Electronic News Gathering

Origins

When networks and local stations began covering news regularly in the 1930s, news reports were often “rip and read” from newspaper and wire service stories. As recording and remote technology improved through World War II, radio stories expanded to include news actualities, recorded on site with “portable” audio wire or tape decks that could weigh 40 pounds or more. By the time local television news began in the late 1940s, newscasts containing news, weather, and sports segments had evolved on radio. This three-part emphasis continued in television.

Both network and station ability to cover such events for television evolved slowly as technological advances enabled them to move out of studios and into the field. At first, photographs and footage purchased from newsreel companies comprised the visuals presented during newscasts, but soon the advent of 16-mm film sound cameras enabled network reporters to cover events such as the 1960 presidential political campaign between Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat John Kennedy. Throughout the 1960s network coverage of such stories as the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War relied on film shot, developed, and edited into news packages. This processing took hours and could expand into days if stories had to be sent from faraway places. Stories shot in Vietnam, for example, were flown to Tokyo for processing and then those images were either flown or transmitted via undersea cable to the United States for editing into news packages. In the 1970s, satellite technology and the development of “electronic news gathering” (ENG), melding videotape, portable video cameras, and microwave links began changing the face of both network and local station news.

ENG cameras and recorders allowed television news operations to expand their news-gathering operations through the 1980s. This newer, portable technology eliminated the need to process film and allowed news events to be transmitted more rapidly to viewers, especially if microwave links were used to send stories from the field back to the studio. In the early 1980s microwaving stories from remote locations for use either as taped stories or live shots in newscasts became commonplace, often eliminating a time lag between coverage and broadcast. In the 1990s smaller, lighter and more portable equipment combined the separate camera and recorder equipment into various versions of camcorders, the most popular of which was the Sony Betacam.

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