Technology & Broadcasting

 

The Today Show (Australia), in the 1980s, was the masthead for Channel Nine – and so  proud of its position in the forefront of all that was new, modern and dynamic in communications.

We had faxes.  I can’t begin to describe the excitement that the first fax engendered.  Here was a whole raft of research, script and pictures, juddering onto a sheet of thermo paper, from Los Angeles, through a phone line.  Amazing.  This was truly the cutting edge.

Of course, the thermo paper had its faults. All the images were destined to fade into oblivion in a matter of weeks just as if we had used invisible ink – an impermanence which meant we had to wait for the hard copy to clatter through the snail mail box just before the print failed on the fax.

And phone calls were getting cheaper.  A call from Los Angeles to Sydney was down to single digits per minute – in dollars that is, not cents.  Of course we only had land lines – the first mobile phone was still five years away.  And “mobile” was something of a misnomer as said phones, when they arrived, were the size, shape, and weight of a brick.  Their ability to actually carry a call was distinctly limited as range was a couple of miles and reception spotty at best.

And then there were the new satellites which in principle allowed us to conduct an interview with someone on the other side of the world.  Possibly.  It did rather depend on the weather, and the time of day, as the satellites seemed to disappear altogether for certain periods when their orbit was not on our side of the world.  These bookings were fiercely expensive so when the satellite “dropped out”, as it did all too often, the Today Show looked foolish and was quite a lot poorer.

We had only recently moved from film to digital video cameras which made life so much easier for journalists, cameramen (they were pretty much always men) and editors.  The old film cameras were heavy and required separate sound operators, unless we were still on single system sound which was several frames out of sync with the picture and meant editing was a small nightmare.

At that time there was only one 24 hour news channel anywhere in the world and it was the fledgling CNN which we watched – when the satellite was in the right position – with some skepticism.  This would never last.  Could never take over from broadcast channels.  There were four major networks in Australia and roughly the same in the US in the 1980s.

Research was done with actual books, or news clippings, or perhaps microfiche.  It was slow, tedious and labor intensive.  It was typed up for the anchors to work with so there was paper everywhere.

This week I visited my granddaughter’s middle school media class and was shocked beyond belief.  These 14 year olds are working with equipment I would have killed for as a news journalist, and techniques unknown to us even some years later.

These kids can also produce whole news stories on their phones.  Phones that fit in their hands, weigh a few ounces and have the most amazing cinematic technology built in, not to mention an ability to research any subject in a matter of seconds.

The changes in television are many, but technology is probably the most dramatic advance. Indeed it is well beyond anything we could have imagined.

Perhaps the most alarming effect of today’s technology is the fact that, as David  Brooks stated recently in his New York Times Op Ed,  “Everybody is a broadcast journalist now”.

Today news is broadcast on platforms hitherto unknown or unavailable to the public –  social media, internet news websites, apps, blogs.

It is alarming to find how many people get all their news from sources which don’t even pretend to be truthful.

These sources produce “fake news” a term which has regrettably been appropriated recently as a way to describe any news which the viewer/reader doesn’t agree with.

Brooks goes on to point out that the networks are very keen to ramp up a crisis atmosphere and so create a “breaking news” situation to increase viewer numbers and therefore network profits.

So the networks themselves are an area of high risk as broadcast news now veers away from straight, careful reporting into opinion, turning professional journalists into pundits whose opinions cloud the facts.

Scott Pelley (60 Minutes correspondent) in his new book, “Truth Worth Telling” shows us the research reporters and their producers continue to use to ensure the news items broadcast are accurate. Of course modern technology makes thorough research considerably faster and easier than our old fashioned paper based methods. But careful research and honest, truthful reporting must be protected if we are to retain a free press.

So while technology seems to have opened up the world of broadcast news to everyone it has come with a major lack of self discipline and regulation.

It’s all too tempting to simply grasp the wonders of today’s amazing technology while ignoring the importance of the less exciting process of careful research so as to offer the truth .

I wonder whatever could be next?

Seeing into the technological future is as difficult today as it was forty years ago, but here’s something to help with the predictions

https://open.nytimes.com/exploring-the-future-of-5g-and-journalism-a53f4c4b8644

https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/86073

https://www.arkadium.com/newsroom/rise-of-the-machines-how-automated-journalism-is-changing-newsrooms/

 

About the Author

After St. Margaret’s College, and brief forays into University studies at Canterbury, Sue Kellaway began a lifetime of travelling and living in different countries around the world.

In 1975 Kellaway began her television career as a reporter with the newly formed South Pacific Televison, in New Zealand– in news and current affairs. With  NZBC’s “Close Up” she covered the elections in Zimbabwe which brought Mugabe to power – interviewing both Mugabe and his opponent Joshua Nkomo. In 1981 she was recruited by Rupert Murdoch’s Channel Ten  Australia to launch the new breakfast show – Good Morning Australia with Gordon Elliot.

But a year later  after a court battle over contracts, which created the precedent that “a kiss on the cheek does not constitute a contract”, she moved to Channel Nine to launch the Today Show,  co hosting with Steve Liebman. At that time she was a member of the Australian Federal Better Heath Commission and Contributing Editor for the New Zealand Womens’ Weekly, commuting between Sydney and Auckland.

She wrote Women and Well Being (Collins) and Sue Kellaway’s Healthy lifestyle for Australian Women (Angus & Robertson) published 1986, and in the same year she left the Today show. For one season she hosted the Tonight Show in New Zealand  but retired from television altogether in 1987. Kellaway lived in Auckland for ten years and  then in London and Surrey (UK) for 20 years, with her husband Charles Bidwill spending time in their homes in Mexico, and Hawaii.

Since 2017 she has lived in Miami Florida close to her children and six grandchildren.