When News Went Electronic

In 1978, I visited a location shoot in Beverly Hills, a Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas movie, The Power. Fonda played a naïve local news reporter; Douglas is her hipper, more cynical cameraman. Today we know it as The China Syndrome (1979). That news crew happens to be in the observation gallery at the (fictional) Ventana nuclear generating station, surreptitiously filming a control room crisis. This may be one of the last times in dramatic movies where the news crew shoots actual film; a key plot element is the time it takes to rush the footage back to the TV station and run it through the developing tank. Crucially, in this paranoid plot, that gives the evil energy plutocrats who own Ventana plenty of time to have their slimy corporate lawyers quash the broadcast.

That was the news technology of the time. The only thing slightly inauthentic about that side of the movie was the relatively fancy 16mm camera. The real ones were usually battered Auricons, a barely postwar design in heavy hammertone steel, which recorded the sound right on the film—the only kind of pro filmmaking that didn’t use a separate recorder. (A movie industry footnote: The tiny Auricon company was owned by William Fox, the founder of 20^th Century Fox, who became an instant convert to sound films when he saw what Warners was making on The Jazz Singer. That story is told in very lightly disguised form in Singing in the Rain.)

TV news started out live. As early as 1938, RCA/NBC had an enormous mobile van prowling the streets of Manhattan. It covered fires, the arrival of ocean liners, and President Roosevelt opening the New York World’s Fair. After the war, smaller, less elaborate location trucks were used by TV stations all over the country. They were great for ball games and parades, but too cumbersome and expensive for daily use to cover crime stories and school board meetings. From 1948 on, the mainstay of television news was 16mm film, which used far smaller, cheaper cameras than live TV. They went everywhere, from Korea to Berlin to Vietnam. From Selma to Watts to Newark. It was a polished news delivery system. But it was slow to air, and film got increasingly costly.

On America’s 200^th birthday, there were nearly a thousand TV stations in the USA, most with an FCC license requirement to cover the community. Each news department spent a small fortune buying and developing movie film (after about 1965, it was expensive color film). Small markets had stations with only one news crew; many other places had three or more. Each shot at least 100 minutes a week—in a year, that could be close to 15,000 minutes of 16mm film and processing. In the earliest days, messengers rushed the film to regular film laboratories. Then stations all bought their own automatic 16mm developing machines.

In 1976, that’s an annual news film bill of about $100,000 per station; $600,000 in today’s money. Imagine all those bucks down the drain every year for one-time-use film that has no afterlife or economic value. Now multiply that by a thousand TV stations. In many cases, Eastman Kodak was selling both the film and the chemicals used to develop it. Those enormously profitable deals with station and network news departments were like a year-in, year-out annuity for Kodak. Impecunious news directors could opt for cheaper DuPont, but few did.

A half-century ago, TV news crews across the country called it a revolution: ENG, Electronic News Gathering. The 16mm newsreel-style cameras used everywhere since the dawn of television news were quickly replaced by portable video cameras and tape recorders that could get on the air without the delay of bringing film back to be developed. Some viewers barely noticed, but sharp-eyed ones saw differences in a live or nearly live image. Over time, ENG would change TV coverage forever. But first, it would drastically impact local TV station economics.

Videotape would do away with film’s endless expense. It could be used and re-used indefinitely. But there was a startling initial price tag ahead of the eventual big savings: the incredible cost of a broadcast-quality video camera back then. Table stakes for RCA’s TK-76 or Ikegami’s giant-killer HL-79 were steep. For American TV technicians, Ikegami seemed to come out of nowhere. A small, specialized company, manufacturing radio and television parts since 1948, it was almost totally unknown in the US, unlike consumer product giants like Sony, Panasonic, JVC, Sanyo and Akai. Yet Ikegami moved in like gangbusters in newsrooms all over the country.

In the mid-to-late Seventies, they all cost between $30,000 and $55,000, fully equipped with battery packs and lenses—about $180,000 to $330,000 in current dollars. Per camera. And you were sending them to cover street riots, fires, and other emergencies year-round in all weather. By contrast, those sturdy-but-inefficient ol’ 16mm cameras cost less than a tenth of that. It’s easy to see why many TV station CFOs blanched at taking the leap.

By now, the video cameras that replaced the 16mm Auricons have followed them into retirement.

Sadly, long before the Radio Corporation of America was sold to France’s Thomson, it was reduced to reselling Japanese VCRs under its own name. We don’t always see old machinery as wistful or poignant, but RCA’s TK-76 earns those fond emotions from many of the now-aged people who used it, despite literally shouldering its 14-pound weight. This nostalgia abides not least because America’s homegrown, pioneering portable video news camera was the last truly successful TV camera from the US company that did more than any other in the world to commercialize broadcast technology.