Broadcasting Telecasting (Apr-Jun 1957)

WITHOUT A "PEER'' in the Rockford Area! IN THIS $ BILLION-PLUS SALES EMPIRE WREX-TV IS THE KING SALESMAN The Rockford TV Area — Illinois' 1st market outside Chicago — is 400,1 95 families strong, with $2,357,080,000 income. It embraces rich farm counties whose cities house industrial giants like General Motors, Fairbanks-Morse, Parker Pen, Burgess Battery, Sundstrand . . . and show sales indexes like Rockford's 158, Beloit's 151, Janesville's 153, DeKalb's 184, Freeport's 176, Dixon's 203. Sales total $1,706,962,000, average $4,265 per family — $447 above average. The most recent viewership survey again shows WREX-TV as the favorite, by better than 3 to 1. It's favored by advertisers too . . . for its consistent results, at much lower cost per thousand. J. M. BAISCH, GENERAL MANAGER Represented by H. R. TELEVISION, Inc. "W RE XT "V CHANNEL 13 © ""l"™ (©J Page 20 • May 6, 1957 OUR RESPECTS to Lewis Edmund Arnold "rp HERE'S a real place for local live programming in television, although a lot J of tv station owners and managers seem to have forgotten that there are any programs except those that come on film or over network lines," declares Lew Arnold, general manager of KTLA (TV) Los Angeles. Mr. Arnold sees live programming as an important way in which a station can cater to the individual tastes of its local viewers, and he firmly believes that audience likes and dislikes vary widely from city to city. "Look at Do You Trust Your Wife?" he points out. "It never got very high ratings nationally, but it was the top-rated program in Los Angeles. Or take the roller derby, which disappeared from New York television years ago but is still tops out here, with advertisers standing in line to sponsor our Monday night roller derby telecasts." Fact that KTLA happens to be owned by Paramount Pictures Corp. has not deterred Mr. Arnold from seeing that KTLA has a full complement of live programs. In addition to sports — and here the schedule includes basketball, boxing, wrestling and auto racing as well as the roller derby — there are variety programs, women's shows, kiddies' shows, musical programs and audience participation programs, which add up to some 60% of all KTLA programming. That 40% left for film shows is a far cry from the national average for non-network tv stations of 77.5% film to 22.5% live programs. It may explain why, in the six months Mr. Arnold has been guiding KTLA's operations, its air time has gone up from 75 to 100 hours a week (25% more than the average for independent tv stations) while some of the other tv stations in Los Angeles (seven in all, including three network-owned stations and three other independents) have been curtailing their hours of programming. Mr. Arnold is happy that February was the best February in KTLA's history, 20% above the same month of 1956, and happier that in March the station hit an all-time high with the largest billings in its ten years. "Dollarwise, we're doing fine," he says, "ratingwise, not so fine. But I've learned that it's a mistake to lose sight of your audience by looking too hard at your ratings. When I can see a line a block long waiting to get into the studio, that's better than any rating in the world to me, and when the sponsors watch their sales records and learn that we can sell more with a 3 than others can with a 15, they forget the rating sheets, too." The author of KTLA's new look got his start in broadcasting at the non-commercial educational fm station of Seton Hall, at South Orange, N. J., not far from Newark, where he was born Jan. 20, 1921, and christened Lewis Edmund Arnold. "Rescued" from his engineering studies at Syracuse ("where my year and a half taught me chiefly that I was never intended to be an engineer"). In World War II, Lew served as an Army radar officer in Europe, returning at war's end with two battle ribbons and the rank of captain. At Seton Hall, having raised funds for WOSU and helped design its studios, Lew served as station manager during his last undergraduate year and stayed on as manager for three years more, also teaching advertising, speech and station management in the department of communications arts and acquiring a master's degree from Columbia. By the fall of 1952, he decided it was time to trade Seton's ivied halls for the marts of Madison Ave. and took a $32-a-week job as a mailroom boy at BBDO, where in a matter of weeks he became a tv traffic supervisor. THE following April, Lew Arnold moved up Madison Ave. a few blocks to the headquarters of the DuMont Television Network, where he started as an assistant in the program department and successively served as assistant business manager, business manager and director of production. With the dissolution of the network, he became executive assistant to Ted Cott, vice president and general manager of the DuMont-owned stations, a trouble-shooting position of multiple duties. Mr. Arnold worked with Mr. Cott for a little more than a year. Meanwhile, DuMont's broadcasting operations had been separated from the company's manufacturing activities into a separate corporation headed by Bernard Goodwin, vice president of Paramount, a substantial DuMont stockholder. When Klaus Landsberg, who had managed KTLA since its inception, was taken ill, Mr. Arnold was asked to go to Los Angeles to help out temporarily. With Mr. Landsberg's death shortly thereafter, the full brunt fell on Mr. Arnold. Since then, he's been too busy at the station to find time for tennis, golf or sailing, his hobbies back East, but "I'm having the time of my life, working my head off and gaining weight at it," he says. Broadcasting • Telecasting