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This article by News 4 Senior Correspondent Rich Newberg appeared in the Spring/Summer 2004 edition of Television Quarterly. When the first images of moving life appeared on television, people couldn’t take their eyes off the small screen. It didn’t matter much what was on the screen. In those early days, the novelty was viewed more for entertainment than information. That would change as film cameras recorded neighborhood events and newsmakers "up close and personal." Local stations presented a defining look at the day’s news. Now, as we look back on that era...we see more than the day’s news in that early footage. We see the era defined in a way that only television can record it. 
Finding that footage is another story. Television has a short memory. Its images are fleeting. Today’s news is tomorrow’s history, and as the thinking goes, history is for text books and newspaper microfilm. Television newsrooms move at a frenzied pace, and are reluctant to look back, when the "here and now" is rapidly changing. The computer search file often goes back only to the year the computer was first installed, when tapes became numbered and catalogued for quick reference. Long before the computer arrived, many stations unceremoniously either dumped their film archives, or boxed them up and shipped them off to warehouses, where they have sat uncatalogued and unappreciated...until now. 
As local television stations approach their golden anniversaries, they are suddenly realizing that their "life stories" and the history of the communities they serve are missing from the shelf. "I’m getting calls from stations in North Carolina, New Jersey, Iowa, and Ohio, that want to recover their lost histories," says Lisa Carter, an archivist helping Kentucky public television network, KET digitize their entire archives of finished programs. "TV stations want to communicate to their audience on an emotional level, about things that are important to their local communities, and history is important to local communities." 
Carter says there’s a renewed interest in archival material nationwide, because the internet has raised expectations about access to historic information. She also says programming like A&E’s "Biography" and the History Channel have created a wave of nostalgia and a market for recapturing the past. Baby boomers want to reconnect with the black and white era of post-war optimism. The moving pictures of their own childhood were produced when television was in its infancy. 
"I’ve grown up with television and watched the medium grow," says Vic Baker, who helped produce "Fifty Golden Years," a sentimental journey beginning with the very first broadcasts of pioneer station WBEN-TV in Buffalo, New York. "I remember as a kid, cutting out a cardboard box into a big television set, then pretending I was a television anchorman inside." Baker, who now produces the 6 o’clock news for anchors at that same station (new call letters, WIVB-TV), spent a year reacquainting himself with his childhood heroes and the events that helped shape his view of the world during the last five decades. He embraced the challenge of producing a golden anniversary special. "You have to preserve legacies!" (This writer co-produced the special and served as the program’s host). Thirty of the fifty golden years were missing when Baker and Public Relations Director Carrol Wolter began searching for film and video tape archives. "Short sighted station managers said ‘throw it out! Put it in the dumpster,’ " recalls Baker. "They didn’t think of themselves as being part of an historic record." Wolter, who grew up in Buffalo, decided this would be the project of her career. "I started with immense enthusiasm and zero material!" She appealed to viewers through a station PSA, asking for memorabilia from the early history of Channel 4. "The station has been a fiber that’s been woven into every family...I got responses every day. It was phenomenal! They sent me padded envelopes full of newspaper articles...It was like putting a huge puzzle piece together. I made file folders for every year..." Wolter tracked down station pioneers in their seventies and eighties, who made curtain calls on camera, sharing a half-century of behind the scenes secrets and treasured film clips of a bygone era. The earliest images of a television culture played once again on the small screen. Marionettes, Santa and his elves, and evil doers on the weekly drama "The Clue," brought back the wonders of childhood and mysteries of life as portrayed by Buffalo’s broadcast pioneers. Wrestlers, the likes of Gorgeous George and strongman Ilio DiPaolo grabbed the spotlight for one last twirling appearance, and a young Jack Kennedy entered the station’s news set for a glimpse back to Camelot. "We could actually build the heritage from what we had to work with," says Wolter. For Baker, he was back in that cardboard TV cut-out. "I got a lot of joy out of doing it because I revived a lot of my childhood memories." Part of the joy for WIVB-TV’s General Manager, was the show’s 8 rating and the station’s subsequent climb to number one in the Buffalo market. "You could see it in every rating book from that point on," says Lou Verruto. "It began to make a difference." The CBS affiliate was second to the once all powerful ABC affiliate, WKBW-TV. "That was one way to get the news junkies to watch us," says Verruto. ‘Here’s what we’ve got, they don’t do this...’ "We introduced ourselves again to that audience. It was viewer friendly in that we weren’t beating our chests. ‘This is what we’ve done as part of your community and your life over the first fifty, and now as we’ re going into the second fifty, here’s what we’re going to try and do.’ You’ve got to save things that you believe are important, as a legacy to the people that are coming after us. They need to know what we were thinking, what we did, and why we did things...." This kind of self-discovery is at the heart of a movement that gathered momentum six years ago following a warning by the Library of Congress: "The American television and video heritage is now at a crossroads. One direction leads toward catastrophic losses of film and videotape. Another...leads toward the managed preservation of extant television and video materials that bear an important relationship to American history and culture..." Local stations wanting to take the high road didn't have a clue how to go about rescuing their archives. Resources to assist local television producers in saving their history are just now becoming available. During the days of film, the most important clips would be used in multiple newscasts and reused for follow-up stories. Unlike video tape, which could be dubbed to another tape, the important film stories were often physically clipped out of their original reels and moved to other reels. "The selections are the needles in the haystack," say WIVB's Baker. "Finding them would be cost prohibitive." The station's film archive has been moved on three occasions, from the Historical Society, to a local college, to a warehouse, where it now sits on shelves in boxes. The mountain of material is under the protection of the Buffalo Broadcast Pioneers, a relatively new group devoted to preserving local television and radio history. "That’s pretty typical," says Curator Ron Simon, whose Museum of Television and Radio in New York City holds rare local news interviews with the likes of Jerry Lewis, Art Buchwald, and Arthur Miller. "You always discover rare insights that cultural and political leaders say nowhere else, potentially great material for future historical documentaries." The museum has footage of the Beatles second U.S. appearance after the Ed Sullivan Show in New York. Local Miami stations recorded the "Fab Four" rollicking on the beach. Simon says the footage has a different feel from the network excerpts that have played over and over again. "So much of this old footage has commercial viability," adds Simon. "Every researcher is looking for footage that hasn’t been seen before, something fresh..." He believes viewers delight in seeing how national stories played out in local communities. "New images bring another type of emotional dimension or new perspective to the event...seeing an old event in a new way." So how can local stations begin the search and take the steps necessary to rescue their fragile history? Television industry leaders and archivists are now fine tuning a step-by-step guide for taking action. It’s called "Local Television: A Guidebook for Saving Our Heritage," and will be available by the summer. The National Television Academy is well aware of the contributions of local stations. "Local television news has always been the foundation of all national news," says Academy President Peter Price, who notes that networks are shrinking the size of their bureaus and relying more and more on their affiliates. "Those same national networks learned long ago, the hard way, what happens to their heritage when kinescopes and tapes are destroyed. The Academy is now working actively with The Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) to promote and hopefully fund the archiving and preservation of local programming from the television stations of America." The guidebook is geared toward the television mind. It will include pictures and even a quiz to determine a station’s "Heritage Quotient." Steps to "chip away" at the mountain of film and video tape include cataloging and storage techniques. There’s even a section devoted to resources (grants) available for preservation. "It’s time to move beyond the crossroads," says Kentucky based digitizer of history, Lisa Carter. She ’s passionate about the mission. "Local television of the recent past is the 20th century’s equivalent to the diaries and manuscripts of the 1800’s. You can capitalize on your hidden assets and invest in your community’s visual heritage." Local stations serve as anchors in turbulent times. There is a depth to the American character that is revealed in times of crisis, but also when we look beyond the fleeting image of the day’s trials and tribulations. "Local television news...finds the voices and images that matter at the level where real life is lived," says Bruce Jackson, former chairman of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. "The ‘economy’ is an abstraction until it is translated into people having or not having products, money, jobs. For the past fifty years, local television news has been the institution that has done more than any other to document the quality and character of ordinary life in America." As Jackson points out "what we know of the past largely depends on which moments were captured in writing or images, what technology was available to document what was going on, and what care was taken to preserve written, aural and visual records." The answers to tomorrow’s questions may be wound up in reels of moving history withering away on warehouse shelves. The technology has arrived to capture a very big picture, on a very small screen. [Senior Correspondent and documentarian for WIVB-TV, the CBS affiliate in Buffalo, New York, Rich Newberg is a Regional Vice President of the New York Chapter of the National Television Academy. He is also a board member of the Buffalo Broadcast Pioneers, whose mission includes preserving Western New York’s rich TV-radio history.] COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
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