Television: Overview: Food Network Era Begins

As cable television became a familiar entity to American viewers in the 1980s, media executives were busy brainstorming ways to target the niche and narrowcasting opportunities available to them. In the early 1990s, Joe Langhan, an executive at the Providence Journal Company in Rhode Island, determined, by observing the plethora of consumer magazines on the topic, that cooking was a popular topic. The media company, which was eager to enter into the cable TV market, took a risk and decided to establish a cable channel devoted completely to food and cooking. The Providence Journal Company and Reese Schonfeld (co-founder of CNN) created the TV Food Network (TVFN), which launched in November 1993. A few years later the channel was purchased by the E.W. Scripps Company, which still owns the Food Network.