for dubbing programs to provide materials to the new Irish-language TV station, Teilifis na Gaeilge. Sulan Studios was the first studio in Ireland to provide systems that allowed music and dialogue to be mixed, matched, and blended.

      Carlton Communications, Great Britain's largest commercial TV company, had new stations in France, India, and Singapore and gained entry into British cable TV during 1996. Carlton and Pearson PLC were partners in a new Indian satellite-TV venture. Granada Group PLC teamed up with BSkyB to launch eight new satellite channels, including Granada Gold Plus, which offered such vintage shows as "Coronation Street," a 35-year-old soap opera that pulled top ratings. Bloomberg International Television introduced a French-language version on September 11.

      ESPN debuted a 24-hour sports news network, and BSkyB added to its two existing sports channels with a third. Digitales Fernsehen 1 (DF1), a satellite company jointly owned by Kirch and BSkyB, won the rights to broadcast Formula One automobile racing.

      Italy's Telepiu launched digital satellite TV in February and offered viewers live matches between top teams in the Italian soccer leagues. Early in July Kirch Group spent $2.2 billion for the world's most prized soccer broadcasting rights: the World Cup finals in 2002 and 2006. The only stipulation was that the games were to be aired on "free" TV.

      Similarly, the International Olympic Committee turned down a $2 billion bid from Murdoch's News Corporation for European broadcasting rights to the Olympic Games between 2000 and 2008 in favour of a lower bid from a group of public broadcasters.

Technology.

      Toshiba Corp.'s new wide-screen TV sets and tuners were formatted to be compatible with Japan's interactive broadcasting system. Mitsubishi Electric Corp. introduced 71-cm (28-in) Diamond Web Internet TVs at $2,500 each.

      Compaq Computer Corp. and Thomson Consumer Electronics, a unit of Thomson SA (France), decided to develop jointly a combination PC/TV that would be completed during the first half of 1997. Also anticipated for 1997 were Philips Electronics NV's flat-screened TVs, which could be hung from a wall like a painting.

      Europe's biggest digital-TV companies agreed before the European Commission to integrate their decoder technologies so that subscribers could receive programs broadcast by rival companies. The Commission had the power to make a common interface mandatory under a European Union directive.

RADIO

      Irish tycoon Tony O'Reilly, chairman of H.J. Heinz Co., bought 41 of New Zealand's commercial radio stations during 1996 for New Zealand Radio Network, a consortium dominated by his business interests. The Maori Council claimed ownership of the stations, however, on the basis of the country's founding Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840. The High Court rejected an injunction to halt the sale, but the council would have the opportunity to appeal.

      Philippine broadcast network GMA posted a record when its flagship AM radio station, DZBB Radyo Bisig Bayan, became a finalist in the New York Festival's 1996 international radio competition. A total of 1,398 entries from 31 countries participated. DZBB's coverage of the 10th anniversary of the People Power Revolution, titled "Salubungan Meeting," was named a finalist for best ongoing news story.

      Hutchison Telecom, British telecommunications arm of Hutchison Whampoa, sought to heighten the company's profile—especially for its fast-growing Orange mobile phone network—by spending £3 million in a sponsorship deal over the next three years with Virgin Radio, the national network owned by British entrepreneur Richard Branson. BBC World Service, which had an audience of 140 million listeners a week (twice that of its nearest competitor, Voice of America), had its capital budget chopped by the British Foreign Office. John Birt, director-general of the BBC, announced the reorganization of World Service, with its news-gathering operations integrated into the rest of the BBC.

      By significantly relaxing radio ownership restrictions in the U.S., the 1996 Telecommunications Act touched off a frenzy of buying and selling as a handful of publicly traded companies competed to outbid one another for prime radio stations. The biggest deal of the year was Westinghouse/CBS's $4.9 billion bid for New York-based Infinity Broadcasting. Counting the Infinity stations, Westinghouse/CBS gained ownership of 83 stations in 15 markets. Other aggressively acquisitive companies included Clear Channel Communications, Jacor Communications, American Radio Systems, and Evergreen Media. Overall, the more than 10,200 commercial radio stations reaped nearly $12 billion in revenues in 1996, up 6% from 1995.

      The market for radio stations began to cool in the fall, owing mostly to a vigilant U.S. Department of Justice. Cheered on by advertisers and small radio groups, the department imposed its own local ownership cap. In examining proposed radio markets, the department made clear that no company could control more than 50% of the radio advertising revenue in a given market, regardless of how many stations the law said it could own.

      The FCC reprimanded Howard Stern, fining a radio station in Richmond, Va., $10,000 for airing his nationally syndicated morning show. The agency found Stern's explicit sex talk "patently offensive." Infinity Broadcasting, the show's owner, had claimed that Stern was "cleaning up his act" when it agreed to pay the government $1.7 million in 1995 to settle indecency fines, levied when FCC Chairman Alfred Sikes led a crackdown on indecent radio.

      Country music was again the most ubiquitous radio format. According to the Wall Street Journal's October 1996 count, 2,525 commercial stations claimed country as their primary format. Adult contemporary was the second most popular (1,572 stations), with news/talk a close third (1,272). Other established formats splintered as stations searched desperately for niche markets. Evergreen Media's WKTU dominated the FM band in New York with a disco format that traced its ancestry to the 1970s.

      (RAMONA MONETTE S. FLORES; HARRY A. JESSEL; LAWRENCE B. TAISHOFF)

Amateur Radio.

      Starting in July, thousands of applications poured into the FCC to request new "vanity" calls—the alphanumerics that ham operators use to identify themselves on air. For the first time, ham operators could pick and choose their calls the same way drivers could choose their license plates. Permitted to apply first were those operators who were requesting calls that they or members of their family had previously held.

      The American Radio Relay League (ARRL), based in Newington, Conn., encouraged hams to flood the FCC with letters protesting another grab for their radio frequencies. The threat came from applicants for a new class of low-orbiting satellites. ARRL officials also voiced concern about federal legislation that would permit the FCC to auction off a small piece of the amateur spectrum in 1997.

      The FCC estimated that in 1996 there were more than two million hams worldwide, with 708,000 licensed operators in the U.S. Hams in New York and New Jersey helped in the recovery efforts following the crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island in July. The ARRL reported that some 125 operators contributed 2,500 hours. President Clinton recognized amateur radio in a letter written for the annual simulated emergency tests in October. Wrote the president, "Ham radio operators have helped to make our world a true global village." (HARRY A. JESSEL; LAWRENCE B. TAISHOFF)

      See also Business and Industry Review: Advertising (Business and Industry Review ); Telecommunications (Business and Industry Review ); Performing Arts: Motion Pictures (Performing Arts ); Music (Performing Arts ).

      This article updates broadcasting.

NEWSPAPERS

      There were many issues affecting international print media, including newspapers, in 1996. One issue in Asia was the matter of creating a new centre for printing. The Subic Bay Freeport Zone in the Philippines was slated to become an Asian centre. The location was seen as a good one because of the well-developed infrastructure, low labour costs, strategic location, and availability of skilled English-speaking workers. The Asian Wall Street Journal, being printed in Kuala Lumpur, claimed to be the first regional newspaper to print in Malaysia. A new English-language business daily, Asia Times, produced by Sondhi Limthongkul, the Thai chairman of Manager Media Group, competed regionally with the Asian Wall Street Journal.

      Competition also spawned collaboration between media. In Japan the newspaper Sankei Shimbun and the Fuji Television Network launched an electronic news service. The Dutch newspapers De Telegraaf and De Volkskrant joined NRC Handelsblad on the Internet. In the U.K. the Reed Elsevier Group created an interactive multimedia television listings guide, TV Times, which included preview clips from major broadcast and satellite channels.

      Electronic projects included AOL Europa, a joint venture between Bertelsmann and America Online to provide newspapers and magazines to European customers. Included were the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror, The Sporting Life, The Independent and the Independent on Sunday, as well as the magazines GQ and Vogue. German AOL subscribers also received the magazines Stern and Geo, while French subscribers received La Tribune Desfossés and the magazines Le Nouvel Observateur and Mieux Vivre Votre Argent. The U.K. service was launched with Mirror Group Newspapers, Newspaper Publishing, and Condé Nast Publications.

      In South Africa new print products were being launched, existing titles upgraded, and cover prices raised. Independent Newspapers of Ireland acquired 58% of Argus Newspapers, the biggest publisher of English-language daily newspapers in South Africa.

      The international media continued to compete with domestic media. The shift to pan-European newspapers, such as the International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal Europe, and the European, which targeted an upscale business elite, might not be as thorough in some respects as the domestic media, but they did provide a global environment for international advertisers. France, which advocated a stronger domestic market, complained about the expansion of international media empires. The opposite was true for Australia, however, where conservatives wanted to liberalize laws barring TV owners from holding more than 15% of a newspaper. Such a relaxation of cross-media and foreign-ownership rules would result in new companies entering the Australian market, where foreign stakes in newspapers had earlier been assessed on a case-by-case basis.

      In Hungary a new law provided for partial privatization, and the state-owned national newspaper, Magyar Nemzet, was put up for sale. Changes in the law in Greece would force the media to publish rate cards, including discount combinations and commissions, which would encourage foreign competition. In Germany laws governing competition were challenged by Burda and Springer.

      Price cutting, the rising cost of newsprint, fear of inflation, and high unemployment reduced the print market in Italy. In the U.K. these same factors closed Rupert Murdoch's Today, and in France Le Nouveau Dimanche suspended publication. Pravda, which had reflected communist and Soviet thought since 1912, ceased publication in July. Two Chinese-language dailies, the Express and the United Daily News, closed.

      Sweden announced plans to launch a newspaper in Poland, to be called Pulse, a variation of the parent newspaper, Dagens Industri. An English-language daily, the Peninsula, was being launched in Qatar by Da ash-Sharq, which also published an Arabic daily, ash-Sharq. The Peninsula would have a home-delivery system, a first for Qatar. (LEARA D. RHODES)

      After a pummeling in 1995, the U.S. newspaper industry improved in 1996. There were no major newspaper closings during the year, and much of the underlying economic news was good. The bitter 17-month strike at Knight-Ridder's Detroit (Mich.) Free Press and Gannett's Detroit News continued in 1996, however. Both companies, which published the two papers through a joint operating agreement, had prepared well for the strike and held their hard line with the unions, even though circulation dropped. The Thomson Corp. sold more of its U.S. newspaper holdings.

      According to the Newspaper Association of America, total advertising expenditures for the first three quarters of 1996 grew by 6.2% over the same period in 1995, and total advertising revenue grew by $2 billion, to $27 billion, in the same period. The price of newsprint, which had risen to a high of $750 per metric ton at the beginning of the year, was under $500 toward the end of 1996. In a major legislative victory, U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton in August signed a bill that would allow newspapers to treat most of their carriers and distributors as contractors, not employees, and thus save millions of dollars in taxes and benefits. Rising stock prices reflected these developments, although the prices represented other communications ventures as well, since most U.S. companies dominated by newspapers had been diversifying into television, radio, and other media.

      Despite their image as communications-age dinosaurs, newspapers moved to the forefront of experimentation with new modes of delivering their content. By the end of 1996, the number of U.S. newspapers delivered on-line had tripled, to nearly 175. Many of these simply repackaged their contents in an on-line format, but others added new content. Media companies also began forming a complex set of partnerships with firms like Microsoft in order to enhance their on-line packages and increase their modes of delivery.

      Meanwhile, journalists at some newspapers had become expert at adding to their print editorial product. A series in the Philadelphia Inquirer on the fate of the U.S. middle class, for example, was enhanced with additional information as well as games and quizzes related to the articles. Other journalists produced controversial investigative series. A series in the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, for example, claimed a connection between the rise of crack cocaine in California in the 1980s and dealers linked to the Contra rebels who, supervised by the CIA, had fought the leftist government of Nicaragua during that period. The claim was later attacked in major articles in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and New York Times.

      Another newspaper development that continued to spread in 1996 was the movement known as civic, or public, journalism. Its underlying argument was that civic life in the U.S. had deteriorated and that if citizens were no longer connected to civic life, they could not feel any connection to news. Thus, civic journalists aimed to reconnect readers to the public discussion of issues and problems. Critics, however, argued that in the attempt to solve problems, civic journalists were making news rather than merely covering it. One advocate of civic journalism, Cole Campbell, assumed a major position in 1996 when he became editor of the St. Louis (Mo.) Post-Dispatch.

      USA Today, the national Gannett daily that had often been criticized for substituting simpleminded happy talk for more sophisticated coverage, indicated that it might be taking another direction. In 1996 it formed two in-depth reporting teams and produced notable and hard-hitting journalism, particularly in a series that analyzed the rise of arson at African-American churches in the South, a complicated story that much of the rest of the press had oversimplified. The paper's management conceded that it had come to realize that the newspaper could attract occasional buyers with bright but weak journalism but that repeat readers—the ones advertisers liked—tended to want substance. Readers seemed to agree, for, according to figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations near the end of the year, USA Today had posted the largest gain of any U.S. newspaper.

      The 1996 Pulitzer Prize for public service went to the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer for a series on the environmental effects of corporate farming. Robert D. McFadden of the New York Times won the award for spot news reporting. The prize for investigative reporting went to the Orange County (Calif.) Register for a series on fraud in a local fertility clinic. Robert B. Semple, Jr., of the New York Times won the prize for editorial writing, and Bob Keeler of Newsday the prize for beat reporting for a series on a church on Long Island. Alix M. Freedman of The Wall Street Journal won the award for national reporting for articles on the U.S. tobacco industry, and David Rohde of The Christian Science Monitor the award for international reporting for his discovery of Muslim mass graves in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Rick Bragg of the New York Times received the prize for feature writing for a series of articles on the contemporary U.S. Laurie Garrett of Newsday achieved the honour for explanatory journalism for her reporting on the outbreak of the Ebola virus in Zaire. The award for commentary went to E.R. Shipp of the New York Daily News for her columns on racial and social issues, and the award for criticism to Robert Campbell, a writer on architecture at the Boston Globe. Jim Morin of the Miami (Fla.) Herald won the prize for editorial cartooning. Herb Caen, a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, was given a special award for his many years of writing on the city. (MIKE HOYT)

MAGAZINES

      Many established magazines moved into alternate language markets during 1996. In Latin America cross-border publications in Spanish included the business magazine Summa, which reprinted business news from such magazines as Forbes and The Economist. Newsweek launched a Spanish-language edition in Latin America. Dow Jones & Co. published the business magazine América Economia in Spanish and launched a Portuguese-language edition for Brazil with local publisher Editoria Meio & Mensagem.

      U.S. publications seeking international markets included Ebony and Elle. Condé Nast Publications launched Vogue in South Korea, where Hachette Filipacchi also launched its movie magazine, Premiere. A Reader's Digest edition was produced for Thailand, and Architectural Digest was launched in Italy.

      The Russian newsweekly Ponyedelnik closed in 1996 owing to cash-flow problems. A new Russian-language newsweekly, Itogi ("Summing Up"), was subsequently launched. Itogi, which was similar to Newsweek, was produced by Newsweek, Inc., and Russia's Most Group to be distributed in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

      In the Czech Republic a thriving new trade press launched more than 20 titles, ranging from Logistika ("Logistics"), a trucking and warehousing magazine, to Zdravotnicke noviny, a magazine for health care workers, to Vy ("You"), which was aimed at Czech women aged 20-35.

      Some new publications in Germany included Alina, a weekly magazine targeted at women between the ages of 30 and 60, Elter Family, designed for parents with children between the ages of 3 and 15, and Men's Health, a collaboration between Motorpresse in Stuttgart and Rodale Press of the U.S. In Belgium Sport magazine was relaunched, and the news magazine Tempo returned to Indonesia after having been banned in 1994. (LEARA D. RHODES)

      The electronic revolution continued to change magazine publishing during 1996, with an estimated 4,000-5,000 full-text magazines on-line by the year's end. The best-publicized on-line title in 1996 was Microsoft's Slate—edited by Michael Kinsley, the former editor of The New Republic. The political and cultural magazine was aimed primarily at Internet users; however, there was also a 30-page paper edition. Many libraries mounted projects to provide more popular titles on-line, including the University of California libraries, whose venture, SCAN, succeeded in increasing the number of scholarly journals available through the Internet.

      Publishers on the World Wide Web faced numerous problems, particularly user hostility to subscription fees. Since many magazines were still available free of charge, only a few with special appeal succeeded in charging a user fee. There were almost as many economic casualties as new sites. Web Review, one of the best-known Internet magazines, suspended publication in May owing to a lack of financial support, but it returned in September.

      The proliferation of nonsensical articles in U.S. scholarly journals was emphasized by a parody that a University of Minnesota professor published as a genuine contribution to social-scientific thought in the summer issue of Social Text. The impenetrable hodgepodge of jargon passed the magazine's editorial board. Explaining the purpose of the hoax in the June issue of Lingua Franca, the author asked, "Why should self-indulgent nonsense . . . be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?"

      The value of market research for magazine editors was highlighted in the weekly publication The Spectator. A market survey showed that 24% of the magazine's readership felt that there was too much of a focus on sports in the publication. At the time of the study, there was no sports coverage in the periodical whatsoever.

      With the advent of desktop publishing technology, many new low-budget magazines were launched. The scores of new 1996 titles included Go, a minipostcard-size magazine with short articles on fashion, film, and music; Biblio, an overview of books and manuscripts for collectors; Searcher, a magazine for database professionals; Double Take, an impressive literary review; and George, a general-interest title for young professionals. A May New York Times survey indicated that Reader's Digest was consistently among the world's top three magazines.

      The winners of the year's National Magazine Award included Business Week for general excellence and The New Yorker for reporting and essays. For the second consecutive year, GQ won the feature-writing medal, and a newcomer, Saveur—a food magazine—gathered two awards, one for photography and the other for special-interest articles. Harper's won the fiction award.

      Marketing magazine subscriptions by means of sweepstakes in the mail did not fare as well in 1996 as it had in previous years. Publisher's Clearing House reported that new subscribers brought in by their mailings declined by an estimated 20-30%. Marketing experts believed this falloff was due to a rise in legalized gambling and general consumer boredom with sweepstakes.

      (WILLIAM A. KATZ)

BOOK PUBLISHING

      While the Net Book Agreement (NBA) all but completely collapsed in the U.K., during 1996—in part because of the threat posed by a flood of cheap U.S. titles coming from The Netherlands—Belgium, Greece, Italy, and Portugal all either strengthened existing restrictions on discounted books or considered introducing such books to their marketplaces for the first time. The Netherlands extended its temporary system for fixing prices for another 10 years. A final verdict on the status of the NBA would not be decided by the Restrictive Practices Court until January 1997.

      In the U.K. the discounting of non-Net books was more sporadic than expected, and supermarkets did not make much effort to increase market shares. As a result, few independent bookstores were forced to shut down, though publishers' profits continued to be reduced by rising paper costs, higher authors' royalties, and lower wholesale prices. Hodder Headline, for example, issued a warning about reduced profits in May, which caused its stock price to fall to just over half its value in 1995.

      Considerable restructuring took place in the U.K. during the year. In December 1995 Microsoft Corp. sold its 18% stake in Dorling Kindersley after the latter's stock value had risen nearly eightfold since 1991. In February 1996 Pearson agreed to pay $580 million for the educational publishing interests of Rupert Murdoch's HarperCollins publishing group, and in May Reader's Digest put Davis & Charles up for sale. In June CINVen, a venture capital company, acquired Routledge from the Thomson Corp. for $42 million, and Macmillan bought media tie-in publisher Boxtree. Alison and Busby was acquired by the Spanish newspaper group Editorial Prensa Iberica during July. Reed Elsevier in August expanded its legal-publishing business with the $150 million purchase of Tolley from United News and Media. Reed took its Consumer Books division off the market in March 1996, however, after failing to obtain a satisfactory price in light of the collapse of the NBA. Elsewhere in Europe, Piper Verlag of Germany acquired Malik Verlag, and Hachette of France bought Hatier, the third largest educational publisher, for an estimated 500 million francs. As a result, Hachette and Groupe de la Cité controlled 85% of the French educational book market.

      Companies such as Penguin Books built up their stock of titles converted from print to CD-ROM but found it difficult to add sufficient value to the product in order to justify a price of about $75 (with the book itself generally a free bonus). They accordingly put their multimedia activity on hold in July, only two years after the project began—as had HarperCollins in June and Reed International in October 1995. Publishers Burda of Germany and Pearson also encountered problems with electronic publishing when Europe Online filed for bankruptcy in August 1996.

      Scandal broke out in the anthropology community after Cambridge University Press decided not to publish an already accepted text on Macedonian history, fearing for the safety of its staff members in Greece. Along with three academic advisers, many writers chose to boycott the press for being too reactionary and denying the author of the manuscript the right to free speech. (PETER J. CURWEN)

      It was not surprising that in 1996, an election year, two books of a political nature took centre stage in the United States. Primary Colors (Random House), a novel whose characters were thinly disguised caricatures of Pres. Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, made a rapid climb up the New York Times best-seller list. Its long run on the list, however, was due mainly to the mystery surrounding the unknown author. Because of the amount of insider information contained in the book, the author was rumoured to be a top government official. Magazines and newspapers devoted columns to analyzing the writing patterns and use of imagery, and many hazarded guesses as to the author's true identity. New York magazine speculated that it was Joe Klein, Newsweek's political columnist, which prompted Klein to write a column denying the accusation. When a Washington Post reporter obtained a copy of the original manuscript, the newspaper had the handwriting analyzed and confirmed that the author was, indeed, Klein. The discovery set off a storm of criticism targeted at Klein, who many said had breached journalistic ethics by lying about his true identity in print.

      Hillary Clinton had her say with the January publication of her book, It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us (Simon & Schuster). Taking as its premise the African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child," Clinton discussed family issues and social policies. The book reached the number 1 spot on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list in its first week of publication. All profits from the book were donated to children's hospitals.

      Actress and novelist Joan Collins also set the publishing industry abuzz about her legal battle with Random House. The former star of television's "Dynasty" had previously published two novels with Simon & Schuster before being lured to Random House by a $4 million deal for two novels. The company had paid Collins a reported $1.3 million when she submitted her first manuscript, but it then deemed the work unpublishable and sued to recover the money. Collins countersued, demanding the full $4 million. A jury concluded that she had met the terms of her agreement by delivering the first manuscript. The decision was seen as a major victory for writers. Random House announced that it would appeal the decision.

      The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ended a 17-year investigation into publishers' pricing and promotional practices. Begun in 1979, the probe received new energy in 1982 when the American Booksellers Association (ABA) and 20 regional associations sent resolutions to Congress asking for the funding for further investigation. In 1988 six major publishers—Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hearst, Harper & Row, and Putnam Berkley—were charged with illegal pricing practices that favoured bookstore chains over independent bookstores. In 1992, although the six cited publishers agreed to modify some pricing practices, the agreements were not ratified by the full FTC. The FTC dismissed the pricing cases in September 1996 without reaching a decision about whether any of the publishers had engaged in illegal activity. The commission stated that further investigation "would not be a prudent use of scarce public resources."

      The 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to Richard Ford, author of Independence Day (Alfred A. Knopf). Tina Rosenberg won in the general nonfiction category for The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism (Random House). Fiction best-sellers for 1995, as reported by Publishers Weekly, were The Rainmaker by John Grisham (2,375,000 copies), The Lost World by Michael Crichton (1,730,691), and Five Days in Paris by Danielle Steel (1,550,000). Nonfiction best-sellers were Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray (2,196,935), My American Journey by Colin Powell with Joseph Persico (1,538,469), and Miss America by Howard Stern (1,398,880). Total book sales in the U.S. rose 5% in 1995 to $19.8 billion. The National Book Award for fiction went to Andrea Barrett for her collection of tales Ship Fever and Other Stories, for nonfiction to James Carroll for An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us, and for poetry to Hayden Carruth for Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems 1991-1995, and the newly created prize for young people's literature went to Victor Martinez for Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida. Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, received the 1996 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

      (BETH S. LEVINE)

      See also Literature .

      This article updates publishing (publishing, history of).

▪ 1996

Introduction

TELEVISION

      In much of the world, capital from new partners fueled television expansion in 1995, while governments acted against both monopolies and "foreign" incursions. In the U.S. there were mergers and buyouts, along with a relaxation of federal regulations.

Organization.

      As NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai; Japan Broadcasting Corporation) celebrated its 70th anniversary on March 22, Japan Satellite Systems (JSAT) launched a second satellite, carrying 50 digital channels. Sumitomo and Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI), of the U.S. launched Jupiter pay-TV, and Itochu, with Time Warner Inc. and US West Communications, Inc., set up Titus. Beginning in April, Rupert Murdoch's STAR Television and Turner Entertainment Networks Asia were permitted to broadcast in Japan.

      Thailand launched its third cable network in 1995, while in Australia Sydney and Melbourne were offered 25 new channels on a third pay-TV service, Foxtel (owned equally by Murdoch's News Corp. and Telstra). Earlier, Optus Vision had launched 11 cable channels that carried, like Foxtel, CNN International, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.'s entertainment and cartoon networks, and a country music channel while sharing Australian racing broadcasts and coproducing a news channel. Satellite and microwave system Australis Media Galaxy secured exclusive rights to films from Sony's Columbia/Tristar, MCA/Universal, and Paramount Pictures. Over protests the Australian Broadcasting Corporation joined pay-TV with a 24-hour news and current affairs channel and a channel for children's programs, comedy, and documentaries.

      In Taiwan, where TV advertising revenues were the third highest in the region (after Japan and South Korea), only large companies purchased programming: United Communications of the powerful Koo Group, Po-Hsin Entertainment, and Rebar Communications. India's smaller cable operators, suffering price undercutting, were bought up by more powerful players: the Hinduja group, RPG Enterprises, and Zee TV (49.9% STAR-owned). Cableview Services Pty. Ltd. started Mega TV, Malaysia's first multichannel cable television service, offering ESPN, the Discovery Channel, CNN, the Cartoon Network, and HBO. The Singapore government issued to the Walt Disney Co. the country's first private-user uplink-downlink license for communicating directly via satellite. Taiwan received Disney's first broadcast, followed by Singapore Cable Vision (SCV). Asia Business News became a 24-hour service on SCV. MTV Asia, the seventh global music TV network, inaugurated its Singapore headquarters, transmitting Mandarin and English programs to 18 million households in 30 countries.

      Italian media magnate Silvio Berlusconi sold 20% of Fininvest's Mediaset for 1.8 trillion lire to Germany's Leo Kirch (10%), South African Johann Rupert's Swiss-based Richemont group (5.9%), and King Fahd's nephew, Prince al-Walid ibn Talal of Saudi Arabia (4.1%). Another 1.8 trillion lire gave a bank consortium 20%, and a further 20% was to go into the stock market during 1996, which would leave Berlusconi with 40%. Although he won the June 11 referendum on media ownership, Berlusconi had until August 1996 to comply with the constitutional court's ruling that no single entity could own more than 20% of the country's TV market. Mediaset included three national TV channels (Canale 5, Italia 1, and Rete 4), a program library, and Publitalia advertising (with a 60% share of the country's TV ad market).

      Sixteen German states moved to permit media companies to own majority stakes in TV stations. Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia, having big media industries, insisted on allowing firms to own up to 100% of one channel, and smaller stakes in others, without exceeding 30% of the total market. Bertelsmann and France's Canal Plus bought 47.5% of Monagesque des Ondes (MDO), the manager of Monaco's family TV station TMC.

      An agreement between Télévision Française 1 (TF1) and China Central Television (CCTV), the first between China and a Western public-service channel, allowed TF1 a permanent correspondent post in Beijing and CCTV the right to buy documentaries and fiction series produced by Télédiffusion de France. Ad agency France Espace would sell advertising spots for CCTV.

      A "green book" issued by the British state secretary for national heritage and communications, Stephen Dorrell, ruled that only groups possessing less than 20% of the written press would be allowed to invest in TV, as long as these did not exceed a 15% audience share. The ruling hit Murdoch, owner of the satellite TV chain BSkyB and News Corp.'s five English newspapers, with 40% of the national circulation.

      In the U.S. in 1995, consolidation swept the TV industry. On July 31 the Walt Disney Co. announced the purchase of Capital Cities/ABC, Inc., for $18.5 billion. In the same week, Westinghouse Electric Corp., which had pioneered commercial radio broadcasting 75 years earlier at KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pa., announced a deal to buy CBS for $5.6 billion. Frustrated by his inability to buy one of the networks, Ted Turner (see BIOGRAPHIES (Turner, Ted )) merged his Turner Broadcasting System (CNN, CNN Headline News, Turner Network Television, superstation WTBS, and the Cartoon Network) with Time Warner in a deal that would net Turner shareholders more than $7 billion in Time Warner stock.

      As the year ended, Microsoft Corp. and NBC announced that they would create a new all-news cable channel to compete with CNN. Despite claims that the market could not support this new venture, it was hailed as an opportunity for Microsoft to gain access to the content it needed and a chance for General Electric Co., the parent company of NBC, to gain an effective entry to the Internet and the World Wide Web.

      Station groups also competed fiercely to buy available TV stations, which drove prices to new highs. In August longtime broadcasting executives were awed by Tribune Broadcasting's $70.5 million bid for KTTY in San Diego, Calif., and by the $207 million that Dow Jones & Co., Inc., and ITT Corp. were willing to pay for New York's WNYC-TV. Driving the consolidation were the loosening of federal ownership restrictions and the anticipated loosening of others, along with a red-hot advertising market. In the spring, advertisers ponied up a record $5.6 billion for the best spots on the networks' fall schedules. Even though the market later showed signs of softening, estimated TV broadcasting revenues in 1995 topped $30 billion, up from $29 billion in 1994.

      The U.S. House of Representatives and Senate passed sweeping telecommunications reform legislation in 1995 aimed at encouraging competition between cable and local telephone companies as well as between local and long-distance telephone companies. Work resumed on the bills in early November, with proponents hopeful that differences between the House and Senate versions could be reconciled. The administration of Pres. Bill Clinton had problems with certain provisions, however, principally those that would relax broadcast ownership restrictions and deregulate cable TV rates. Conferees agreed in December to keep the rate regulations in place for three years.

      Although its executives complained about government regulation, U.S. cable enjoyed a good year. Subscriptions grew 4.3%, to about 62.3 million homes (63.4% of all homes with TV). At the same time, rates increased 4.1%. Revenues for the year were projected to hit $26.2 billion, up nearly $2 billion from 1994. Tempering cable's good news, however, were concerns about competition. The large telephone companies continued to make plans to challenge cable for its subscribers by building parallel networks. Hoping to get a head start, Pacific Telesis Group, NYNEX, and Bell Atlantic Corp. invested heavily into "wireless cable," which delivered services to subscribers via microwave channels. To receive the service, subscribers' televisions had to be equipped with a special antenna and a set-top tuner and descrambler. At year's end it was estimated that 200 systems served more than 800,000 subscribers in the U.S.

      A more immediate threat to cable, however, was satellite-delivered pay-TV. After 16 months on the market, Hughes Electronics Corp.'s DirecTV and United States Satellite Broadcasting claimed in November that more than one million consumers had purchased the 18-inch dish and other equipment needed to subscribe. Hoping to launch a similar service, the nation's largest cable operators, led by TCI, agreed to buy the satellite channels of another company. The FCC nixed the deal, however, saying that the cable venture—Primestar Partners—would have to bid for the channels at an open auction in January 1996.

      There were two new broadcast networks in 1995, each hoping to repeat Fox's remarkable success. Both debuted in January, with abbreviated prime-time schedules. The United Paramount Network (UPN), the creation of Paramount and the Chris-Craft/United station group, offered programming on Mondays and Tuesdays. The WB Network, a partnership of Warner Bros. Inc. and the Tribune Broadcasting station group, began broadcasting on Wednesdays and added a slate of sitcoms on Sundays in the fall. UPN had the better ratings, primarily on the strength of "Star Trek: Voyager."

Programming.

      The European Commission adopted for 10 years the directive "Television sans Frontiers," which obligated general audience channels to broadcast a majority of European works. Thematic channels could opt to invest in European production by using quotas.

      France 3 and Television Suisse Romande (TSR) created the first transborder newscast. Lasting five to seven minutes, "Genève-Region" (over Suisse 4)/"Genève le journal" (France 3) was produced by eight reporters from each country and financed equally by the two stations. Chaine Metco, patterned after the U.S. Weather Channel and the Canadian Meteo Media, started giving 24-hour forecasts on TMC and Serie Club. It was the first in France entirely dedicated to weather. At the 11th Mediaville convention of satellite and cable specialists, it was announced that Arab-language programs would be allowed on cable despite tensions with Algeria.

      After a two-year negotiation, the Council Superior Audiovisual authorized Canal Plus to broadcast until the year 2000. Listed in the convention were restrictions in announcing and broadcasting films not suitable for children below 16 years of age on Wednesdays (when there was no school), Saturday mornings, and Sunday mornings. Pornographic films broadcast once a month could be rerun three times.

      CNN disappeared from Berlin's cable service, and MTV Europe also appeared to be on its way out in favour of local competitors, the NTV news channel and VIVA rock music station. Media authorities pointed to an acute shortage of frequencies caused by Deutsche Telekom's monopoly of cable infrastructure. Targeting 14-49-year-old German women, TM3 aired in August. The business news service Bloomberg LP started the 24-hour channel Bloomberg Information Television Europe to compete with CNN Business News Europe, NBC Super Channel, and Dow Jones & Co.'s European Business News over Britain's Sky Channel.

      Russian Public Television (ORT), which was 51% state-owned, dropped the twice-monthly "Meetings with Solzhenitsyn." Writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's wife, Natalya, suggested that criticism was being stifled before the parliamentary elections held on December 17. On a scale unheard of in Russia, journalists protested the March 1 killing of ORT's newly appointed executive director, Vladislav Listyev (see OBITUARIES (Listyev, Vladislav Nikolayevich )), one of Russia's most popular journalists.

      After an outcry the Romanian government rescinded its ban on tobacco advertising on TV. Women's groups forced the withdrawal of a TV ad for Malaysia's first sports car, Bufori. The ad, featuring four women in a marriage bureau, had one woman list ownership of a Bufori as a criterion for a spouse.

      AsiaSat 2's launching in late 1995 expanded the STAR movie channels' capacity to broadcast in Mandarin, Hindi, English, Bahasa Indonesia, Tagalog, Cantonese, and Japanese. A contractual dispute between STAR and Viacom resulted in MTV's pullout and Channel V's creation. Featuring rock videos by singers from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and India, the channel sent different transmissions to India and the Middle East from those to East Asia and Taiwan. MTV returned to India on Doodarshan, while the British media conglomerate Pearson (which acquired 10% of Hong Kong's Television Broadcast, TVB) took a stake in The Hindustan Times to produce Hindi-language programs.

      India's Supreme Court ruled the government's broadcasting monopoly unconstitutional on February 9. The Board of Cricket Control India had wanted to sell world broadcast rights to the 1996 World Cup to ESPN; earlier the Cricket Association of Bengal tangled with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting over another tournament. Although the constitution allowed business monopolies, broadcasting, as a means of expression, could not be monopolized.

      The big three U.S. networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) saw their share of the prime-time audience drop to an all-time low of 57% in the 1994-95 season, down four points from the previous season's 61% and three points off the previous low, of 60%, in 1992-93. The culprits were Fox, the new networks, cable's increased investment in original programming, and the O.J. Simpson trial, which was covered extensively on cable and drew huge audiences.

      ABC was the most watched network during the 1994-95 season, with a 12 rating and a 20 share, according to the A.C. Nielsen Co. (A rating was the percentage of the 95.9 million U.S. homes with TV sets, a share the percentage of TV homes with their sets on at the time of a program.) NBC came in second (11.5 rating/18 share), and CBS, which had dominated prime time for several seasons, finished third (11.1 rating/18 share). Fox was again fourth (7.7 rating/12 share), but it gained ground against the older networks, especially with the younger audiences that advertisers sought. ABC had four of the top 10 shows: "Home Improvement," "Grace Under Fire," "NFL Monday Night Football," and "NYPD Blue." In "Seinfeld" and "ER," however, NBC had the top two shows.

      The networks tried to stem their prime-time slide by introducing 42 new shows in September. Two months later, however, it appeared that the season was something of a bust. Of the newcomers, only NBC's "Caroline in the City" and "Single Guy" cracked the top 10.

      By November it was clear that David Letterman had lost his grip on the lead in late-night TV ratings. While his CBS audience drifted away, Jay Leno's fans on NBC stayed faithful. By August, Leno was regularly outscoring Letterman in the ratings.

      While NBC prepared to cover the 1996 summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, Ga., in 1996, in August it secured the TV rights to the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, Australia, and the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, Utah, for $1,270,000,000. In addition, in December NBC bought the rights to the 2004 and 2008 Summer Games, as well as the 2006 Winter Games.

      Fox, which had acquired TV rights to National Football Conference games prior to the 1994-95 season, captured a piece of major league baseball in November. Fox was to share coverage of regular and postseason baseball with NBC, ESPN, and Liberty Media through the 2000 season. Under the five-year multinetwork deal, baseball teams would divvy up $1.7 billion in network rights payments.

      Television programming became a political target in 1995. Republican presidential candidates Robert Dole and Richard Lugar made alleged excesses of TV an early campaign theme, with Dole warning in an April speech that TV was guilty of "bombarding our children with destructive messages of casual violence and even more casual sex." Three months later President Clinton called for legislation that would require every TV set to include so-called V-chip technology, allowing parents to block out programming rated as objectionable, and Congress added its support to the idea. In October former secretary of education William Bennett and Senators Sam Nunn and Joe Lieberman took aim at sensationalistic talk shows. They cited a "Jenny Jones" show that some said had prompted a murder; a male guest became so upset when another man declared his love for him during a taping of the program that he later shot and killed him. With the support of congressional Democrats and children's advocates, Reed Hundt, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called for rules requiring TV stations to air a minimum amount of children's programming. Opposed by the broadcasting industry, he was unable to persuade a majority of his fellow commissioners to adopt the requirement.

Technology.

      Europe launched its first digital satellite, Astra 1E, in 1995. Using digital compression technology in transmitting 500 channels, it gave customers using a decoder or a set-top box access to global news and sports events and services like teleshopping and telebanking. South African Multichoice Ltd.'s pay-TV Nethold started a 24-channel digital satellite service for 200 subscribers who paid for decoders. Using the Eutelsat Hot Bird l, Canal Horizons (the African version of Canal Plus) attracted 90,000 subscribers.

      Sales of Japanese TV sets with oblong screens wide enough to show films reached 1.5 million in 1994 and 3 million in 1995 and led to the issuance of specially made "extended-definition" films. Sony Corp. stopped exporting Japanese-made colour TVs by the end of 1995 because the strong yen made them too expensive overseas. Sony's production from factories in the U.S., South America, Europe, and Asia reached nine million, up 10% from 1994. Matsushita Electric, the world's largest consumer electronics firm and maker of Panasonic sets, competed with its own factories in Wales, Mexico, and Malaysia.

      This updates the article broadcasting.

RADIO

      Radio worldwide in 1995 was marked with excesses. Four days before the sovereignty referendum in Quebec, the Montreal talk show host Pierre Brassard (posing as Prime Minister Jean Chrétien) telephoned Queen Elizabeth II. The French disc jockey François Meunier was fired from Skyrock and sued by several unions for saying four times "A dead policeman is more or less good news" after announcing the assassination of Nice policeman Georges Janvier.

      Set up discreetly on Berlin's FM band since September 13, 1994, Radio France International (RFI) was officially installed on May 17, 1995. The more popular France Inter had ceased broadcasting on Dec. 31, 1994, upon the departure of Allied troops after German reunification. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), a symbol of the Cold War, moved from Munich, Germany, where it was first set up in 1951, to Prague after the U.S. Congress reduced its budget.

      In Canada, Vancouver's alternative radio station (1040 AM or 88.5 Cable FM) introduced a program featuring unusual international recordings. It was the first of its kind in Vancouver, and the Filipino journalist Mel Tobias served as its host.

      In the U.S. nationally syndicated talk shows proliferated. Among the newcomers was former New York governor Mario Cuomo, who provided a liberal counterweight to popular conservatives like Rush Limbaugh. In the wake of the bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City, Okla., in April, Pres. Bill Clinton condemned "loud and angry voices" for fostering civil unrest, and conservative talk-show hosts complained that the president was unjustly referring to them. Catching much of the flak was the Watergate conspirator who had turned radio host, G. Gordon Liddy, who told listeners that he used drawings of President and Mrs. Clinton for target practice and who discussed on the air how to shoot federal agents.

      Infinity Broadcasting agreed in September to pay the government about $1.7 million to settle a host of outstanding indecency complaints against Howard Stern. Infinity did not concede that its star was indecent, saying that it agreed to the settlement only to clear the way for the approval of station acquisitions.

      Anticipating the relaxation of federal ownership restrictions, the big radio station groups got bigger by buying up other groups. Prices also increased. In November the Spanish Broadcasting System agreed to pay $83.5 million for the New York FM station WPAT. Undergirding the rising prices was the strong advertising market, with total revenues predicted to grow 8-9% in 1995 and top $11 billion. (RAMONA MONETTE S. FLORES;

      HARRY A. JESSELL; LAWRENCE B. TAISHOFF)

      When telephone service was disrupted by the terrorist bomb that ripped apart a federal building in Oklahoma City, amateur radio operators were soon on the scene providing emergency communications. They were also on call to aid rescue workers and displaced families as a series of hurricanes battered the southeastern U.S. and the Caribbean area throughout the late summer and early fall.

      According to the American Radio Relay League, some two million people around the world—680,000 in the U.S. alone—held licenses to transmit voice or data over private noncommercial amateur channels. In the U.S. the Federal Communications Commission ruled in February that hams could choose their own call signs, but squabbles over who could apply and how to apply for the "vanity" signs held up implementation. The FCC also ruled that amateurs operating in the high-frequency band could use automatic control systems for data communications.

      (HARRY A. JESSEL; LAWRENCE B. TAISHOFF)

      See also Business and Industry Review: Advertising (Business and Industry Review ); Telecommunications (Business and Industry Review ); Performing Arts: Motion Pictures (Performing Arts ); Music (Performing Arts ).

      This updates the article broadcasting.

NEWSPAPERS

      A series of price rises for newsprint wreaked havoc in the newspaper industry worldwide in 1995. Between March and the end of the year, newsprint prices rose about 50%. It brought to an abrupt end the decade-long trend toward larger papers and special-interest supplements and encouraged a switch to more economical tabloid formats.

      One of the worst-hit companies was Rupert Murdoch's News International and its five U.K. titles (The Times, Sunday Times, Sun, News of the World, and Today). The company was forced to cut pages and print runs in March and April. Its weakest newspaper, the Labour-leaning Today, founded in 1986, was most seriously hit; it suffered a marked fall in circulation, was at one point put up for sale, and in November was closed. The rising costs resulted in the abatement of a fierce two-year price war in Britain, which had been initiated by Murdoch, and cover prices started to edge up. In August The Times was given away free for one day, courtesy of Microsoft Corp., which sponsored the entire issue to mark the launch of its Windows 95.

      The money-losing Independent, founded shortly after Today in 1986, was briefly famous for its fresh and fearless approach to reporting. By 1995, however, it had become the sickest of the British papers, and it endured another round of refinancing in March, which resulted in Tony O'Reilly's Irish Independent Newspapers group and Mirror Group Newspapers more than doubling their stakes, to 43% each. The paper was relaunched with a tabloid second section in June, but it was still below the target of 300,000 copies per day as the year ended. Its editor, Ian Hargreaves, was forced out by the two dominant owners in November.

      In such competitive markets there was an unusually large number of changes of editors during the year, as new leadership was established at The Guardian, Daily and Sunday Telegraph, Daily and Sunday Express, Daily Mirror, and News of the World. In September The Observer, which had suffered two decades of decline, was relaunched by new editor Andrew Jaspan and the new owner, the Guardian Media Group, but as the year ended it had yet to show a significant improvement in sales.

      The Thomson Corp. withdrew from the British industry by putting its Scottish newspapers up for sale, as well as its English regional newspaper chain. In November the Scotsman, flagship of the company, a morning daily famous for speaking up for Scottish interests from Edinburgh, was sold for an estimated £ 90 million to property tycoons David and Frederick Barclay. The brothers also salvaged the European, an English-language weekly founded by the late Robert Maxwell. In December Lloyd's List and Shipping Gazette, the daily paper serving the shipping industry, was sold to its staff via a management buyout by the troubled insurance market owners, Lloyd's of London.

      Ireland's debt-laden Irish Press Newspapers group, which published the Irish Press, Sunday Press, and Evening Press, was placed in liquidation. The papers stopped publication on May 26, but efforts to salvage the titles continued, unsuccessfully, until August.

      In Hong Kong the South China Morning Post suffered editorial cuts and gained a new editor, Jonathan Fenby (former editor of The Observer in London). It also dropped its "Lily Wong" cartoon strip in what some criticized as a self-censorship move in preparation for China's taking control in 1997. Murdoch struck a deal with the communist People's Daily to develop information services.

      In Singapore the International Herald Tribune was in the spotlight in the ongoing struggle over how far American news organizations were prepared to compromise with governments that rejected Western concepts of free speech. In July the paper was ordered to pay record damages of S$950,000 to Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong and to Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore's founding father and senior minister) and his son, Lee Hsien Loong, the deputy prime minister. The damages arose from an article by Philip Bowring, a former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, which suggested that the son had been appointed deputy prime minister because of his father.

      In India the English-language press, led by the Times of India, became more popular in tone in an effort to fend off competition from rapidly growing Indian-language papers. The Bombay (Mumbai)-based Audit Bureau of Circulation said that with five main titles (Times of India, Indian Express, Hindu, Hindustan Times, and Economic Times), there was a saturation of English-language papers.

      In Australia there was a buildup of pressure on the government from three media magnates, Murdoch, Kerry Packer, and Conrad Black, all seeking a relaxation in rules limiting foreign interests in Australian companies. Control of the media group John Fairfax Holdings was one of the most coveted prizes. (MAGGIE BROWN)

      Newspapers in the U.S. also were affected by the skyrocketing cost of newsprint in 1995, with some forced to take drastic measures. The Washington Post limited the amount of foreign travel by reporters and cut back on space in some sections. Other papers, including the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, laid off staffers. The New York Times raised its newsstand prices both in and out of town. Sunday magazines at papers such as the Dallas (Texas) Morning News and the Providence (R.I.) Journal were folded. USA Today cut its news space by 5%, and California's Orange County Register reduced the width of its pages.

      Houston, Texas, became the nation's largest one-newspaper city with the abrupt closing of the Houston Post. The 111-year-old paper was sold to the Hearst Corp.'s Chronicle, which immediately shut it down. There was no final commemorative issue. The Evening Sun, an 85-year-old institution in Baltimore, Md., was closed by its Los Angeles-based owner, the Times Mirror Co. Most famous as H.L. Mencken's forum for 30 years, the paper was known for its coverage of local issues and its blue-collar readership. The 10-year-old New York Newsday also closed during the year.

      The nation's largest newspaper publisher, Gannett Co., became even larger with its acquisition of Multimedia Inc. Gannett, which already owned 82 newspapers, including USA Today, would add another 11 dailies and 49 nondaily papers, increasing its circulation to more than 6.4 million a day. The purchase also allowed Gannett to expand its holdings in television and radio as well as branch out to cable TV. The newly acquired papers were located in medium to small markets, and all were in states where Gannett owned no newspapers.

      A survey found that fully half the newspapers in the U.S. were initiating or exploring the possibility of starting on-line services. Eight of the largest newspaper companies banded together to create a national network of local newspapers on-line. The participating companies were Gannett Co. Inc., Knight-Ridder Inc., Advance Publications Inc., Times Mirror Co., Tribune Co., Cox Newspapers Inc., Hearst Corp., and Washington Post Co. They collectively owned 185 daily papers with a circulation of about 20 million. The goal of the partnership was to get greater numbers of papers on-line, establishing a coast-to-coast network. Two New Hampshire dailies got a jump on the 1996 presidential election by setting up a site on the World Wide Web. Foster's Democrat in Dover and the Citizen of Laconia would cover the New Hampshire primary, offering analysis and on-line discussion between citizens and candidates.

      The Wall Street Journal added a sports page and a travel page to its Friday edition. The New York Daily News launched El Daily News, a bilingual edition published Monday through Friday. The Evening Bulletin in Providence, started in 1863 to provide late-breaking news from the Civil War front, merged with the city's morning paper, the Providence Journal. The owner of the Milwaukee (Wis.) Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel combined the two papers in April as the Journal Sentinel. In Michigan the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press continued to publish despite a strike that began in July.

      The Virgin Islands Daily News won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for public service with a 10-part series on crime and the criminal justice system. The Gannett newspaper, based on St. Thomas, had only 18 full-time editors and reporters. The prize for spot news reporting went to the staff of the Los Angeles Times. Using manual typewriters, emergency phones, and flashlights, the staff managed to publish a paper capturing the drama and devastation of the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake. Two New York Newsday reporters won the prize for investigative reporting for stories about the abuse of disability pensions by police officers. Other Pulitzers went to Washington Post reporter Leon Dash and photographer Lucian Perkins, who won for explanatory journalism for their series on a welfare family in Washington, D.C. The prize for beat reporting went to David M. Shribman of the Boston Globe for his insights on the national political scene. Tony Horwitz of the Wall Street Journal took the award for national reporting for his stories on the oppressive conditions that workers in low-wage and low-skill fields were forced to endure. For his graphic and moving coverage of the ethnic violence in Rwanda, Mark Fritz of the Associated Press won the prize for international reporting. The feature writing award went to Ron Suskind of the Wall Street Journal for a series on inner-city honours students in Washington, D.C. Jim Dwyer of New York Newsday won the prize for commentary. Margo Jefferson of the New York Times took the award for criticism. The winner for editorial cartooning was Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta (Ga.) Constitution, and the award for editorial writing went to Jeffrey Good of Florida's St. Petersburg Times for his editorials urging reform of the state probate system. The award for spot news photography went to Carol Guzy of the Washington Post for her work in Haiti, and the prize for feature photography went to the Associated Press for staff coverage of the Rwanda tragedy. (MELANIE ANNE COOPER)

      This updates the article publishing (publishing, history of).

MAGAZINES

      There was only limited growth in new magazines in 1995, with launches generally aimed at exploiting existing gaps. Wired, the U.S computer magazine, had a troubled launch in the U.K. and had to revise its format and marketing. The American magazine Men's Health, owned by Rodale, launched a customized U.K. edition, while the U.K. computer magazine company Dennis Publishing launched Maxim, also aimed at mainstream male readers. Rather than risking start-ups, large publishers such as Condé Nast sought new business by taking on contract publishing. Condé Nast set up a U.K. on-line editorial team to establish computerized versions of its products. National Magazines, the U.K. arm of the Hearst Corp., changed the editors of five of its six titles. (MAGGIE BROWN)

      Americans traveling abroad were more likely to find their favourite magazines on a European newsstand. Companies like Reader's Digest, Condé Nast, Playboy, and Hearst published their titles in more than 80 countries and more than a dozen languages. Most of the articles were generated by local editorial staffs, with translations of material that had appeared in the original American editions.

      Many U.S. newsstand magazines, including Time and Newsweek, offered both on-line and print copies in 1995. Less popular magazines, from esoteric underground titles to more than 300 scholarly and literary journals, were available only as computer journals. More items became available on the Internet, and some libraries were checking in e-journals just as they did printed journals. Publishers saw this as the beginning of what would develop into centralized information sources for periodicals. Several publishers, librarians, and editors warned, however, that the rush to go on-line often overlooked the need for careful planning for the new format. Others expressed fears that the new technologies threatened the future of all magazines, on- or off-line. There might be, such critics said, so much information available that the traditional magazine would be crowded out altogether.

      According to the Faxon Co., the prices for U.S. magazines would rise by about 15% in 1995-96. By mid-1995 the average annual price of a physics journal was $1,126, contrasted with an average price of $35.58 for a popular newsstand magazine. The hikes were caused by increases in the costs of paper and postage and by a shaky U.S. dollar. Faced with a 12% increase in postal rates as well as close to a 40% jump in paper prices, Hearst decided to control its costs by producing fewer copies, thereby reducing the number of readers; some 15 titles, from Good Housekeeping to Cosmopolitan, had their circulation cut. Other publishers were expected to follow the Hearst lead.

      Two new political magazines appeared in the U.S. in 1995: The Weekly Standard, a conservative journal edited by William Kristol and backed by Rupert Murdoch, and the liberal entertainment-oriented George, edited by John F. Kennedy, Jr., and supported by the Paris conglomerate Hachette. With all of the money behind them, both were expected at least to last out 1996. Among other new titles were Double Take, a documentary magazine with photographs introduced by the child psychiatrist Robert Coles; Civilization, a bimonthly from the Library of Congress that had a multicultural approach; and Legacy, an Afro-American history magazine published by American Heritage.

      The highest honours in the 1995 National Magazine Awards went to GQ (Gentlemen's Quarterly) for special interest and features. The general excellence award for magazines with a circulation of more than one million went to Entertainment Weekly, followed by The New Yorker (400,000-1 million) and I.D. Magazine (less than 100,000), a publication on culture and design. Among other winners were The Atlantic Monthly for reporting and The New Republic for public interest. (WILLIAM A. KATZ)

      This updates the article publishing (publishing, history of).

BOOK PUBLISHING

      The European book industry continued to suffer a period of considerable uncertainty in 1995. In the U.K. a variety of strategic responses were adopted in response to sluggish sales, the breakdown of the Net Book Agreement (NBA), rapidly increasing paper prices, and bad debts arising from the Dillons book chain receivership.

      In July Reed Elsevier offered for sale its consumer book publishing business, including the Hamlyn, Octopus, and Heinemann imprints. This reflected a decision to concentrate on the relatively profitable specialist imprints such as Butterworth and on-line information services. By contrast, Hodder Headline announced its intention to expand the number of titles published in 1995 by 55%, targeting nontraditional outlets such as supermarkets and gasoline (petrol) stations. Dorling Kindersley successfully built up its CD-ROM business, and HarperCollins restructured into two superdivisions while shedding roughly 100 staff members. Layoffs also were announced at Penguin.

      The independent publishing sector in the U.K. was again reduced in size. The largest independent, Macmillan, agreed in April to sell 65% of the company to Holtzbrinck, one of Germany's biggest publishing groups, and in July André Deutsch was bought by the VCI video group.

      The longer-term prospects for reference books and other traditional strengths of established imprints appeared to be in question as multimedia versions took their place. In 1995 the trend toward electronic publishing was apparent everywhere, with Bonnier of Sweden, for example, setting up a multimedia operation. Even the print version novel was under threat from new technology; Penguin published its first electronic version in November.

      The cult of the author began to bridge the divide between "literary" and "popular" fiction. The payment of a $750,000 advance to Martin Amis appeared to indicate a fresh impetus to market "highbrow" authors in a manner little seen since the days of Charles Dickens. A further sign of the times was the decision by the Booker Prize-nominated author Timothy Mo to publish his new novel on his own.

      Access to Dickens through libraries or cheap paperback reprints remained secure, but the same could no longer be said of H.G. Wells or George Orwell. The combination of rising paper prices and the extension of copyright protection in the European Union from 50 to 70 years looked certain to spell the end of the cheap paperback classic, of which Wordsworth Editions, which pioneered the concept in the U.K., had sold 30 million since 1992.

      Needless to say, the U.K. NBA remained constantly in the news. With investigations under way by the European Commission and the U.K. Restrictive Practices Court, Hodder Headline chose in May to discount John Le Carré's new hardback novel, Our Game. Stocked by many supermarket chains at discounts of up to 50% off the list price, the book sold well enough to induce Hodder to follow up with a new Rosamunde Pilcher novel. Hodder's determination to move to the top of the publishing industry was also reflected in its purchase of Moa Beckett of New Zealand in January for $5.3 million. (PETER J. CURWEN)

      In June 1994 the publishing community had been shocked by the ouster of Richard E. Snyder, Simon & Schuster's legendary chief executive officer, by Viacom, the company that took over Simon & Schuster's parent company, Paramount Communications, Inc. In September 1995 Snyder sought to make a comeback by acquiring a majority interest in Western Publishing, the largest children's book publisher in the U.S. The collapse of the deal in October, combined with Western's poor earnings performance, caused the company's share price to fall precipitously.

      The sensational murder trial of O.J. Simpson, the former football star who was accused of stabbing to death his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, ended with Simpson's controversial acquittal in October. The intense scrutiny propelled a number of titles. Nicole Simpson's friend Faye Resnick started the frenzy off with Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted (Dove Books), which became a national best-seller. Then Simpson himself wrote (with Larry Schiller) from his cell I Want to Tell You (Little, Brown), which also was a best-seller, though his second book, with the working title Now I Can Tell You, was unable to find a buyer even after the asking price of $6 million reportedly had been reduced by half. Raging Heart: The Intimate Story of the Tragic Marriage of O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson by Sheila Weller (Pocket Books) was published at the same time in January and rose up the best-seller lists. Barbara Cochran Berry, the ex-wife of Simpson's legal team leader, Johnnie Cochran, weighed in with Life After Johnnie Cochran: Why I Left the Sweetest-Talking, Most Successful Black Lawyer in L.A. (Basic), which accused him of physical abuse. Still to come were books on the case by noted authors who were under contract with various houses: Dominick Dunne (Crown), Joseph Bosco (Morrow), Joe McGinniss (Crown), and Jeffrey Toobin (Random House). Los Angeles prosecutor Marcia Clark sold world rights to her memoir to Viking for $4.2 million, while HarperCollins bought the memoir of Clark's legal partner Christopher Darden for $1.3 million.

      Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (see BIOGRAPHIES (Gingrich, Newt )) also grabbed a few headlines when, in January, he signed with HarperCollins to write two books for $4.5 million. Following a storm of criticism surrounding speculation that HarperCollins' owner, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, was angling for political favours, Gingrich refused the advance, opting instead for $1 against royalties. The House Ethics Committee began looking into the matter. The first book, To Renew America, was expected to net Gingrich $1.4 million. Gingrich raised a storm again when he was asked to speak at the American Booksellers Association (ABA) convention in June. Members of the ABA events committee sent a letter of protest to ABA management over the selection. During Gingrich's speech at the convention, a bookseller was arrested for distributing leaflets, but criminal charges against her were later dropped.

      In 1994 the ABA had filed an antitrust suit against five publishers, claiming they had offered illegal "secret" deals, prices, and promotions to various chain bookstores and discount outlets. A week before the suit was to be heard in a New York court, the ABA settled with one of the publishers charged, Hugh Lauter Levin. While denying wrongdoing, Levin agreed to abide by the Robinson-Patman Act in terms of its pricing. Houghton Mifflin settled with the ABA in late October, agreeing to pay $270,000 and revise its discount and display allowance structure. Penguin USA later settled on similar terms, but the remaining cases were still in litigation.

      In another major lawsuit the seven authors of the textbook Merrill Mathematics won a $3.2 million suit against a variety of publishers, including Macmillan and Macmillan/McGraw-Hill; it was thought to be one of the largest settlements ever won by authors in a suit against a publisher. (Because of several mergers, Macmillan, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, Merrill, and Bell & Howell were all named in the suit.) The conflict arose when Macmillan decided not to publish the third edition of the book and refused to return the manuscript to the authors, which thus prevented them from finding another publisher. In addition, the company held that the noncompetition clause in their contracts prohibited them from working on similar projects with other publishers. The authors then filed a lawsuit charging breach of contract and alleging that the publishing companies refused to publish the third edition in order to eliminate market competition. An out-of-court settlement was reached with Maxwell Proceeds Trust, which handled monies resulting from sales of Maxwell companies, including Macmillan. The authors also were given back their publishing rights and production materials.

      Setting off fears for the survival of the Canadian book trade industry, Borders, the U.S. bookstore chain, announced it would open its first Canadian superstore in Toronto in the spring of 1996.

      The 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was awarded to Carol Shields, author of The Stone Diaries (Viking). (See BIOGRAPHIES (Shields, Carol ).) Jonathan Weiner won for nonfiction for The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time (Knopf). Fiction best-sellers for 1994, as reported by Publishers Weekly, were The Chamber by John Grisham (3,189,893), Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy (2,302,529), and The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (2,092,526). The nonfiction best-sellers were In the Kitchen with Rosie by Rosie Daley (5,487,369), Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray (1,853,000), and Crossing the Threshold of Hope by Pope John Paul II (1,625,883). Total book sales in the U.S. rose more than 4% in 1994 to $18.8 billion.

      The National Book Award for fiction went to Philip Roth for Sabbath's Theater, for nonfiction to Tina Rosenberg for The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism, and for poetry to Stanley Kunitz for Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected. David McCullough received the 1995 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

      (BETH S. LEVINE)

      See also Literature .

      This updates the article publishing (publishing, history of).

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