International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Broadcast journalism took news off the page and extended it to → radio and → television in the mid-twentieth century. The first broadcast journalists came from other media including newspapers, news and photo magazines, theater newsreels, motion pictures, and documentary films. The development of radio and → television news was greatly influenced by the funding model chosen by different nations, with the most popular being a yearly tax or fee system (Great Britain, Canada, Germany) or an advertiser-supported system (United States). In the United States, radio news found its purpose and audience during World War II. Concerning television, CBS, NBC and a few local stations offered news programs before World War II ( Conway 2009 ), but television news became an important platform after the war, as television diffused to a larger audience, becoming a true mass medium (→ Television Networks ). Pioneering local television news operations included WFIL (Philadelphia), WBAP (Fort Worth), and WPIX (New York), where stations invested in a team of photographers and reporters to blanket the coverage area and fill → newscasts with local coverage. More viewers turned to network and local television news until it eclipsed newspapers in the 1960s as the most popular source of news in the United States. In Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, and other nations that employed a user fee to pay ... log in or subscribe to read full text