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I’ve been busy the past month attempting to get more memories down from old-timers for the history chapter of The Basics of Videojournalism. I’ll post something on the interview with KGO cameraman Fred Pardini later this week…today I want to tell you about a daughter’s memories of her father.
Last month I interviewed Marcia Miner, daughter of an honest-to-gosh newsreel man.
Charles Peden wrote the book – the ONLY book – on newsreel cameramen, pictured above and published in 1932. Right now it seems to be THE definitive book on that vanished career.
Peden’s daughter, Marcia Miner, spoke with me about her memories of her father…and her memories foreshadowed what my daughters must have lived through as they grew up in a house with a TV news shooter.
Miner apparently inherited her dad’s wanderlust…his job took him all over the world. She was born in England because he and her pregnant mother journeyed there so he could teach the new sound on film technology to British newsreel men.
Marcia said her father loved his job…he would come home and talking about the stories he covered.
He graduated from Yale with a degree in Engineering…and got a job with RKO/with radio stations she thinks…it would have been as an audio man.
Peden’s first job on a newsreel crew was with Movietone News. Back in those days the audio technology was so new and so complex that if the company wanted sound, they had to send along an audio man. The gear was heavy…three, four, five boxes and it had to be loaded up on top of the car and there were three on the crew…cameraman, light man, sound man and the contact man (we talked a bit about what a contact man was and decided they are now called a producer).
Like my daughters, Miner accompanied her father on the occasional story – Mafia trials, sports stories, horse races…and her biggest moment.
She recalls how one summer while she was still in college in Washington DC her father called her (he was a White House correspondent at the time) and said, “Get yourself over to the White House. Truman is going to make a statement.”
She said that she walked up to the guardhouse and the guard told her to walk right into the White House, saying her father had left a note that she was coming. She walked right up into the White House…not one was around and then her father found her. They wandered into Truman’s office…there were still men and movie men.
Truman came in and the still men started flashing/then left. (Camermen can’t take pictures due to the sound from the still cameras)
“This was when he fired McCarther…”
As Trueman left, she recalls, “He put his hand on my head and said, “Is this your father?” I said yes and he said, “How nice.”
Her father’s career entranced her – and she would have liked to be a cameraman but the union rules said only sons could be cameramen in those days.
These interviews will continue and I’ll incorporate them into the textbook chapters on history and ethics.
(Slug changed due to request by Marcia…her father’s nickname is “Chic.”)
Nothing like being lazy. Yesterday I sent Angela Grant a response to one of her reader’s questions and she posted it, thus saving me some time and effort.
The focus: how to hook a prosumer camera into a “mult” box for a feed.
Explanation for non-newies and wanna-be newsies.
Prosumer (or consumer) cameras do not come with the high quality shielded cables and connectors of professional gear. They come with mini-jack audio and RCA audio/video inputs/outputs.
Mult box – basically a box or even suitcase that can take a single feed in from a camera and microphone which has multiple audio and video outputs. These are almost always professional connectors – so BNC video and XLR audio. The audio can be either line or mike level.
Feed – what is sounds like. Think piranhas in a feeding frenzy. Ya have a big story and only one camera is allowed inside…so they feed their signal out to the mult box and everyone else hooks in and records what the single camera is sending. I’ve seen mult boxes daisy-chained together so that up to thirty or forty media organizations can take a feed.
So take a meander over to Angela’s site today…and stick around for future posts. The lady has a good thing going.
While I’ve had the Canon HV20 for a year and played with hi-def on some projects, I posted my first hi-def video to youtube yesterday.
Went out last Friday night to cheer my break dancers (I’m the high school club advisor) on at a competition and wouldn’t you know it, had a camera in hand, so I shot the event.
They came in second (polite cheers) – even after the judges picked them as best. Something I love and respect about break dancing. The audience gets to hop in with their opinion, so when the judges pointed at my guys, both they and the audience pointed at the other team. To do anything else would have been disrespectful and dishonest.
Never tell me that youth is going bad.
Last night my school board (Lodi Unified School District) was set to vote on cutting voted to cut 390 teacher jobs in order to save the district from bankruptcy. I would guess that’s about 20% of the teachers in the district.
Feelings ran high as hundreds of parents, students and district employees packed the auditorium at Ronald E. McNair High School. Over a two hour period, dozens addressed the board with pleas to save both specific programs and the integrity of their schools. There was a sense of hope – initially – which left as the auditorium emptied and only the board and a few dozen die-hards remained, waiting for the inevitable.
My daughter Alexis and I gave it up at 11:50, leaving as the board debated the legal effects of adding additional district jobs and administrative jobs to the list.
But by that time they had already made their intentions clear…each board member pleading with the public to understand their position and their two choices: make the cuts or have the district go bankrupt and the state take over operations.
Neither was a choice anyone wanted to hear.
The only hope is now pinned on what happens over the few months. On March 15 pink slips WILL go out to the 390 teachers…and possibly more from other fields. Between March and May 15 the board may be able to find alternative ways to save both money and jobs. (Some strong possibilities, if they are willing to be bold, are changing the school year calendar and working with the union for furloughs.)
I’m not sure where I am on the seniority list and won’t know until this Friday at the earliest. I know I will be getting a pink slip, as will an estimated 75% of the teachers at McNair. We have the youngest, brightest, and newest staff members in the district. I know students cried last night in their speeches, hugging each other for support, as they held out hope for their futures. I know it will not be pretty and I also know that the board, faced with the impossible, made the only choice they could at the time. And I hold this out for both students and staff – keep hope alive.
Associated Press by way of tvspy.com writes about Young Broadcasting filing for Chapter 11.
Of note to me because I have buddies working for KRON in San Francisco – one of the company properties.
AP goes on to say
TV broadcasters in the U.S. are under pressure as the economic downturn sends advertising revenue spiraling downward. Credit rating agency Moody’s Investors Service warned last week that broadcasters entered the recession with high levels of debt and already were struggling to retain audiences as more customers turn to portable gadgets and the Web for entertainment.
What goes around, comes around.
Just got the perfect interview for the book!!!
Fred Pardini, former chief photog for KGO in San Francisco, is retired now and nearing 80. Words out of the past best describe him: dapper, genteel.
I spent two hours picking his brain on camera and have a wealth of information on his career and move from still photographer to TV news. Wow. He’s shot more presidents that I (we think nine or ten) and his career spanned everything from Speed Graflexes to 35mm to B/W single system sound cameras to Betacam. I used to watch him in awe when I was a newbie. Where I schlepped and sweated, he was cool and calm. The weight of the gear never seem to bother him. He was “The Man with The Cam.”
Had to let you know he is on tape and I will begin working on uploading/editing and perhaps posting a snippet or two.
His only request was a copy of the tape – which I hope to have to him in DVD format by the weekend.
As they used to say – stay tuned.
(Yeah, I’m feeling giddy…and I may be able to get Les Thomsen too/former newsreel cameraman who is amazingly still alive and willing to talk. All we need to do is agree on a date and time.)
This is a message to all who teach journalism and broadcasting – primarily on the high school level, but pretty much anyone who is teaching to a rapidly evolving field. I snoop around on listservs and blogs and there seems to be a growing awareness (duh) and a slight feeling of panic (oh yeah) about the fact that newspapers are disappearing. What is being taught in many high schools may no longer be a practical skill set, but outdated.
So here’s the message: I’ve been watching the convergence/morphing/disappearance of media for the past five or six years.
What you are seeing is momentous – historic. Nothing like this has happened since the invention of the printing press. Even radio and television did not have the effect on media that the Internet has. Both of the former merely adapted what was there to fit their format.
The Internet is forcing changes and literally destroying the old media.
Throwing up your hands and bemoaning what is inevitable will not help.
What will help is working with your bright young students who are technophiles and asking them what they would do. Somewhere out there is the genius or geniuses who will tie together the best of the old and new – and I strongly suspect it won’t be some old geezer who can’t see anything because they keep looking back to the past rather than forward.
Toss this out to your classes – ask them what they love about each type of media and what they hate. Ask them to design the perfect media – what elements would they keep/what would they toss.
These are scary times…my former freshman/now seniors are almost crying because what they are studying for is fast disappearing. Sometimes you can’t follow in footsteps already there…you have to be a leader and make your own trail.
Final note: the heart and soul of what you are teaching remains the same. Good solid research, sticking to the facts, neutral stance, clear writing. What is changing is where and how the audience accesses the information. Your students are probably way ahead of your there – and many of you may have your hands tied (I know I do) by districts that live in fear of the Internet.
A local school had a spot of bad news in my area this past week and parents were texting kids about what was happening before most of the staff was aware of the news. Kids on computers were pulling up stories off the local newspaper and TV websites. Kids walk into my classroom asking to Bluetooth songs to my computer so they can use them in projects. They Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, email, AIM, and text the way we walk and talk.
Use that power and have them tell you what the future is.
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