The Picture Problems

Associated Press, the world's largest news agency, last week started a brand-new service: television film news. A.P. was simply giving in to the inevitable. Both of its biggest U.S. competitors, United Press and International News Service, are already deep in the TV news field, provide stations with special scripts and daily news film. In the last few years TV news has become so important that A.P. could no longer afford to stay out. But despite all the money and time spent on TV, the news programs are still far short of the telecasters' dreams. Even newspapers which own TV stations now realize that covering news for TV is not like reporting: it is an entirely new, costly and different job, that cannot simply be grafted on to newspaper operations.

The new job must be learned the hard way, one expensive step after another. As a result, cost-conscious TV stations still rely on network news shows, wire-service newsreels, or on such local "newscasts" as an announcer sitting at a desk reading bulletins, or a display of still pictures, headlines and press-service bulletins flashed on a screen.

Camera Chase. To learn the new job, some newspaper-owned stations, such as the New York Daily News's WPIX, the Chicago Tribime's WGN-TV and the Fort Worth Star-Tele gram's WBAP-TV, have set up separate TV desks, with a staff of newsmen and newsreel and TV cameramen. Even with all that, covering live spot news is often impossible. For example, when a freight plane crashed in Jamaica, N.Y. two weeks ago (TIME, April 14), a WPIX camera crew found it could not send on-the-spot broadcasts, though it was only ten miles from the station; a ridge was between it and the station's transmitter. Moreover, even getting to the scene of the news is often a problem, since TV camera crews cannot be shunted around as easily as reporters and photographers can. But RCA may soon help overcome that. It is working on a one-man, portable camera-transmitter that weighs only 53 Ibs., hopes to make a TV cameraman almost as mobile as a reporter with copy-paper and pencil.

Despite the troubles, those willing to spend money on TV coverage think the results are worth it, especially as advertisers snap up TV news shows. The Los Angeles Times's and the Mirror's KTTV has one of the most energetic newspaper-owned TV news setups in the U.S., including fourteen staffers and camera crews. It thinks $5,470 a week for TV news-gathering is well spent. One of its best local stunts: when a three-year-old girl disappeared recently, the station assigned four cameras (TV and newsreel) to the hunt. Three followed the search party and another, set up in the girl's home, was able to catch her reunion with her mother.

No Competition. For all its faults, TV coverage has already added new worries for newspaper reporters. On a big story, the principals often have little time to talk to newsmen: they want to do all their talking in front of TV cameras. Still cameramen, who have sweated to get good pictures, have been beaten by pictures snapped from the TV screen in the office. And editors, sitting before a TV set in the office, have often been able to point out caustically things that their reporters on the spot have missed.

However, most newspapers are no longer afraid of competition from TV news. Even such shows as the Kefauver hearings have hurt newspaper sales little. Said the Los Angeles Times's Night Managing Editor Earl Craven: "Instead of being in competition with us, we find the station helps our circulation. Seeing the pictures whets the public's appetite . . . And they go out and buy the paper."

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