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The television sponsor has become semi-mythical. He is remote and unseen, but omnipresent. Dramas, football games, and press conferences pause for a''word''from him. He''makes possible''concerts and public affairs broadcasts. His''underwriting grants''brings the viewer music festivals and classic films. Interviews with visiting statesmen are interrupted for him, to continue''in a moment.''Sponsorship is basic to American television. Even noncommercial television looks to it for survival. A vast industry has grown up around the needs and wishes of sponsors. Television's program formulas, business practices, and ratings have all evolved in ways to satisfy sponsor requirements. Indeed, he has become a potentate of our time.The Sponsor is divided into three parts. In''Rise,''Barnouw sketches the rise of the sponsor, in both radio and television, to his present state of eminence. In''Domain,''the sponsor's pervasive impact on television programming is examined, with an emphasis on network television, the primary arena of the industry. And in''Prospect,''Barnouw assesses what such dominance has meant for American society, mores, and institutions--and what it may mean for our future. This is a gripping volume about power, how it not only influences programming itself, but how it defines for the average person what is good, great, and desirable.

Branded Women in U.S. Television examines how The Real Housewives of New York City, Martha Stewart, and other female entrepreneurs create branded televised versions of the iconic U.S. housewife. Using their television presence to establish and promote their own product lines, including jewelry, cookware, clothing, and skincare, they become the primary physical representations of these brands. While their businesses are serious and seriously lucrative, especially reality television enables a certain representational flexibility that allows participants to create campy and sometimes tongue-in-cheek personas. Peter Bjelskou explores their innovative branding strategies, specifically the complex relationships between their entrepreneurial endeavors and their physical bodies, attires, tastes, and personal histories. Generally these branded women speak volumes about their contemporaneous political environments, and this book illustrates how they, and many other women in U.S. television history, are indicative of larger societal trends and structures.

Fernsehserien – jeder kennt sie, jeder hat eine Erinnerung an sie, ein Gefühl oder einen Gedanken, den er damit verbindet. Annekatrin Bock wendet sich dem Gegenstand der US-amerikanischen Prime-Time-Serie zu und fragt danach, welche Faktoren sich darauf auswirken, dass eine Serie von Serienzuschauern im deutschen Rezeptionskontext rezipiert wird. Dabei werden zukünftige Trends der Serienproduktion-, -vermarktung, und -rezeption formuliert und diskutiert.

The Citizen Machine is the untold political history of television's formative era. Historian Anna McCarthy goes behind the scenes of early television programming, revealing that long before the age of PBS, leaders from business, philanthropy, and social reform movements as well as public intellectuals were all obsessively concerned with TV's potential to mold the right kind of citizen.Based on years of path-breaking archival work, The Citizen Machine sheds new light on the place of television in the postwar American political landscape.

Title from PDF title page (viewed on June 1, 2009).

Focusing on the electronic media—television, radio, and the Internet—Audience Economics bridges a substantial gap in the literature by providing an integrated framework for understanding the various businesses involved in generating and selling audiences to advertisers. Philip M. Napoli presents original research in order to answer several key questions: • How are audiences manufactured, valued, and sold? • How do advertisers and media firms predict the behavior of audiences?• How has the process of measuring audiences evolved over time?• How and why do advertisers assign different values to segments of the media audience?• How does audience economics shape media content?Examining the relationship between the four principal actors in the audience marketplace—advertisers, media firms, consumers, and audience measurement firms—Napoli explains the ways in which they interact with and mutually depend on each other. He also analyzes recent developments, such as the introduction of local people meters by Nielsen Media Research and the establishment and evolution of audience measurement systems for the Internet. A valuable resource for academics, students, policymakers, and media professionals, Audience Economics keeps pace with the rapid changes in media and audience-measurement technologies in order to provide a thorough understanding of the unique dynamics of the audience marketplace today.

'An Oxford University paperback.'