Competitors to national network news have also emerged
For our purposes, a medium is considered national if it has a large audience in all regions of the United States. It is not government-owned; there are no state-owned mass media in this country. The Public Broadcasting Service, although partly funded by the federal government, is an independent corporation. The United States Information Agency, an agency of the federal government, cannot broadcast its material in the United States except by a special act of Congress.
National media include the six major television networks–ABC, CBS, NBC, UPN, WB, and Fox–as well as the noncommercial Public Broadcasting Service. (Two new national networks, United Paramount Tag Heuer Replica Watches and Warner Bros., do not yet have complete weekly schedules, and the Home Shopping Network does not have the range of programming that the other commercial networks offer.) National media also include the major radio networks; the major wire services, Associated Press (AP) and Reuters; magazines such as the newsweeklies Time, Newsweek, and U. S. News & World Report; and such general interest magazines as the Reader’s Digest, TV Guide, and People; the Wall Street Journal; the New York Times; USA Today; and the Christian Science Monitor.
In 1997, the Wall Street Journal had a daily circulation of 1,879,000–the largest daily circulation of any newspaper in the United States and more than one-third of the weekly circulation of Time. In contrast, even the largest newspaper chains tend to be somewhat regional in character, and most chains encourage local autonomy in news-gathering and editorial policy.
In mid-1982, the Gannett newspaper chain began publishing a national newspaper, USA Today, modeled on television’s notions of news. The stories in USA Today are brief, extensively illustrated, and written to emphasize “the human interest angle.” By 1989, USA Today had eclipsed the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor in daily circulation, reaching more than 1.3 million individuals daily. In 1997, the average Monday-through-Thursday circulation of USA Today was 1,662,000, jumping to 2,000,000 on Fridays.
Competitors to national network news have also emerged. In summer 1986, the Associated Press and CONUS Communications instituted a television news feed ser-vice called “TV Direct.” The service Tag Heuer Carrera Replica Watches provides video-formatted AP news photos and video feeds of Washington events to television stations across the country. AP serves nearly 6,000 broadcast stations nationwide; CONUS is a news cooperative of television stations.
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