THE 1980s: MEDIA: OVERVIEW

Consolidation and Change

The 1980s was a decade of consolidation in the media, as huge television networks were bought up by even bigger companies, small publishing firms were cobbled together into multimedia behemoths, and small-town newspapers were bought by nationwide chains and changed into local voices of a national editorial policy. Because almost everyone read newspapers and magazines, listened to the radio, or watched television, the decade's "merger mania" in these businesses received more public attention than in other industries. The money involved in all forms of media—both profits and losses—climbed to astronomical levels. The American public was confronted with a staggering array of new magazines, cable channels, movies, and books, as well as relatively new media such as videotapes and audiocasette recordings of books.

Visual Newspapers

Even the local newspaper familiar to most Americans was changing. The national newspaper USA Today hit newsstands in 1982 and within four years had a daily circulation of more than one million readers: not a large enough audience to turn a profit, but enough to concern the owners of its local competitors. To compensate, papers around the country began to emulate USA Today's style, which relied on eye-catching color photographs, charts, and snippets of sports and entertainment news calculated to be of interest mainly to travelers. Production costs climbed, and many of the nation's oldest newspapers, in cities from Philadelphia and Cleveland to Memphis and Los Angeles, closed their doors. The papers that survived were mostly those that had been bought up by large syndicates such as Knight-Ridder and Gannett, the group that started USA Today. By the end of the decade there were fewer than four hundred independent dailies left, compared to the 1,228 owned by the publishing conglomerates.

The Blockbuster Syndrome

Book publishing under-went a similar transition during the decade. The country's most recognized publishing names—Macmillan, Simon and Schuster, Prentice-Hall, Harper and Row, to name only a few—changed hands with sometimes dizzying speed. Their new owners, for whom book publishing was only one of a variety of business endeavors, were interested more in profits than literary value or the firm's reputation. Quality, "risky" books were less likely to be published than ever before; increasingly the shelves of bookstores and libraries were dominated by "blockbusters," mediocre bestsellers for which the authors were paid millions in advance.

Paperback Originals

Paperback books gained a new-found respectability in the 1980s as consumers tired of paying the rising cost of hardbacks. Previously main-stream publishing houses had issued a hardcover edition of a book and then sold the reprint rights to a paperback publisher. In the 1980s, however, the publishing conglomerates bought or started their own reprint lines, to retain the rights to their own bestsellers and to reprint older favorites from their lines. In response the softcover publishers turned to paperback originals, mostly inexpensive science fiction and romance novels, while they continued to bid exorbitant sums for the rights to the few hardcover books that remained available to them.

Book Products

Publishers also sought new profit opportunities in other forms of media, including audiocasette versions of popular books, computer software, and self-help books. This led the larger chain bookstores (many of which were owned by the publishing conglomerates) to broaden their inventories beyond books, to the extent that finding a book in some bookstores became an increasingly difficult proposition.

New Magazines

Magazine publishing experienced something of a boom during the decade, with more new titles aimed at increasingly specialized audiences. Shelves of newsstands were crowded with magazines devoted to computing, child-rearing, health and exercise, travel, sports, television, and popular music. Most of these new arrivals folded within a few years, although a few of the new magazines enjoyed considerable success, including the music magazine Spin; EM Ebony Man, a fashion and lifestyles magazine aimed at young black men; and Sassy, targeted at teenage girls. The 1980s also saw the arrival of glossy periodicals such as Tiffany and Veranda aimed at a more affluent readership, and the revival of Vanity Fair, which found its niche after a disastrous few years.

Radio

Perhaps the most common communications medium in the decade continued to be radio, owned by 99 percent of American households and a standard feature in nearly every automobile. In the 1980s there were nine thousand radio stations around the country, with most of their programming originating locally. The differences between AM and FM programming became more pronounced over the decade, as the better sound quality of FM stations made them the preferred choice among music listeners. AM stations, on the other hand, were oriented more toward talk shows, sports, and news. An ideological difference between AM and FM began to develop as well: the nonprofit National Public Radio carried the allegedly liberal news program All Things Considered on FM stations around the country; AM stations, on the other hand, began carrying the unabashedly right-wing Rush Limbaugh in national syndication.

The Television Revolution

Like radio, television was in nearly every home in the nation. The explosive growth of the cable industry during the 1980s ended the dominance of the three major networks, which had been responsible for most television programming, news, and sports for the first four decades of the medium. But during the course of the decade, the average number of channels available to the typical viewer had increased from seven to more than thirty, and the major networks' share of viewers dropped by 15 percent. Cable networks were cheaper to operate than the major networks, since they mostly showed syndicated reruns, old movies, sporting events, and inexpensive talk shows; consequently they could be content with a smaller audience share. Many cable channels practiced "narrowcasting," which meant that their programs were aimed at a specific, specialized target audience. Cable television could direct their programs at a more mature audience, as well: the most successful cable service, Home Box Office, specialized in unedited, commercial-free showings of popular theatrical releases. Thus, network executives extolled television as a medium to bring people together and deplored the vulgarity of cable's programs, while cable owners placed a higher value on diversity, individualism, and free expression.

The Networks Respond

CBS, ABC, and NBC attempted to respond to cable's challenge in various ways. They loosened their programming standards and developed series that were more graphically violent and sexual, as well as adopting a more sensational approach to the news. They extended their programming hours to compete with cable's round-the-clock schedules. In some instances they tried to join the cable boom themselves, as when ABC launched the Satellite News Channel to compete with Ted Turner's Cable News Network in 1992. But for the most part network executives were simply bewildered at the changes to the industry they had once controlled. Their falling earnings made them ripe for takeover in 1985, when all of the "Big Three" were bought by larger corporations in a span of nine months. By 1986 ABC and CBS were being outearned by twelve major cable channels. With more channels added every year, the trend toward cable and away from network television showed no signs of abating.