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The television industry has the opportunity to do more-much more-to serve our communities and customers as we emerge into the new millennium.
Our industry must take an even more pro-active approach to people's changing lifestyles and needs. The industry's own bottom line formula continues to focus almost exclusively on the anachronistic Four S's: Sports, sitcoms, soap operas and situation spot news, although there are noble efforts like cable's high-speed initiative to schools: we must do more to provide knowledge-based programming. The reality is that television provides less than 5%c of programming time and far less in budgets to bona fide education, according to at least one critic.
For over a decade, we have been running up against the phenomena of a viewing audience with minutely fractured personal time. A new paradigm has evolved in how our viewing customers spend...