Radio Broadcasters and the Challenge of Television: A New Orleans Case

This is a classic case history in entrepreneurship — the successful introduction of innovation — in which a conservative, contented chief executive of a richly successful AM broadcasting station, a manager whose real talents and interests lay entirely outside the field of “show business,†is pitted against another executive whose knowledge of electronic entertainment was profound. If any name can be given to the one trait that the former did not have and that the latter had in abundance and which, as Dean Pusateri shows, led on to victory, it was an enlightened enthusiasm of the kind that is not readily expressed in logical terms nor subjected to cost-benefit analysis. For WWL-TV, enthusiasm won, and the rest is history.