Ten Years Ago... AOL Wants to Be Viewed Like a Cable-TV Company

AOL Wants to Be Viewed Like a Cable-TV Company: It remains to be seen if that analogy really fits the online industry
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal 10/31/1996, AUTHOR: Bart Zeigler and Jared Sandberg]
America Online announced a major restructuring of its organization encouraging possibly befuddled investors to imagine the reorganized company as a cable-TV company rather than just a ho-hum online service. Cable companies, when they first started entering the TV market, were not predicted to be successful against the major TV networks -- and now many television shows and advertising dollars are finding a home on cable. Critics of AOL's transformation point out that cable didn't have much competition in local markets while AOL has a lot. Also, no one is convinced that online advertising is really making money. Overall, AOL execs felt pretty good at the time -- AOL still had the industry's greatest number of subscribers, 7 million, and was growing faster in the Fall of 1996 than in the Summer of 1996.

Campaign for Free Air Time Falls Short of Organizers' Goals
[SOURCE: Washington Post 10/31/1996, AUTHOR: Howard Kurtz]
Report out of Annenberg Public Policy Center finds that 78% of all Americans did not even know of the effort to get free air time for presidential candidates. Many journalists were not even aware of schedules for these broadcasts and there was scarce reporting of them even in TV guides. Broadcasters are saying that the effort was a failure; organizers are saying that it was a good first step. Campaign reform efforts in the next Congress may include legislating future free time programming.
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