ABSTRACT
As World War II approached, another major ratings service, known as the Pulse, began to measure radio audience size. Unlike its competitors, Pulse collected information by conducting face-to-face interviews. Interest in audience research grew steadily throughout the 1930s and culminated in the establishment of the Office of Radio Research (ORR) in 1937. Funded by a Rockefeller Foundation grant, the ORR was headed by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, who was assisted by Hadley Cantril and Frank Stanton. The latter would go on to assume the presidency of CBS in 1946 and would serve in that capacity into the 1970s. Over a 10-year period, the ORR published several texts dealing with audience research findings and methodology. Among them were Lazarsfeld and Stanton’s multivolume Radio Research, which covered the periods of 1941-1943 and 1948-1949. During the same decade, Lazarsfeld also published book-length reports on the public’s attitude toward radio: The People Look at Radio (1946) and Radio Listening in America (1948). Both works cast radio in a favorable light by concluding that most listeners felt the medium did an exemplary job. The Pulse and Hooper were the prevailing radio station rating services in the 1950s as the medium worked at regaining its footing following the meteoric rise of television. In 1965, Arbitron Ratings began measuring radio audience size through the use of a diary, which required respondents to document their listening habits over a seven-day period. By the 1970s, Arbitron reigned as the leading radio measurement company, whereas Hooper and Pulse faded
As early as 1929, the question of listenership was of interest to broadcasters and advertisers alike. That year Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting (CAB), headed by Archibald M. Crossley, undertook a study to determine how many people were tuned to certain network radio programs. Information was gathered by phoning a preselected sample of homes. One of the things the survey found was that the majority of listening occurred evenings between 7:00 and 11:00 p.m. This became known as radio’s “prime time” until the 1950s.
