User:Tristinashley/sandbox

When radio first became popular, it was not used as a source of information; rather, people listened to the radio solely for entertainment purposes.[2] This began to change with a man named Edward R. Murrow. Edward Murrow was an American who traveled to England in order to broadcast news about World War II. He stayed in London throughout the war and was the first to report on events such as bombings in London and updated the people on Hitler's reign. Murrow gained his fame mainly after reporting on Hitler's German army annexing Austria. Many Americans relied on his broadcasts throughout the war to gain information about the war.[3]

More people also began to rely on radio for information after the attacks on Pearl Harbor. People found out about the bombing through President Roosevelt's broadcast interrupting their daily programming. It set Americans on edge, and people began to rely more heavily on the radio for major announcements throughout World War II.[4] World War II was a time where radio broadcasting became a much larger industry because it was the easiest and quickest way for people to get updates on what was going on throughout the world.

Informative radio continued while television reporting also began to take flight. Throughout the 40's and 50's television news sources grew, but radio still dominated. It wasn't until John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963 that television newscasting took off. Radio could only capture the sound of the event, but television showed people the true horror of the assassination.[5] This was one of the first major events in which news companies competed with each other to get the news out to the public first. CBS News was the first to report that Kennedy had been shot and was killed.[6] News crews spent the next several days covering everything happening in Washington, including Kennedy's funeral.[7] This set the standard for news stations to have to cover major events quicker and get them out to the public as they were happening. The JFK assassination helped to transform television journalism to how it is today, with instantaneous coverage and live coverages at major events. Television offered faster coverage than radio and allowed viewers to feel more as if they were experiencing the event because they could visualize exactly what was going on.[8]

NBC (National Broadcasting Company) and CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) were the two competing forces of news broadcasting in the early years of broadcast journalism. NBC was established in 1926 and CBS in 1927. There was a divide in the industry because they were not only competing against each other, but radio news that had already been established.

Women had a hard time immersing themselves into radio news seeing as most of the radio broadcasts were men. There was a small amount of women who hosted programs that were for homemakers and were on entertainment broadcast. After World War II, the doors for women in broadcasting opened up. This was also due to the shortage of men that were home during the war, so news outlets looked to women to fill those gaps of times. In the 1960s and 1970s larger numbers of women began to enter into broadcast news field. ↵

Both radio and television are major sources for broadcast journalism today, even with rapidly expanding technology. Television still focuses on covering major events, but radio broadcasts focus more on analyzing stories rather than reporting breaking news.[9] The internet often beats out broadcast journalism in terms of reporting breaking news, and the field of broadcast journalism is constantly having to adapt to the changing technology of today.