Word: local
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Toronto-born, Novak graduated from local York University intending to be a writer ("No kid goes to bed at night dreaming he'll be a ghostwriter"). After earning an M.A. in contemporary Jewish studies at Brandeis, he spent ten years editing scholarly magazines and writing a string of financially unsuccessful books (among them: High Culture, about marijuana use, The Great American Man Shortage and a compendium of Jewish humor). Just as he resigned himself to "finding a real job," an editor friend at Bantam suggested Lee Iacocca. "Great! My kind of guy," said Novak, who had never heard of Iacocca...
Affiliation with a network no longer offers the protection from local competition it once did. To stand out amid increasingly stiff competition, many local stations are turning to expanded news programs. Journalism is local television's biggest money spinner, typically accounting for at least a third of a station's revenues and an even higher share of profits...
...lines that distinguish big stations from small ones, and network affiliates from the country's 400 independent stations. The main culprit: satellites. By providing a relatively inexpensive electronic highway over which video signals can be transmitted, satellites have created a new industry of program suppliers that can offer local stations a broad variety of material once available only from the networks...
Cable's growth has made it harder for local stations to win viewers as well. The affiliates are especially hard hit, since they must take 21 hours a week of increasingly unwatched prime-time network programming. They are reluctant to give up that burden, since they receive at least $140 million a year each from the networks for shouldering it. Independent stations have somewhat more latitude, but both groups are hungry for programming that sets them apart from cable and from each other. Among their alternatives are better movies and syndicated reruns of popular network sitcoms like Cosby, Cheers...
...bolster the reputation of their profitable newscasts, local stations send their anchors scurrying all over the world to report major international news stories that were once the domain of network reporters. California anchors fly off to Central America, Beijing and Tokyo. When East Germany began to break / down the Berlin Wall two weeks ago, dozens of local U.S. news teams headed to Berlin from markets as big as Seattle and as small as Manchester, N.H. Says John Spinola, general manager of Westinghouse-owned station WBZ in Boston: "Every time I look around, we've got someone out of the country...