behind the camera in pictures
Some things just don’t change in seventy years. If the story calls for it, a photog may be finding themselves and their gear on the roof of their news unit.
Left: Universal Newsreel crew, 1938.
Right: Photo borrowed from and of Rick Portier, WAFB-TV
While I will not publicly take a side in the “VJ/OMB” arguments that cause many a flamewar on the normally even-keeled b-roll.net, ethically I cannot let a misconception continue to slide. Mister Michael Rosenblum did not invent the VJ/OMB concept as his website states. It was NBC.
In January of 1976, in order for photographer Neil Davis to agree to work with them, NBC invented “a new concept in television journalism” – the one man band as their press release stated per Davis’ biography.
Davis was to shoot his own stories, edit them and step in front of the camera to report. Much like what consultants pitch today as a new and revolutionary concept for television news.
Today, its generally understood that there is a firewall between news and sales, and that advertising clients have no control over what is aired in the newscasts. But it hasn’t always been that way.
In the early days of television, the cigarette companies were the advertisers with the deepest pockets and the willingness to gamble on a new method of advertising – and with it threw out the ethics held dearly today.
NBC’s first prime-time network news program, the Camel News Caravan, did not receive its name by accident. Its sponsor was the manufacture of Camel Cigarettes – the R.J. Reynolds company. And what R. J. Reynolds wanted, they got. The company helped to select the staff, name and policies of the news program and NBC complied willingly. As NBC’s Reuven Frank wrote:
“What Camel wanted Camel got – because they paid so much…The money from Camel cigarettes supported the entire national and worldwide structure of NBC Television News – salaries, equipment, bureau rents, and overseas allowances to educate reporters’ children.”
Television’s expanding reach as an advertising medium and therefore no longer needing a single major sponsor for a show eventually helped in creating the firewall between the news and advertiser interference we see today.
Cigarette advertising on television and radio itself was banned in 1971 over growing health concerns by Congress.
Contrary to popular public portrayal of the news crew rushing from story-to-story, the old military idiom of “hurry up and wait” is a much more apt description of the average day of your typical news crew.
Whether its a crew loitering on a D.C. rooftop waiting for the president in the fall of 1934 or a photog covering a modern day trial in southern Louisiana, bringing you the news of the day often involves a whole lot of waiting around.
Scrum, pack journalism, gaggle, gang bang, pig f*ck. Whatever your regional term of choice is for the practice, competing outlets have been been showing up to shoot the same story since the very first photog rolled on a scene.
Left: Interview with a race car driver, circa 1930. Right: Modern day scrum in Greensboro, NC (photo borrowed from Lenslinger)
The quickest way to cause a flame war in the normally and refreshingly civil for the TV business b-roll.net forums is to bring up the changes facing the industry – namely “one man bands” or “VJs.”
Forty-plus years earlier, another change came along that caused just as much dissident among the ranks of photographers – the move from newsreels to television news.
Newsreel soundman Chic Peden in a 1967 letter to another newsreel photographer, summed up the feelings among some of his ranks over the changes:
TV news is too demanding – too many stories in a day and too many “crisis”. Every story seems to be the big one. Which is a lot of crap. They put out specials on three alarm fires.
On May 20, 1927 with Lindbergh’s historic take-off for Paris, Fox Movietone News recorded the first news report that included sound.
A few short years later, the forebearers of today’s ubiquitous live and satellite trucks could be found roaming the landscapes of the world in search of stories to feed the news beast.
Left: Hearst Metrotone News trucks being unloaded in San Francisco. Right: Pathé News truck in Washington D.C. Below: Interior of a “sound” news truck from a 1930 issue of Popular Mechanics.
