The centralized structure of ownership of the local television industry in the United States today has resulted from a combination of regulatory and market pressures. This dissertation analyzes the ways in which centralizing tendencies in ownership structure have been accompanied by the centralization of operations. As station groups add more stations and seek to operate the stations they already own in an ever more profitable manner, changed industrial practices are vitally important because they have direct effects upon the product of those stations, especially local television news.
In analyzing such centralizing tendencies, the project focuses not only on centralization of ownership and operation, but on two further factors as well: changing interpretations of the public interest and the development of technologies for local television stations. Changing interpretations of the public interest provision of regulatory law permitted and encouraged station groups to grow larger, redefining the structure of the local television industry, even in the times of heaviest restriction. In terms of technological development, after a brief period of equipment designed simply to get product on the air, television equipment developers followed a consistent guiding principle of staff reduction and job simplification which aided this momentum towards centralization. The combination of changing ownership structures, shifts in understandings of public interest, and new technologies has resulted in new business models built around invoking economies of scale, including centralcasting and multi-channel operation.
These new business models have dramatically altered the program product of local television stations, especially local news. News programming, which initially entered broadcasting in response to the regulatory mandate that broadcasters serve the public in return for free access to the public airwaves, has been transformed into a primary source of local station revenue. This commodified version of news programming is the logical result of practices begun in newspapers and continued in radio broadcasting. The news product of local stations is an area of vital concern in the present day media environment, as the quantity of news on the air increases without a corresponding increase in newsroom resources, jeopardizing the quality and veracity of those news programs.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-04132006-124130 |
| Date | 01 June 2006 |
| Creators | Baggerman, Thomas W. |
| Contributors | Carol A. Stabile, Ph.D., Robert Bellamy, Ph.D, Jonathan Sterne, Ph.D, Peter Simonson, Ph.D. |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-04132006-124130/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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