Feedback

• Formative meeting of APBE in Washington in 1955 (first convention was a yearlater in the same city) with perhaps a couple dozen attending for 2-3 hours of meeting• Focus on sharing course outlines and teaching ideas• Institutions (17 at first), not individual members• Creation of the Journal of Broadcasting as first scholarly focused journal in theworld to aid development, recognition of this field academically• Meetings usually in Chicago or (every four years) Washington, with the NABA QUARTER-CENTURY LATER, IN 1980. . .Chris: Some of you still remember . . . Jimmy Carter was president. . . Americanhostages had been held a year in Iran . . .inflation was awful and so were the lines atgas stations . . GM was introducing it’s new “X” cars, the first small American carsdesigned for an era of high-priced gas . . . ..IBM would introduce its first PC within ayear (and Apple already had done so) . . .the first video rental store had opened the yearbefore . . . nobody yet had a cell phone (hard to imagine). . .Kathleen–on an industry on the eve of change:• Now more than a thousand commercial TV stations and 725 “public” TV stations• Programming still dominated by same three legacy networks• Twenty percent of homes now had cable• CNN (“Chicken Noodle Network”) began that year to widespread ridicule–but apioneer in what would quickly become a host of cable/satellite networksChris – on changing BEA and broadcast education:• We had become BEA seven years before . . .suggesting we were interested in morethan only “professional” training . . .• Dr. Harold Niven was in his 17th year as BEA executive secretary, and still runningthe NAB convention where he tooled around on his golf cart• We began a steady run of Las Vegas meetings–with perhaps 250-300 participantsand more research papers each year• JOB had added “& electronic media” to its title as an indication of wideningacademic interest beyond “just” broadcasting• Curricula had been transformed—production was still dominant in most schools,but now students learned something of theory, process and effect, policy implicationsand even criticismNOW, A FULL HALF CENTURY LATER, IN 2005 . . . .Kathleen–on today’s dramatically changing industry:• Digital threats, digital opportunities: satellite radio and television, MP3 players andiPods• more networks than you can readily count—and thus decline in legacy networkaudiences over past dozen or so years• yet television matters—look at the policy debates on indecency, ownership and thelikeBEA—Educating tomorrow’s electronic media professionals 19