Prior to 1961, the cost and inflexibility of colorcasting commercials and the limited number of color television sets in the United States had deterred advertisers from switching to color commercials. From 1961 to 1967, however, color's popularity grew significantly. It was hypothesized that, because research on television color effectiveness…

An examination of the ways in which United States postal policies affected the development of the magazine industry before Congress passed the second-class mail category in 1863 reveals how a medium is shaped at least in part by the technology, policy, and politics of its delivery systems. In the nineteenth century, magazines depended on the mails…

Electronic media have undergone substantial growth and change in the past two decades, and the structure of the programming industry has also changed, with the competition for programming becoming more intense. At the same time, government has moved toward deregulation in this area, with the result being increasing concentration,…

A year-long study of telecommunications policies and regulations in nine states--Texas, California, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, New York, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington--found that these states tend to be more flexible in their telecommunications regulation than other states, although the process for achieving this flexibility has tended to…

In this paper, the tools of legal and economic analysis are used to analyze the division of decision making authority between state and federal regulators of telecommunications policy. First, the principles of welfare economics are applied to the problem of defining appropriate jurisdictional boundaries. The results of this analysis are normative…

The National Association of Broadcasters conducted a mail survey of local commercial television stations to determine the levels of commercials and non-program material run in programs produced for children under the age of 12. A random selected composite week from the 1986-87 television season was used and 267 stations from a random sample…

This collection of essays is intended to increase cultural awareness and provide new information about the nature of writing in a number of the discourse communities central to modern economic life. The book focuses on academe, journalism, industry, computers, finance, and law. Essays and their authors are: "Coming to Terms with Different…

This book is the second edition of a selective listing of organizations that promote books and reading, administer literacy projects, and encourage the study of books. Intended as a guide to national programs of special interest to the Center for the Book, it was also compiled to be useful to the entire book community. The emphasis is on the…

Emphasizing that books are keys to cultural development, catalysts to trade, and unparalleled (but "neglected") ambassadors of American culture, this report points out the need for a new international outlook on the part of the entire United States publishing community. The report calls for a renewed cooperative approach, which would bring…

Hispanic Americans owned nearly 250,000 U.S. businesses in 1982. This is only one-fourth of the number which would be expected given their proportion of the population. Most Hispanic businesses were small service or retail establishments with no paid employees. This report provides an analysis of survey data which were collected by the Bureau of…

Summarized in this document are the proceedings of a public hearing sponsored by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Board of Regents in order to provide a forum in which publishers, editors, paper manufacturers and distributors, printers, biomedical researchers, librarians, and other professionals concerned with preserving the biomedical…

This is a selective listing of organizations that promote books and reading, administer literacy projects, and encourage the study of books. Expanding on a brief list of organizations in the 1984 Library of Congress report, Books in Our Future, it focuses on national programs of special interest to the Center for the Book in the Library of…

The legal action brought by author J. D. Salinger against Random House Publishers to prevent certain letters--now the property of various university libraries--from being published in a biography illustrates how the long-standing accommodation between the Copyright Act and the First Amendment can occasionally break down. Although the biographer…

In 1984, parents of a Minneapolis, Minnesota, ninth grader came before the school district's "Students' Right to Learn Committee" to object to what they described as a bowdlerized version of "Romeo and Juliet" in the Scott, Foresman text, and the publisher's failure to acknowledge in the text that the play was abridged. The…

Although small, high-technology firms contribute greatly to major scientific and technical innovations, their potential impact is hindered by financial, personnel, regulatory and other problems. In 1977, the National Science Foundation conducted a survey of firms (N=1,232) presumed to be active in research and development (R&D) and sponsored…