Herbert Muschel

Muschel grew up on Manhattan's Lower East Side and graduated from New York University with a degree in journalism. During World War II he served in the Merchant Marine as a radio operator and purser.⁠[1]

After the war Muschel published the CBSCBSCBS is an American commercial broadcast television network. It was founded in 1927 as United Independent Broadcasters, renamed the Columbia Broadcasting System in 1928, and grew from a radio network into a television network under William S. Paley. With ABC and NBC it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks; it has been owned in turn by Westinghouse, Viacom, ViacomCBS and Paramount Global, has been owned by Paramount Skydance Corporation since 2025, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry radio program Invitation to Learning in booklet form. The news release PR Newswire issued on his death said he was credited as one of the founders of a television guide in New York that gave viewers program times, channels and summaries; the history of PR Newswire in the International Directory of Company Histories calls him the “originator” of TV Guide.⁠[1][2]

In 1954 Muschel founded PR Newswire in New York. At the time the Federal Communications Commission allowed only AT&TAT&TAT&T (AT&T Inc.) is a telecommunications company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Its predecessor was SBC Communications, a regional holding company created in the 1984 breakup of the Bell System; SBC merged with the original AT&T Corp. in 2005 and adopted its name, and it has since operated a nationwide wireless network and fiber broadband, at one time also owning DIRECTV and WarnerMedia.Open the full entry and Western Union to send printed messages to a third person; PR Newswire took a single copy of a client's news release and delivered it simultaneously to 12 major New York news outlets over a private teleprinter network, for a flat fee of $15 a day. Before then, delivering news releases to the media had been a time-consuming and uncertain process. PR Newswire later described this as the first time press releases were treated as breaking news.⁠[1][2]

In 1963 David Steinberg, a former business writer for the New York Herald Tribune, joined Muschel at PR Newswire; he later served as its chief executive from 1975 to 1992. On Muschel's death Steinberg said, “He was a pragmatist and an idealist who treated his friends and employees as family.”⁠[1]

In 1971 PR Newswire was sold to Western Union Corporation. In 1982 it was acquired by United Business Media plc of London.⁠[1][2]

Muschel died on November 1, 2003, at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, at the age of 85; he was survived by his wife, Dollie. PR Newswire said at the time that it had about 40,000 customers worldwide, including more than half of U.S. publicly traded companies, offices in 14 countries, and distribution of customer news to outlets in 135 countries in 27 languages. The public relations trade publication PRNEWS described him as a pioneer of the commercial newswire industry.⁠[1][3]