Today we'll take another look at one of those programs you see in the Monday listings but probably don't pay much attention to: it's
American Newsstand, ABC's afternoon effort to produce "news with an accent on youth." It was a ten-minute broadcast that ran five days a week, after the conclusion of
American Bandstand (at 4:50 p.m., according to
this week's listings) and attempted to capitalize on that show's audience to build a news market that the perennial third-place network felt was underdeveloped. The newscast began in 1961 and ran through the 1962-63 season; when
Bandstand became a Saturday program,
Newsstand went off the air.
The primary anchors for
American Newsstand were Roger Sharp, Bill Lord and Dave Jayne, and if you watch the broadcast below, you'll see that for a newscast tailored to a youth audience, it's surprisingly strong on hard news. In fact, there's probably more "news" content in this broadcast than you'd see on the evening news today.
As the caption states, this broadcast is from November 29, 1961. And now you know the rest of the story.
TV
