Wednesday, December 28, 2022

Pocketpiece Project

Over the last several months I've been doing a lot of research about Nielsen Pocketpieces with the goal of tracking down as many as I can, digitizing them, and ultimately hosting them on the blog. For those unfamiliar with Pocketpieces, they are booklets that Nielsen sent out to TV networks and advertisers biweekly (and later weekly) from the 1950s through 2007 which included a comprehensive accounting of TV ratings. Although they were released through 2007, I'm particularly interested in the ones through 1981 as there is very little publicly released ratings data prior to that point.

Recently & with some help, I've managed to find a nearly complete collection of them across multiple sources and have begun the process of digitizing them. Unfortunately, I am based in New York City and the Pocketpieces in question are located in Washington, DC and Los Angeles so there will be a lot of travel involved over the next year or several years in order to get them all, but that is the next major project on this site. I'm not sure how Nielsen is going to feel about this, so it remains to be seen if this is something that will ever see completion, but I can't imagine that they'll care all that much about 40-50+ year old data.

I'm also not sure how I'm going to organize this within the current layout of the blog, but as I get more of them posted then I'll make some changes to better accommodate. I'm also quite aware that I have not yet finished posting the 2002-03 season, let alone the more recent 2010-2013 seasons, so that is also on the radar, but life has gotten very busy this fall and I can only focus my attentions on so many things. Hopefully 2002-03 will be finished soon.

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