Back in the 60s, I was a beat reporter for the Patriot Ledger, a daily evenig newspaper in Quincy, MA. One February night, probably in 1968, I was interviewing an elected official in a parking lot outside a church in Westwood, Massachusetts, when the first TV mobile van pulled in.
This was the beginning of local news coverage going mobile. Until then, local network affiliates featured white men sitting in front of cameras reading copy and showing black-and-white film produced and distributed by one of the three networks. The only women were called "weather girls," and the only minorities were athletes or people being arrested, but that's another story.
Sometime around 1968, the technology got mobile and inexpensive enough, that a big city's TV newsroom could buy on of these vans like the one that had pulled up as I interviewed this suburban official. It was white with "WHDH TV"emblazoned on the panel and a satellite dish was attached to the top. This guy hopped out with a suntan and a suit and an entourage. There were a couple of attendants putting tissue around his suit collar and patting his face with something that made him more tan. Another assistant held four floodlights on a pole being powered by a generator in the van.
Then there was this camera, about the size of a Toyota Prius, on a wooden tripod. It's a museum piece today, but it was state of the art back then.
This talking head completely stole the setting. Everyone in the parking lot became electrified by the talking head and his crew. TV was exciting. My official stopped talking to me in mid sentence and turned to the talking head. I was gone, out the frame and forgotten.
I folded up my steno notebook and stuck my Bic pen back into my pocket, got into my beatup Ford Falcon to head back to my City Room. I would work until maybe 2 am. I would pound out words on my old Royal Typewriter. They might have been very good words, Pulitzer quality words. But the best I could do is tell people what is what like to have been there.
My story would be set in type and a zinc plate photo of the official would be taken from our "morgue" would liven up the look of the copy. People would read my story the next afternoon or at home waiting for dinner the next night.
But that talking head? He'd drive back to his studio. The camera guy would take the film, snip out the lame parts--and there were many--and his interview would be on the 11 o'clock news that night.
While the best I could do was tell you what it was like to have been there, the TV guy could actually show you. I could not beat that in so many ways.
So now, more than 40 years later, I am a blogger and an author. I have been rewarded relatively well by using and sharing words. And once again, here comes video. It's different this time. It's up close and it's much more personal and people understand a talking head for what he or she is.
This time, I do not plan to be left out. Of course I will continue to write. It is my core competency and a lifelong passion. But there are things you cannot do with words, that you can do with video.
It is a story teller's medium. While relatively few of us can tell stories very well with written words, video can let everyday people everywhere tell remarkable stories. These stories may last for generations. They can become family albums, or the histories of civilizations that did not endure. They can be this and so much more.
And I do not intend to be left out. I have started posting on Your Truman Show, where I sit on the board, on YouTube, on Facebook and on this blog. It seems to me, that people now have a global distribution system. They don't need NBC or Fox to do it. I am going to spend more time using video and exploring its incredible possibilities.
