television seriously.

Write a 5 pages paper on teleliteracy: taking television seriously. Essentially, all major brand name products did their advertisements through the magazines which were at the time circulating in their millions with research indicating magazines claimed 12.6% of the total advertising market share as of 1946. It was during this decade (the 1940s) that television had started truly penetrating into households across the world. However, it was not until 1944 that network television began (Carroll, 377).

By 1956, television diffusion had reached a staggering 71.8% with close to 35 million sets within households worldwide. The resultant growth of television advertisement saw a consequent drop in radio advertising sales. To adjust to the threat of the emergence of television, radios adopted a counter-strategy of focusing on local and regional advertising sales. Magazines on the other hand did not initially feel threatened partly because television did not at the time offer four-color advertisements. And true to their assessment, interest in consumer magazines continued to flourish throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s. However, with the decrease in the prices of four-color televisions, television penetration rose even further by up to 97% in 1969. Consequently, the economic ride the general interest magazine had thrived in came to an abrupt end (Winship, 311).

Displacing the interest in picture magazine with an unrivaled immediacy, four-color television amassed 12.2% of the total advertising market share by 1956 while magazine advertising market share had plummeted to a meager 8%. Television not only ate away magazines’ advertising market but also snatched away the general entertainment seekers who were previously readers. The habit of nighttime television watching resulted in unread magazine pile-ups and a consequent loss of incentive to purchase magazines, therefore. As a result, magazines failed due to loss of national advertising and consumer time which television had so effectively snapped up (Carroll, 411)

Magazines, like radio, adapted to this loss by adopting various strategies. For one, they resorted to focusing on developing more special interest magazines which were intended to gain readership due to the fact that these new magazines offered specialized or more detailed information that was unavailable in the general electronic media.