Black & Blue

When NBC obeyed the handwriting on the wall and divorced its Blue Network last year (TIME, Jan. 19), anyone with a couple of million dollars to spare (asking price $12,000,000) could have become owner of the No. 3 U.S. radio chain. No one did (it is still, like NBC, a wholly owned subsidiary of RCA). But this week the Blue was one year old as a separate corporation. Loudly enough for all non-buyers to hear, it proudly announced that it had wound up the year in the black (profits undisclosed).

Seven Wall Street investment houses, three insurance companies, two commodity manufacturers, a daily newspaper and a retired capitalist had fingered the Blue cloth and gone away--frightened by economic uncertainty and the future of radio broadcasting.

Despite these impressive obstacles, weatherwise observers gave the Blue a fair chance of finding a buyer in 1943. They pointed to the $11,300,000 worth of gross time the network sold to advertisers during the past year. The Blue began the year with 116 affiliated stations, ended with 146 --an estimated gain of some 900,000 radio families. It has 40 sponsored programs (20% of its air time), of which 24 are new accounts.

Although it still rents NBC broadcasting facilities and is staffed largely by onetime NBC men, the Blue managed to achieve something of its own personality in its first corporate year. It leaned heavily on war and children's programs, built up a first-rate staff of newscasters and commentators from Raymond Gram Swing to Walter Winchell. Unable to compete with its rivals in top-flight shows, the Blue swelled with sudden dignity last month when Serge Koussevitzky (studio nickname: Blue Serge) and his Boston Symphony began the first of 46 broadcasts.

The Blue's unexpected aggressiveness raised many an eyebrow at stolid NBC, parental RCA. It gave advertisers special discounts, charmed them by other commercial wrinkles. It gleefully violated NBC's and CBS's ban on transcribed programs. This move was regarded as almost treasonable because the two big chains figure that live shows are their stock in trade. Big, live shows are expensive, but distinctive.

This argument means little to the Blue's young (41), soft-talking, sartorial president Mark Woods. Onetime shipyard worker and NBC vice president, he proposes to embark on a new cycle of U.S. broadcasting with transcriptions as soon as A.F.M. Boss James Caesar Petrillo's ban on recordings is resolved. President Woods thinks that war workers and others who cannot listen to the live shows in the evenings should be given a chance to hear them transcribed, that they could also provide the daytime soap operas with the competition they merit.

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