By Dom Serafini
On June 6, 2024, Informa, the U.K. publishing group, announced that it was closing its TBI TV trade magazine after more that 35 years of publication. Two months later, on August 6, the U.K. media company Future announced that it was closing both its Broadcasting & Cable and Multichannel News.
The news of those closures was received with dismay by this reporter since the publications were somewhat linked to VideoAge.
Based in Washington, D.C., Broadcasting was born in 1931, and in 1941 became a weekly. In 1986, Times Mirror acquired Broadcasting for $75 million from its publisher Sol Taishoff’s son Larry. In 1991, it was sold to Cahners (later, Reed Business, the organizer of MIPTV and MIPCOM) for $32 million. In 1993, it became Broadcasting & Cable. In 2009, Broadcasting & Cable was sold to New Bay Media for an undisclosed sum. And in 2018, Future Plc acquired New Bay Media. After a few years, the publication’s print schedule became erratic, and in 2020 it was printed mostly monthly.
As per September 30, 2024 Broadcasting & Cable and Multichannel News will cease publication.
As for TBI, it was founded by the American journalist Les Brown in 1988 and was most likely inspired by VideoAge‘s onetime subtitle: “The Business Journal of Television.” TBI went through various ownerships before been taken over by Informa, a business research and exhibitions group based in London, U.K.
Looking back, this reporter was fond of both Les Brown, who would meet with this reporter at various TV trade shows (in particular at Prix Italia), together with his wife, from whom he was inseparable; and Sol Taishoff, who would berate me for being an editor for his nemesis Sol Paul’s venerable TV/Radio Age (before starting VideoAge).
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