My speciality. Шепелева М.А - 28 стр.

a number of state and specialty news networks have been organized with varying
degrees of success to provide agricultural, financial, sports, weather, and regional-
oriented
material. On the audio side, complete talk nets have been formed as an ancillary
activity by established radio network companies to enhance local conversation
formats with national-appeal guests and hosts. Though some people would be
reluctant to call such offerings "news," they serve the same purpose as
conventional news services in making informational product readily available to
local electronic media outlets in an efficient and affordable form.

      Audience Measurement Services

       Another service provider even more central to the economic well-being of
radio
and television outlets is the ratings service. Through a variety of sampling
techniques, these companies seek to determine the size and composition of
station/channel/network audiences so that advertisers can obtain estimates of who
and how many consumers are being exposed to commercials placed on those
outlets. For print media, audience measurement is a fairly concrete and
straightforward operation. Since 1914, the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) has
monitored and documented the circulation of most magazines and daily
newspapers in the United States and Canada. Because a copy of a publication is a
tangible commodity, the dissemination of these commodities is relatively easy to
track and use in estimating probable readership figures. An electronic signal, on
the other hand, does not bundle itself into countable copies. Instead, its audience is
determined by how many people choose to tune to its initially invisible trans-
missions. Broadcast ratings services, then, arose as attempts to estimate how many
people within range of the signal were actually being exposed to it.

      Radio Telephony Blossoms into Radio

        With the onset of Work! War I, wireless activity and research were focused
on the needs of the military. On the one hand, this activity spurred the further
development of radio technology. On the other hand, most of this attention was
devoted to the telegraphy aspect of the enterprise. Armies and governments were
much more concerned about increasing their ability to send and detect dots and
dashes than they were about generating the curiosity that was voice
communication. Nevertheless, by 1915 the U.S. Navy was conducting transatlantic
voice tests from its Arlington, Virginia, station. Because the United States was not
yet at war, such experimentation could still be accommodated and helped keep
interest in the radio telephone alive.
         While the Marconi company was trying to decipher this fantastic notion, ee
De Forest had improved his Audion tube to the point at which it could function as