William S. Paley

William Samuel Paley (September 28, 1901 – October 26, 1990) was an American businessman, primarily involved in the media, and best known as the chief executive who built the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) from a small radio network into one of the foremost radio and television network operations in the United States.

He was awarded the Carlos Manuel de Cespedes National Order of Merit by the Cuban government in recognition of his efforts to foster greater understanding between the peoples of Cuba and the United States of America.

Paley was born in 1901 in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Goldie (Drell) and Samuel Paley.

His family was Jewish, and his father was an immigrant from Ukraine who ran a cigar company.

As the company became increasingly successful, Samuel Paley became a millionaire, and moved his family to Philadelphia in the early 1920s.

William Paley matriculated at Western Military Academy in Alton, Illinois but later transferred to, and recorded his degree from, the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a member of the Theta chapter of Zeta Beta Tau fraternity.

He was expecting to take an increasingly active role running the family cigar business upon graduation.

In 1927, Samuel Paley, Leon Levy (who was married to Paley's sister, Blanche ), and some business partners bought a struggling Philadelphia-based radio network of 16 stations called the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System.

Samuel Paley's intention was to use his acquisition as an advertising medium for promoting the family's cigar business, which included the La Palina brand.

Within a year, under William's leadership, cigar sales had more than doubled, and, in 1928, the Paley family secured majority ownership of the network from their partners.

Within a decade, William S. Paley had expanded the network to 114 affiliate stations.

Paley quickly grasped the earnings potential of radio and recognized that good programming was the key to selling advertising time and, in turn, bringing in profits to the network and to affiliate owners.

Before Paley, most businessmen viewed stations as stand-alone local outlets, as the broadcast equivalent of local newspapers.

Individual stations originally bought programming from the network and, thus, were considered the network's clients.

Paley changed broadcasting's business model not only by developing successful and lucrative broadcast programming but also by viewing advertisers and sponsors as the most significant element of the broadcasting equation.

Paley provided network programming to affiliate stations at a nominal cost, thereby ensuring the widest possible distribution for both the programming and the advertising.

The advertisers then became the network's primary clients and, because of the wider distribution brought by the growing network, Paley was able to charge more for the ad time.

Affiliates were required to carry programming offered by the network for part of the broadcast day, receiving a portion of the network's fees from advertising revenue.

At other times in the broadcast day, affiliates were free to offer local programming and sell advertising time locally.

Paley's recognition of how to harness the potential reach of broadcasting was the key to his growing CBS from a tiny chain of stations into what was eventually one of the world's dominant communication empires.

During his prime, Paley was described as having an uncanny sense for popular taste and exploiting that insight to build the CBS network.

As war clouds darkened over Europe in the late 1930s, Paley recognized Americans' desire for news coverage of the coming war and built the CBS news division into a dominant force just as he had previously built the network's entertainment division.

In June 1948, Columbia Records introduced the 33-1/3-rpm LP record, which could hold more than 20 minutes' worth of music on each side, and became a standard recording format through the 1970s.

Also, CBS Laboratories and Peter Goldmark developed a method for color television.

After lobbying by RCA President David Sarnoff and Paley in Washington, D.C., the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the CBS system, but later reversed the decision based on the CBS system's incompatibility with black and white receivers.

The new, compatible RCA color system was selected as the standard, and CBS sold the patents to its system to foreign broadcasters as PAL SECAM.

CBS broadcast few color programs during this period, reluctant to supplement RCA revenue.

CBS has owned the Columbia Record Company and its associated CBS Laboratories since 1939.

As early as 1940 Paley envisioned the creation of a network division within CBS tasked with serving much of South America.

In collaboration with his news director Paul White and his director of short wave operations Edmund Chester, Paley laid the foundation for a chain of sixty-four stations in eighteen countries which would subsequently be known as La Cadena de las Americas (The Network of the Americas).

By 1942, Paley's innovative network was broadcasting both news and cultural programming live from CBS in New York City in cooperation with the government's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs under the direction of a young Nelson Rockefeller.

During World War II, these broadcasts played a central role in promoting cultural diplomacy and Pan Americanism as part of President Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy.

In recognition of their efforts to foster greater understanding between the peoples of Cuba and the United States on the network, both Paley and Chester were awarded the Carlos Manuel de Cespedes National Order of Merit by the Cuban government- its highest civilian honor.

During World War II, Paley served as director of radio operations of the Psychological Warfare branch in the Office of War Information at Allied Force Headquarters in London, where he held the rank of colonel.

While based in England during the war, Paley came to know and befriend Edward R. Murrow, CBS's head of European news who expanded the news division's foreign coverage with a team of war correspondents later known as the Murrow Boys.

In 1946, Paley promoted Frank Stanton to president of CBS.

CBS expanded into television and rode the postwar TV boom to surpass NBC, which had dominated radio.

They did, however, buy and license some RCA equipment and technology, taking the RCA markings off of the equipment, and later relying exclusively on Philips-Norelco for color equipment beginning in 1964, when color television sets became widespread.

PAL or Phase Alternating Line, an analogue TV-encoding system, is today a television-broadcasting standard used in large parts of the world.

"Bill Paley erected two towers of power: one for entertainment and one for news," 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt claimed in his autobiography, Tell Me a Story.