Instant Replay…New Information + The Birth Of A & B Roll News

A week or so back, I did a story on the early days of live news on CBS. I had thought that the ‘CBS Television News With Douglas Edwards’ had always come from the Grand Central Studios, but it didn’t. It did move there some time in the mid 50s, but here’s the story of the earliest days of the show.

In re reading “This Is CBS”, by Robert Slater, he quotes CBS Television’s first news president Sig Mickelson on the 1951 push to make news a more dynamic part of the programing. “The TV news department was located in a corner office of the radio news department at 485 Madison Avenue. The studio was eight blocks away in Liederkranz Hall.”

By the time the 1952 Presidential election rolled around, at least the CBS Television News department had moved, but not the studio…yet. Here is another quote: “Television news occupied a crowded space on 42nd Street over Grand Central Station. The broadcast studio was thirteen blocks away at Liederkranz Hall. This required the staff to hustle into a cab every night at 7:20 trying to rush last minute film and scripts to Edwards before the start of the news. This did not always work out, especially on rainy days.”

It was at Liederkrantz Hall that news legend Don Hewitt came up with the idea of using dual projectors and in essence gave us the A and B roll concept of news footage. Back then, boring “talking head” news footage was the norm, but to add a bit of extra texture, Hewitt hit on the idea of inserting related images using a second projector. This was done on the fly…punched live on the air. One machine ran the “head” with sound, the other projector was loaded with film of related images and ran with no audio.

It was while previewing Senator Robert Taft’s long and boring speech on a swollen federal budget, that the idea occurred to Hewitt. Who says politicians aren’t an inspiration?!? Enjoy and Share.

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