Channel One News is a youth marketing company whose main purpose is to get advertising to a captive audience of impressionable schoolchildren. The company loans a school TV equipment in exchange for the school’s contractual pledge to show students a daily, 12-minute, hyper-commercial, TV program called Channel One News. Students lose one hour a week of schools time, which equates to one lost week of instructional time (32 hours) per year. No educational organization endorses the use of Channel One News.
Channel One has fallen on very hard times. Once they claimed over 8 million students were under contract. Since 1997 they have continued to lose schools and now they claim “nearly five million” students and the true figure is probably lower.
In May 2014, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt acquired Channel One from ZelnickMedia the makers of the ultra-violent Grand Thief Auto video game series. Houghton Mifflin did not disclose the purchase price.
At the end of 2014 most of Channel One’s full-paying advertisers have abandoned the program.
LIVE BY THE HYPE, DIE BY THE HYPE AN EMPIRE UNDONE The Wild Rise and Hard Fall of Chris Whittle By Vance H. Trimble Birch Lane 353pp $24.95 His empire and reputation in tatters, erstwhile media magnate Christopher Whittle in October, 1994, tapped out a 1,500-word mea culpa for the...
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From Jim Metrock: Martin Christie has been Channel One’s main Alabama lobbyist since 1998. Martin was a friend of mine. In fact he sort of worked for me at one time. He was the lobbyist for the Associated Industries of Alabama and the Business Council of Alabama when I was a board...
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From Jim Metrock: Since 1997, I have been writing articles about Channel One’s commercial exploitation of schoolchildren. They are all here. The main reason I wrote was to help educators, administrators, school board members, other parents, and young people themselves in their efforts to remove Channel One from their classrooms. I hope my...
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Tiszenkel must have seen the train wreck coming. Now safely in Rhode Island working at CVS. From Jim Metrock: Channel One News has to be one of the creepiest workplaces in the country. The whole company is shrouded with secrecy. The company never announces the departure of important employees, even if...
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From Jim Metrock: I recently found the transcript for the 1998 face off between Dr. Alex Molnar of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Channel One’s CEO David Tanzer. Both appeared on the Today Show to discuss Dr. Molnar’s study The Hidden Costs of Channel One. The study said that Channel One was costing...
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From Jim Metrock: It might just now be sinking in. People are going to lose their jobs at Channel One. Whenever Company A acquires Company B, Company B immediately says that there will be no changes at Company B. Everyone should stop worrying. Nothing is going to change. These of course are...
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From Jim Metrock: I was writing about David Drucker, when the news broke about Channel One being acquired by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Mr. Drucker was hired last year to be the Senior Vice President of Sponsorship & Advertising Sales at Channel One. He was hired for the hardest. most challenging job in the...
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Losses too much for ZelnickMedia? How much did Houghton Mifflin Harcourt pay, if anything, for the controversial youth marketing company? Will HMHC keep Channel One’s current employees? Fourth Channel One owner in seven years. (Primedia, Alloy Media and Marketing, ZelnickMedia, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) May 13, 2014, 10:03 a.m. EDT Houghton Mifflin...
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