Arthur Hailey: Evening News

Inside the van, working alongside the technician, Rita expertly ran Minh's tape cassettes through an editing machine, viewing them on a TV monitor. Not surprisingly, she thought, the pictures were superb.

On normal assignments, and working with an editor as an extra team member, producer and editor together would select portions of the tapes, then, over a sound track of a correspondent's comments, put all components together as a fully edited piece. But that took forty-five minutes, sometimes longer, and today there wasn't time. So, making fast decisions, Rita chose several of the most dramatic scenes which the technician transmitted as they were—in TV jargon, "quick and dirty.”

Outside the satellite van, seated on some metal steps, Partridge completed his script and, after conferring briefly with Minh and the sound man, recorded a sound track.

Having allowed for the anchorman's introduction, which would be written in New York and have the story's up-front facts, Partridge began:

" Pilots in a long-ago war called it comin'in on a wing and a prayer. There was a song with that name . . . It's unlikely anyone will write a song about today.”

"The Muskegon Airlines Airbus was sixty miles out from Dallas-Fort Worth . . . with a near-full passenger load . . . having comefrom Chicago . . . when the mid-air collision happened..."

As always, when an experienced correspondent wrote for TV news, Partridge had written "slightly off the pictures.” It was a specialized art form, difficult to learn, and some in television never quite succeeded. Even among professional writers the talent did not receive the recognition it deserved, because the words were written to accompany pictures and seldom read well alone.

The trick, as Harry Partridge and others like him knew, was not to describe the pictures. A television viewer would be seeing, visually, what was happening on the screen and did not need verbal description. Yet the spoken words must not be so far removed from the pictures as to split the viewer's consciousness. It was a literary balancing act, much of it instinctive.

Something else TV news people recognized: The best news writing was not in neat sentences and paragraphs. Fragments of sentences worked better. Facts must be taut, verbs strong and active; a script should crackle. Finally, by manner and intonation the correspondent should convey a meaning too. Yes, he or she had to be an excellent reporter, but an actor also. At all those things Partridge was expert, though today he had a handicap: he had not seen the pictures, as a correspondent normally did. But he knew, more or less, what they would be.

Partridge concluded with a standup—himself, head and shoulders, speaking directly to the camera. Behind him, activity was continuing around the wrecked Airbus.

” There is more of this story to come . . . tragic details, the toll of dead and injured. But what is clear, even now, is that collision dangers are multiplying . . . on the airways, in our crowded skies . . . Harry Partridge, CBA News, Dallas-Fort Worth.”

The cassette with the narration and standup was passed to Rita inside the van. Still trusting Partridge, knowing him too well to waste precious time checking, she ordered it sent to New York without review. Moments later, watching and listening as the technician transmitted, she was admiring. Remembering the discussion half an hour earlier in the terminal bar she reflected: with his multitalents, Partridge was demonstrating why his pay was so much higher than that of the reporter for the New York Times.

Outside, Partridge was performing still one more of a correspondent's duties—an audio report, spoken from notes and largely ad-libbed, for CBA Radio News. When the TV transmission was finished, that would go to New York by satellite too.

The CBA News headquarters building in New York was a plain and unimpressive eight-story brownstone on the east side of upper Manhattan. Formerly a furniture factory, now only the shell of the original structure remained, the interior having been remodeled and refurbished many times by an assortment of contractors. Out of this piecemeal work had come a maze of intersecting corridors in which unescorted visitors got lost.

Despite the drab domicile of CBA News, the place contained a sultan's fortune in electronic wizardry, a considerable portion of it in technicians' country, two floors below street level, sometimes referred to as the catacombs. And here, among a multitude of functions, was a vital department with a prosaic name—the One-inch-tape Room.

All news reports from CBA crews around the world came in, via satellite and occasionally by landline, to the One-inch-tape Room. From there, too, all taped recordings of finished news went out to viewers, via a broadcast control room and again by satellite.

Endemic to the One-inch-tape Room were enormous pressures, taut nerves, tension, instant decision making and urgent commands, especially just before and during broadcasts of the National Evening News.

At such times, someone unaware of what was happening might consider the scene disorganized bedlam, a technological nightmare. The impression would be heightened by surrounding semi-darkness, necessary for watching a forest of TV screens.

But in fact the operation functioned smoothly, quickly and with skill. Mistakes here could he disastrous. They rarely happened.

A half-dozen large and sophisticated reel-to-reel tape machines, built into consoles and with TV monitors above, dominated the activity; the machines used one-inch magnetic tape, the highest-quality and most reliable. At each tape machine and console sat a skilled operator receiving, editing and transmitting tapes swiftly, according to instructions. The operators, older than most workers in the building, were a motley group who seemed to take pride in dressing shabbily and behaving boisterously. Because of this, a commentator once described them as the "fighter pilots”of TV broadcasting.

Every weekday, an hour or so before National Evening News broadcast time, a senior news producer moved down five floors from his seat at the Horseshoe to preside over the One-inch-tape Room and its operators. There, acting as a maestro, shouting instructions while sernaphoring with his arms, he viewed incoming material for that night's news, ordered further editing if necessary, and kept colleagues at the Horseshoe informed of which expected items were now in-house and how, at first glance, each looked.

Everything, it always seemed, arrived at the One-inch-tape Room in haste and late. It was a tradition that producers, correspondents and editors working in the field polished and repolished their pieces until the last possible moment, so that most came in during the half hour before the broadcast and some after the broadcast had begun. There were even nail-biting occasions when the front half of a report was going out from one tape recorder and being broadcast while the back portion was still feeding into another machine. During those moments nervous, sweating operators pushed themselves to the limit of their skills.

The senior producer most often in charge was Will Kazazis, Brooklyn-born of an excitable Greek family, a trait he had inherited. His excitability, though, seemed to fit the job and despite it he never lost control. Thus it was Kazazis who received Rita Abrams' satellite transmission from DFW—first Minh Van Canh's pictures sent "quick and dirty,” then Harry Partridge's audio track, concluding with his standup.

The time was 6:48 . . . ten minutes of news remaining. A commercial break had just begun.

Kazazis told the operator who had taken the feed in, "Slap it together fast. Use all of Partridge's track. Put the best pictures over it. I trust you. Now move, move, move!”