Forty Years of The TV News Revolution
Always On is about the way smartphones and social media have transformed just about every facet of our lives but it is also something of a reporter’s notebook giving a flavour of my life as a technology journalist.
There is a chapter devoted to the relationship between journalists and the PR industry - an increasingly unbalanced one, with one side much better resourced and staffed than the other. But a constant theme is the way broadcasting and in particular TV news, has been through its own technology revolution.
In September 1981, a few months after leaving university, I got a six month contract as a researcher in the BBC’s Leeds regional news operation. There I found a newsroom ringing with the clatter of typewriters, thick with clouds of cigarette smoke, and with a drinking culture that saw the news editor pop down to the in-house bar for a couple of pints at lunchtime and another one before taking his place in the gallery for the evening’s edition of Look North.
While video had arrived in London - or ENG, Electronic News gathering as it was known - the crews in Leeds were still shooting on film. That meant waiting 45 minutes for the film to be processed or “go through the bath”. My job was then to sit with the film editor pretending to give some useful advice as he chopped out each shot, hung them up, and then cut them together at lightning speed to make a finished package. (Before the era of digital editing, film was quicker and easier to work with than video, where each shot had to be copied in sequence from the rushes to the finished tape.)
But my real role was to look after the interests of the reporters who would read their script live in the studio as the film was played out. A couple of the reporters were freelances known as “minutemen” - they were literally paid by the minute. Just before the programme they would rush into the edit suite to ask how long their piece was.
If I said it had come out at 3’57” I would get a dusty answer. “Wrong, sonny - I think you’ll find that’s 4’01”.”
When I moved to the London TV Newsroom in 1983 I found that the technology was only a little more advanced, but the network news operation involved a lot more people. Yes, the crews were shooting on video but it was heavy equipment with a cameraman linked to a sound recordist by an umbilical cord while an electrician arrived in a separate van packed with lighting equipment.
In the newsroom, a fleet of ladies with electric typewriters waited for you to dictate the script you had written out in longhand while a copytaster - often quite a senior journalist - sorted through the agency wires ripped from the telex machine.
To check facts and research the background to a story you turned not to Google but to News Information, a vast cuttings library whose diligent staff spent their days cutting up the newspapers and putting every story into the relevant folder. “Rumours of an explosion at a power station called Chernobyl? You’ll want Soviet Union/Energy/Nuclear’.
Graphics were made on cardboard by somewhat truculent members of a Fleet Street union. An animation meant a graphic operator actually pulling out a strip of paper to reveal the words beneath.
As for computers, they were being trialled on the new Breakfast Time but they did not arrive in the newsroom until 1985. At which point, our union called us out on strike. The issue was money - ITN was paying its staff £1000 per head to accept the beastly machines, the strike was settled when the BBC offered us £300.
Thirty years on from that embarrassing incident for a future technology correspondent computers and the internet had transformed journalism and broadcast news.
But at the start of Always On in January 2007, the use of the internet as a means to transmit video back to base or even go live was still seen as a bit risky. So when I arrived in San Francisco to cover an event called MacWorld where Steve Jobs was expected to unveil something special I was a little nervous. Here’s an extract from Chapter 1:
We booked into our hotel the night before Apple’s show started and immediately did what has since become a key task for any TV crew away from base. Tested the Wi-Fi. For decades, feeding a TV report back to base meant one of two things: travelling to a nearby TV station to use their facilities, or using a satellite truck. Both were expensive but reliable. You would pay a hefty sum to book a 15-minute slot on a satellite just before your deadline, but you could be pretty certain your piece would arrive. Early in my career, a foreign trip involved a lot of people: a three-man crew – yes, almost always men – made up of a cameraman, sound operator and lighting engineer, plus a videotape editor, and often a facilities engineer or two to operate a satellite truck.
You needed transport too: a despatch rider to ferry the tapes around, and sometimes a driver. As a young producer in 1985 I was sent to Paris for a state visit by the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. I was working with a very distinguished foreign correspondent who told me to get us a driver, and seemed amused when I asked, ‘What – for the whole week?’ I ended up handing over to the taxi driver something like £800 .
Now, in the digital era, that TV army had been reduced to one person, known as a ‘shoot edit’. They would shoot pictures, record audio, then edit the package – and increasingly they were responsible for getting it back to base. By 2007 we were also gradually moving away from expensive satellite feeds to a new essentially free method: feeding the finished package from the shoot/edit’s laptop over the Internet back to base. In the days of sketchy Internet connections this was OK if you had many hours to feed. On one occasion, exasperated by the impossibility of feeding a Breakfast report from a Barcelona hotel’s congested Wi-Fi, I went round to a friend’s house to use his faster broadband connection. It took an hour, but it got there.
What you did not want to do was feed over the Internet against a tight deadline. But that is exactly what we were planning to do in San Francisco the next morning: shoot, edit and feed a story for the Ten O’Clock News about an event that would not be over until a few hours before the bulletin. Hence the need to test the Wi-Fi. It seemed pretty fast that evening, but who knew how it would perform the following day?
Spoiler alert - it all turned out fine, the connection did indeed prove reliable and our piece did arrive on time. But read the book to find out about the other hurdles we had to clear along the way.
Since then feeding over the internet rather than via a satellite truck has become utterly routine, even though there are still hairy moments when the laptop’s countdown clock telling you how long until your piece reaches its destination threatens to overshoot your deadline.
Meanwhile that event in San Francisco launched not only the smartphone era but another technology revolution in broadcast news. The huge unwieldy £25,000 Sony cameras news crews used back in 2007 are disappearing, replaced by smaller lighter digital SLR cameras - and sometimes by smartphones.
In 2021 I am going live from my loft via smartphone, and multi-skilled colleagues are using iPhones to shoot whole news reports or record and edit radio programmes.
The tools of my trade have changed radically in my 40 years in broadcasting and we have all had to learn new skills - from shooting TikTok videos to starting a Substack newsletter. Actually, I have yet to crack TikTok but it can’t be that difficult………can it?
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