Looking Back

Last Updated on January 20, 2017

Eighteen years ago today, I was hired by a small television station, starting a career in a medium I’ve dreamed about being part of since I was four years old.

A lot of people, when reflecting on such anniversaries, like to say things like, “It seems like only yesterday.”

Not for me.&nbsp  Some days it seems like about six lifetimes ago.&nbsp  Other days, it seems more like a decade.&nbsp  It doesn’t seem like it only just begun.&nbsp  Maybe that’s because of all the change that has come along over the years.

I’ve seen numerous tape formats come and go, for instance.&nbsp  When I started in television, we recorded video on a tape format called U-matic, also known as “three-quarter,” referring to the width of the recording surface of the tape itself.&nbsp  (By that same nomenclature, VHS could have been called “half-inch.”)&nbsp  The station that hired me used U-matic long after it had started its pathway to obsolecence, having been replaced by Beta.&nbsp  Since then, I’ve worked with a little-known (thank goodness) format called MII, then DVC Pro, and now P2.

P2, which is one of the new rages in electronic news gathering, isn’t tape at all.&nbsp  It’s a small card, about as big as that Visa that’s costing you a small fortune in interest each month, containing an array of small memory cards like the ones you’d find in a digital camera.&nbsp  A P2 card can shoot up to a half-hour (or more depending on the size) of footage, and can then be reformatted like a hard drive, and used again without any picture quality loss like multiple passes of videotape might cause.

When I started in television, we used electronic typewriters.&nbsp  Scripts were typed on paper sheets known as Q-Sets, which were five (and later seven) layers of colored paper with a page of carbon paper in between each.&nbsp  You typed on the top page and instantly had four copies.&nbsp  The top sheet, white, was loaded into a device called a TelePrompTer, which consisted of a camera pointing down at the paper, which was then shown on a mirror in front of the lens of the camera so that the newscaster could read the script while looking directly at the viewer.&nbsp  The second sheet, a pale yellow, was handed to the anchors on the desk.&nbsp  The third and fourth sheets (blue and pink, although I don’t remember which was which) went to the director and the audio operator.&nbsp  The bottom sheet (about the color of a manilla folder) went to me.&nbsp  I was the tape operator:&nbsp  when a news anchor introduced a pre-taped story voiced by one of the reporters on staff, I was the guy pressing Play on a giant VCR so you could actually see that story.

There was an art to rolling tapes.&nbsp  You had to learn the anchor’s reading pace, figure out which of the last few words on the script would be the one you’d roll the tape on so that everything would time out correctly.&nbsp  Sitting in that closet-sized tape room was a lot of pressure, and I became quite the expert at hitting the mark.

There was an art to separating Q-sets.&nbsp  It was all in the wrist, in fact.&nbsp  At the top of each Q-set, there was a perforated seam that held all of the pages and the carbon paper in place.&nbsp  If you snapped it just right, the seam and the carbon paper would slide out leaving only the script papers which were then easily sorted by color.&nbsp  More than once, I had to shoo away an over-eager intern who tried to rip the seam off the top of the paper, then manually pull each sheet of carbon out one at a time.&nbsp  It was live TV!&nbsp  We just didn’t have time for that kind of patience.

Nowadays, everything is done on computers.&nbsp  (Things were done on computers long before my first TV station was still trying to do it with electric typewriters, in fact.)&nbsp  Even stories that are shot without an inch of videotape are now loaded into computers so that the stories you see on the air can be edited, then played back from another computer system.&nbsp  There’s no tape operator in a closet-sized room, either.&nbsp  The director now just hits one extra button to play the tape from the computer and all is right with the world…at least until it’s time for the next story.

Newsrooms seem to be getting a lot younger these days.&nbsp  I’m not 100% sure whether that’s a function of trying to get rid of the older, presumably-always-but-not-necessarily-always-higher-payed workers, or a function of me just getting a bit older myself.&nbsp  Just today I had a talk with someone in our studio who’s still in college, just as I was when I started in TV, and it was almost sobering to realize that equipment I used to have to work with are such relics that they’re not even mentioned in Journalism school, anymore.

There’s something sad about that, but then I suppose that’s how progress, good or bad, works.

I’ve been doing my current specific job, making those promo announcements about the next special report on the way — you know, those news ads you all hate so much — for about thirteen years now.&nbsp  That hasn’t changed nearly as much.&nbsp  We are still routinely asked to come up with a compelling way to present a story to you, the viewer, that will entice you to watch, often before the story is even shot and, once in a while, even before the reporter who is going to do the story even knows he’s doing it.

But it’s the little challenges like those that make life interesting, right?

And nowadays, we’re not only dealing with the normal, nearly endless problems we deal with every day, but we worry about things like webpages, high definition and digital television.&nbsp  (And I assure you: no one is more sick of hearing about the transition to digital television than those of us who work at TV stations who are forced by the FCC to mention it about 832 times a day!)

In any case, I thought I’d try something a little unusual with this post.&nbsp  I’m going to take your questions about TV and what I do.&nbsp  I have to warn you up front that I don’t talk about my station or the company that owns it specifically, nor can I comment on specific people I work with or have worked with in the past.&nbsp  I’d like to keep my job, you see.&nbsp  Even though I’ve been in this crazy business for a while now, I note that I’m still a long way away from retirement age.&nbsp  So if you have questions about what goes on behind the scenes at a TV station, I’ll answer as best I can.