Into the Newsroom

Exploring the Digital Production of Regional Television News

Emma Hemmingway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134137237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Into the Newsroom provides a rigorous investigation into the everyday rituals that are performed in the television newsroom, and offers a unique suggestion that news is both a highly haphazard and yet technologically complicated process of deliberate construction involving the interweaving of reflexive professional journalists as well as developing, unpredictable technologies. Arguing specifically for a recognition and an exploration of technological agency, this book takes the reader on an exciting journey into the digital newsroom, using exclusive observation and interviews from those journalists working on the BBC's recent pilot project of local television news as part of its empirical evidence.

This is an essential introduction for both those seeking to understand news processes at the level of every day routines and practices, and for those students and scholars who are eager to adopt new and challenging ways to theorise news as practice.

1
INTRODUCTION

Before we begin our journey through the practical world of television news production, acquainting ourselves with the daily routines, tasks, practices and technologies that together constitute this complex yet haphazard milieu, I want to spend a few minutes telling some ‘technology stories’. These three particular stories that are situated in different places in the world, that occur at different times in our history, and which all involve different technologies, have one remarkable thing in common. And it is this common thread that holds these stories together that we also need to recognise and understand if our own journey is to make any sense to us.

Our first story involves a young Hungarian known as Endre Friedmann, but perhaps better known today as Robert Capa. Capa is regarded as one of the most famous war photographers of the twentieth century. He photographed five different wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the First Indo-China War. He is probably best remembered for his relentless documentation of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy, the Battle of Normandy on Omaha Beach and the liberation of Paris.

Capa first found photography work in Berlin in the very early 1930s but as he was a Jew he quickly moved from Germany to France to escape from the rise of Nazism. At that time, he adopted the name Robert Capa as he felt it would be more recognisable and familiar and that it sounded American. In 1936 his name became known for a particular photograph that he took on the Cordoba Front of a Loyalist militiaman who had been shot and was in the process of falling to his death. But it was to be his coverage of World War II, and in particular the 1944 D-Day landings, that was to bring him worldwide fame. And it is the story of these photographs that concerns us as we begin our exploration of the crucial role that technologies play in the construction of news facts.

On 6 June 1944, Capa swam ashore with the first allied assault wave on Omaha Beach. He was armed with two Contax 11 cameras mounted with 50-millimetre lenses and several rolls of spare film. Stumbling ashore under heavy enemy fire, Capa managed to take 108 pictures, or four rolls, of what should have become some of the most significant photographs in history. Much of the new close-up action style of war coverage was attributed to the advances in photographic technology. News photographers at the front lines were all using small, portable 35-millimetre cameras, such as the Leica, which could take up to 36 photographs before being reloaded. But it was what happened to the photographs in the darkroom developing process that has played such a key role in their acquiring an unforeseen notoriety.

Capa sent the photographs back to Life magazine to be developed and published. A 15-year-old laboratory assistant called Dennis Banks then made a crucial mistake in the darkroom and set the dryer at too high a level. All but 11 frames of the pictures were melted and ruined. Life magazine printed 10 of the remaining 11 frames in its June 1944 issue with captions that described the footage as ‘slightly out of focus’, explaining that Capa’s hands were shaking in the excitement of the moment. The shakiness of the footage was in reality caused by the negatives being damaged in the drying process. Capa himself used this phrase as the title of his autobiographical account of the war, Slightly out of Focus.

This story tells us two things. First, it shows how the relationship between news gatherers and their available technologies is absolutely crucial to the construction of news facts. If it wasn’t for the development of the small, portable cameras, Capa could never have got close enough to his subjects to photograph them effectively. But it also shows us how these technologies are unpredictable, and that our relationships with them can be haphazard and even beyond out control. These relationships are not constant or reliable; they do not act within set parameters that we may predict. As this story shows, our whole visual understanding and appreciation of the D-Day landings, one of the most famous moments in modern European history, is determined by a single error that occurs within an ad hoc relationship between a 15-year-old laboratory assistant, a photographic heater and a hundred negatives.

Nearly 20 years later, across the Atlantic Ocean, our second story also involves the coverage of a monumental historic event, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. To tell this story we can turn to the testimony of those newsmen who were directly involved in reporting this devastating event and who’ve since written about their experiences in a gripping book entitled When The News Went Live, Dallas 1963.

Bob Huffaker, Bill Mercer, George Phenix and Wes Wise were all young newsmen who never expected to find themselves at the centre of what was to become one of the biggest news stories of all time. They were responsible for covering the president’s assassination and its subsequent aftermath, including television’s first ‘live’ murder.

As Dan Rather, the former CBS news reporter and managing editor, outlines in the book, these four men were on the ground covering what they had imagined would be nothing more than a short presidential visit to the city.

From the Presidential motorcade to Parkland Hospital, from Lee Harvey Oswald’s shooting to the trial and lonesome death of Jack Ruby, they were there, on the inside. The view they were afforded of these events was unique; the tales they have to tell, one-of-a-kind.

(Dan Rather, in Foreword to When the News Went Live, Huffaker et al., 2004)

Their individual testimonies of this unpredictable yet momentous occasion quickly reveal how crucial were the roles that the available technologies played in the construction of the events. The story of the assassination of a president and the murder of a suspected assassin is on one level the story of the individual relationships forged between men and their machines, relationships that develop in arbitrary and often surprising ways. All four of these young journalists were reliant upon the often unwieldy and cumbersome technologies of their day.

We wrote our own copy. There were no news readers among us. Eddie demanded versatility and all of us were prepared to report and write as well as shoot film and operate audio equipment. Video – as opposed to our 16 mm news film – was the purview of our engineering and production people. There were no tape cassettes or cartridges in those days, and both video and audio were recorded on reel-to-reel devices. Videotape machines weren’t yet portable. The size of deep freezers, they were either installed in a studio or mounted in a van, using reels of tape two inches wide.

(Huffaker et al., 2004, p.36)

The authors argue that this particular news story, with its sudden demands on journalists to be able to broadcast live from a location, without any prior warning or preparation, signified a turning point in the history of the use of news technologies. This was the day when television news reporting ‘grew up’. As their stories reveal, this new-found maturity was only achievable by means of the various associations that evolved during that specific day between journalists and their particular technologies.

When I arrived on the morning of Saturday November 23rd, the press room was overrun with out-of-town reporters and cluttered with camera equipment, film canisters, extension cords, audiotape recorders, food wrappers and Styrofoam cups. I made the rounds of our mobile van out at the Commerce Street curb and talked to the operators and floor directors running our inside cameras. We stationed one camera in the basement to glimpse Oswald being taken through the jail office. The other remained on the crowded third floor, where reporters were jostling for position in the narrow hallway between the elevators and Captain Fritz’s homicide office. I hooked up with Dan Rather’s CBS reporter Nelson Benton, a former World War II bomber pilot who proved to be a good friend as he and I took turns with the third-floor camera’s mike.

(Huffaker et al., 2004, p.39)

Huffaker’s account of the coverage of Jack Ruby’s spur-of-the-moment shooting of the suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, is in essence a story of a group of men struggling with inadequate technologies, and the intrepid but wildly contingent strategies they adopt as they attempt to develop a relationship with this machinery to report live to the world.

Seconds after the shot, I knew that from up in our vans, Nelson couldn’t possibly figure things out on the monitors. I couldn’t distinguish one torso from another in the fracas as I fought to keep my footing. Twice I said, ‘Oswald has been shot.’ Then to avoid covering up anything Nelson might be saying, I stopped talking, hoping that Nelson had heard me. He hadn’t.

With tapes rolling in both Dallas and New York, Nelson had begun his broadcast a split second after Ruby pulled the trigger. Not having heard the gunshot, he said, ‘This is the basement of Dallas City Hall, and there’s a scuffle down there.’ As Nelson continued to talk, I was trying to stay out of our camera’s field of view, and I fell silent so that I wouldn’t conflict with Nelson’s reporting. Neither of us could hear the other, and Nelson was reaching for words as he found it impossible to see what was happening on the black-and-white monitors. He began trying to reach me, but I couldn’t hear as he said on the air, ‘We’re going to try to bring in Bob Huffaker of KRLD. Bob, can you hear us down there? Can you give us an account of what happened?’ I couldn’t hear anything except the din in the basement. Jim English was glued to his camera and unable to tell me anything, and Bob Hankal had disappeared, headset and all. People were stepping on my mike cord and my feet, pushing and elbowing, wrestling and shouting.

(Huffaker et al., 2004, p.56)

This historic moment certainly illustrates the burgeoning power of television news. But more significantly, it also reveals the developing knowledge that journalists were beginning to acquire of a network of human and nonhuman actors, which together, and in constant but continually changing associations with one another, are responsible for the construction of news facts.

These men would probably not have described their work in such terms. They certainly wouldn’t have had the time or luxury to analyse these spontaneous and often short-lived constellations of technologies and people within which they found themselves operating. But there is an important realisation in their recollections not just of the central role of technologies, but of how highly contingent and random are the relationships they developed with them in their attempt to produce their news reports. Taking a short section describing the moment that Oswald’s murder is broadcast live, we can begin to see just how many seemingly unrelated factors had to come together in order for this groundbreaking broadcast to be successful.

Fort Worth’s WBAP-TV was feeding NBC correspondent Tom Pettit’s broadcasts from their engine-challenged van, which a wrecker had deposited at the curb. Pettit’s guys in New York had switched to him when he said, ‘Let me have it. I want it.’ Their NBC cameraman had to take a wide establishing shot then rack his lens turret on the air for a tight shot of the shooting, while our Jim English had the optical advantage with our camera’s giant zoom lens. Jim zoomed out and framed the struggle as detectives dragged both Ruby and Oswald toward the jail office. Jim had a headset, but I had no way of communicating with anyone. Bob Hankal, our floor director, also with a headset, had been stationed left of the lens, but I lost sight of him as the brawl tossed me hard to the right.

We’d just broadcast television’s first murder. I had missed Oswald’s middle name, and Nelson had called the place the Houston County Jail once, but I had managed to stand up and hang onto the mike.

(Huffaker et al., 2004, p.60)

While CBS’s Bob Huffaker and Nelson Benton, along with NBC’s Tom Pettit, were reporting live from the scene on national TV, their colleagues were continuing to depend upon the success of the lengthy film-developing process before they could air their 16-millimetre black-and-white footage. As we saw with Capa’s earlier material this process was highly unpredictable and prone to both human and technological error. While Huffaker was reporting the Oswald shooting live, his KRLD reporter George Phenix was also capturing it with his big Auricon optical-sound-on-film camera:

We put the film in the developing process, and Eddie Barker called the FBI. I paced and smoked and waited for the film to be developed. The night before, I had loaded the film wrong and ruined an exclusive interview that CBS reporter Nelson Benton had grabbed with Police Chief Curry. Anxiously I waited as Dean Angel threaded the film through the projector. ‘Please God let there be at least some sort of image on the film.’ I knew if anyone could pull the film through the long line of developing tanks intact it would be Dean. He was calm under pressure. More than once, he had saved my hide by getting an image despite poor photography. The film finally came out of the soup and there Jack Ruby was, standing just off my right shoulder. He stepped in front of my camera and – bang. I walked out of the screening room, shaken. I would see my film only one more time.

(Phenix, in Huffaker et al., 2004, p.88)

Thus one of the world’s most momentous and devastating events is captured on film and processed for the waiting world, only by means of the specific relationship between a young journalist, a roll of film, a set of developing tanks and a fortunate individual who just happened to be calm under pressure. As our first story of Capa’s D-Day footage revealed, if any of the individual components in this story had been changed, or had in association with the others performed in a slightly different way, the entire course of television history as we now know it would have been significantly altered.

They’re giving us an up-close portrait of a dramatic time. While they were breaking the news, they were also breaking new ground. There was no precedent for television news broadcasting for four days straight without commercial interruption. There was no precedent for the drama of broadcasting a violent murder on a Sunday morning coast to coast. These were young men who were thrust into a devastating local story that had international significance. They realised – in the moment – that this was the story of a lifetime. Unlike other Americans they had no time to mourn the president’s passing; rather they had a job to do and they did it well.

(Jeff West, director 1993–2004 The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, in Huffaker et al., 2004, p.96)

Our final story is a long way from the experiences of young journalists and photographers attempting to capture the most significant moments in recent history. Instead it is the story of a local television reporter, a lorry carrying pots of coloured paint, a roll of film and the attempt to fill the airtime of regional morning and lunchtime television bulletins. Yet this too is a similar story, outlining the complex relationships between journalists and their technological partners in the production of news.

This particular story takes place in Nottingham, England in 1987, more than 20 years after the assassination of President Kennedy. On that particular morning a television reporter arrived at the BBC’s Nottingham newsroom at 7.30am. His job was to provide news material for the half-hourly morning and the 12.30pm lunchtime bulletins. While the half-hourly morning bulletins were being broadcast a colourful accident occurred right outside the building.

An articulated lorry pulled up sharply at a set of traffic lights and as it did so more than seventy pots of coloured paint were suddenly catapulted off the back of it onto the road, where they promptly exploded, showering the road with tons of various coloured paints. The traffic congestion and chaos that ensued brought Nottingham city centre to a complete standstill as the road flowed with dozens of multicoloured paint rivers.

For a local television station this was a great picture-story that fortuitously had happened on their very doorstep. A cameraman was immediately sent outside to the scene, but this was still in the days of film cameras as opposed to video cameras. By 8.00am the scene had been captured on film, but there was no technical facility in the Nottingham newsroom to convert the film to video for broadcast so the pictures were effectively unusable.

A local dispatch rider had to be organised, who collected the film reel from the Nottingham newsroom and delivered it by motorbike to engineers at the BBC’s larger news centre in Birmingham where the film could then be processed and transferred to videotape for broadcast. This process took around four-and-a-half hours. Once the film had been developed and transferred to video format, the Nottingham reporter then had to pay for a video-line booking from Birmingham to the Nottingham newsroom in order to get the material transferred back. The entire production process took more than five hours to complete. The morning bulletins and the lunchtime bulletin had of course been transmitted hours earlier without the required pictures, and the original footage could then not be transmitted until the main programme at 6.30pm that evening. By that time the road was cleaned and traffic was travelling normally throughout the city. The news story had in effect well and truly disappeared!

This local story illustrates how events that may at first seem to be easily accessed for news purposes are still crucially entangled with whatever available technologies we may have at our immediate disposal. In this example the filming of the material was not the problem. But the subsequent development of that material for broadcast made its proximate location to the Nottingham newsroom irrelevant. So a story that happened as close as possible to the hub of Nottingham’s news production facilities became as distant and unreachable as if it had occurred fifty miles away, simply because of the technological inadequacies of that particular newsroom infrastructure.

Here we have three separate stories occurring at different times in history involving three different journalistic endeavours to produce news footage. Yet there is a common thread that runs through each and that links the individual testimonies. That thread is the recognition of the contingent, unpredictable, but crucial relationships that are made between journalists and those technological machines or apparatuses that are equal constituents in any news-production process.

Having said this, where does it leave us? Isn’t it clear to anyone who has an interest in the production of television news that it involves complex technologies whose operations we may not completely understand? That is certainly the case. But we need to concentrate our efforts on understanding not just the role that technologies play, but more importantly, the associations that we discover between human and technological actors. It is the relationships, the alliances and the linkages that we will discover between these seemingly disparate constituents that help us to gain a fuller understanding of news processes.

A camera does not act in isolation. A journalist never works alone. A satellite truck cannot produce news independently. Yet how do these three actors, the camera, the human and the truck, come together? How do they relate to one another in order to create a live broadcast? With these types of questions we are being asked to map the associations between these different components. If we return to our three stories, in all of them we have seen glimpses of these associations between the different elements that may constitute the specific news event. But our stories alone cannot give us the tools with which to begin to unpick these relationships, to chart them in detail and to articulate what we find. In order to get that close to the production processes we’re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Actor Network Theory
• 3 Entering the Network
• 4 Video Journalism (1)
• 5 Video Journalism (2)
• 6 Extending the Network
• 7 The Satellite Truck and Live Reporting
• 8 Human Actors, Intentionality and Actor Network Theory
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography