Welcome, Please, The Digital Revolution   

A technological breakthrough that will forever change how the news is reported.

Sometime in the near future, TV reporters will likely be lone wolves toting small, lightweight, low-light digital chip cameras, laptop computers and cellular telephones. Digital video compression will utilize a disc or a chip to record images and will eventually replace videotape. Fiber optics technology will carry digital video over a telephone into newsrooms for editing on a personal computer or for live transmission. And all of these changes will allow TV reporters to be as flexible as print journalists in gathering news around the world.

This isn't some distant futuristic scenario of the mid-21st century. Television news is on the verge of another technological breakthrough that will forever change how the news is reported and produced. It will enable companies to employ fewer people to do more at lower costs.

But whether the news will be better is another matter.

Already, some of the elements are in place and others are evolving. Laptop computers and cellular telephones are standard equipment in many newsrooms, and newer models have become more compact and more proficient. Although digital video can be transmitted via satellite, sending the signal over a cellular telephone is not yet possible. Meanwhile, telephone companies have begun installing fiber optic networks throughout the country, and digital chip cameras are expected to be on the market by 1999, if not sooner.

But the technology for editing video digitally on a personal computer rather than a video editing system is almost a reality. At the Orange County News Channel (OCN) in Southern California, preparations are under-way to integrate digital video editing into news production. By next summer the 24-hour cable operation intends to experiment with a digital software program installed on the hard drive of a MacIntosh computer. The software is being developed by the Avid Corp. of Burlington, Massachusetts, one of several firms researching digital video.

"We expect to do a whole news program of an hour or half hour on digital to see how it works," says OCN General Manager Ken Tiven. "By 1994 we expect to be into digital editing in a meaningful way."

OCN Senior Producer Ed Casaccia explains how it works: "The analog [video] signal is converted into a digital storage pattern that is compressed on a hard drive. The conversion is done in real time so that the reporter is screening the video at the PC. After the editing, the digital material is dumped into Master Control for playback.

"There is a substantial reduction in costs for all this," he says. "Just how much overall is still unknown, but we will save thousands and thousands of dollars. We're working toward the eventual goal of no moving parts in our equipment and no more videotape."

It's not surprising that OCN would be the first news operation in the country to use digital video editing. Tiven and Casaccia are well known as technological gurus, and OCN has been an innovator since it first went on the air in the fall of 1990.

Long before the Persian Gulf War showed how valuable cheap, lightweight High-8 video cameras can be for news-gathering, OCN reporters were using them. High-8 editing is poorer in quality than the more popular – and more expensive – Beta and U-matic formats, so OCN edits from High-8 to Beta for playback. Other news operations using High-8 now do the same.

Although the long-term costs may be lower, digital video editing probably will not become widespread until the advent of digital cameras. Most firms are reluctant to take the lead, and many are committed to Beta or other proven formats into the next decade.

Furthermore, owners need a return on their investment, which brings up the question of whether this new technology will improve journalism. Tiven thinks so. "If the reporter is trained properly," he says, "he or she will be able to communicate the [news] in graphic detail."

Certainly the mobility of the digitalized reporter will be enhanced. But too often in the past technology has been used because it is there, not because it makes sense journalistically.

For example, the introduction of on-the-scene microwave transmissions in the mid-1970s has allowed reporters to stand in front of darkened buildings while reporting "live" on meetings that had ended hours before. Stations also fill up their news segments with "live" reports via satellite from faraway places that do little to educate their audience.

News executives would do well to heed the advice of Mike Burke, former news director at WGGB-TV in Springfield, Massachusetts. When the satellite news gathering explosion occurred in 1986, dozens of companies selling dishes, trucks and other equipment inundated the Radio and Television News Director Association convention in Salt Lake City. CBS News's "Sunday Morning" also was there to report on the phenomenon.

"All this new technology lets us do so much more," Burke told CBS. "But we've got to lead the technology. We can't have the technology lead us." l