David Sarnoff in the context of "RKO Pictures"

RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was a major American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1987. Initially, RCA was a patent trust owned by a partnership of General Electric (GE), Westinghouse, AT&T Corporation and United Fruit Company. It became an independent company in 1932 after the partners agreed to divest their ownerships in settling an antitrust lawsuit by the United States.

An innovative and progressive company, RCA was the dominant electronics and communications firm in the United States for over five decades. In the early 1920s, RCA was at the forefront of the mushrooming radio industry, both as a major manufacturer of radio receivers and as the exclusive manufacturer of the first superheterodyne receiver. In 1926, the company founded the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the first nationwide radio network. During the '20s and '30s RCA also pioneered the introduction and development of broadcast television—both black and white and especially color television. Throughout most of its existence, RCA was closely identified with the leadership of David Sarnoff. He became general manager at the company's founding, served as president from 1930 to 1965, and remained active as chairman of the board until the end of 1969.

A newspaper hawker, newsboy or newsie is a street vendor of newspapers without a fixed newsstand. Related jobs include paperboys, delivering newspapers to subscribers, and news butchers, selling papers on trains. The job was historically done by children, especially in the United States. The profession has faced significant decline worldwide in modern times owing to the advent of online news.

In the United States they became an iconic image of youthful entrepreneurship. Famous Americans that had worked as newsboys included Bruce Barton, Ralph Bunche, Joe DiMaggio, Thomas Edison, Dwight Eisenhower, Sam Rayburn, Walter Reuther, David Sarnoff, Cardinal Spellman, Harry Truman and Mark Twain.

RKO Pictures, commonly known as simply RKO, is an American film, television and stage production company owned by Concord. In its original incarnation, as RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., it was one of the "Big Five" film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain and Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Offices of America studio were brought together under the control of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in October 1928. RCA executive David Sarnoff engineered the merger to create a market for the company's sound-on-film technology, RCA Photophone, and in early 1929 production began under the RKO name (an initialism of Radio-Keith-Orpheum). Two years later, another Kennedy concern, the Pathé studio, was folded into the operation. By the mid-1940s, RKO was controlled by investor Floyd Odlum.

RKO has long been renowned for its cycle of musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the mid- to late 1930s. Actors Katharine Hepburn and, later, Robert Mitchum had their first major successes at the studio. Cary Grant was a mainstay for years, with credits including touchstones of the screwball comedy genre with which RKO was identified. The work of producer Val Lewton's low-budget horror unit and RKO's many ventures into the field now known as film noir have been acclaimed, largely after the fact, by film critics and historians. The studio produced two of the most famous films in motion picture history: King Kong and producer/director/star Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. RKO was also responsible for notable coproductions such as It's a Wonderful Life and Notorious, and it distributed many celebrated films by animation pioneer Walt Disney and leading independent producer Samuel Goldwyn. Though it often could not compete financially for top star and director contracts, RKO's below-the-line personnel were among the finest, including composer Max Steiner, cinematographers Nicholas Musuraca and Gregg Toland, and designer Van Nest Polglase.