I'm 72, so I was 12 when the JFK assassination happened, and reading through this thread brings back those memories like it was yesterday. The only way you ever forget an event like this is through death or dementia.
I think it helps to recall what didn't exist back in 1963. There were no satellite trucks. No satellite communications at all. No fiber optics. No cable TV, much less 24x7 cable news operations. Coaxial cable was limited to Ma Bell -- there were no domestic competitors to the incumbent telephone companies, most of whom were owned by the original AT&T, which also owned and controlled the long distance network -- and the television industry. Except maybe for hams and engineers, nobody had coax in their homes. What anyone saw on TV was a handful of fuzzy, low definition channels, all of which came over the air to a rooftop or set-top antenna, and through to a CRT television set, the vast majority of which were still black & white.
There was no ENG. Reporters and correspondents communicated via pay phones or two-way radios with their newsrooms. That wasn't an option for network people, and analog mobile phones were few and very pricey, so they needed to beg, borrow or steal a phone line, or call collect. Long distance on a pay phone could be dollars per minute (in 1963 dollars). Cell phones were decades in the future.
Radio meant AM in most places. FM existed, but it was largely simulcasting the co-owned AM in the market. FM's total market share was in the single digits in most places. But every station still had a news commitment, so every station ran newscasts somewhere in their schedules.
Videotape was new, and definitely not portable. (Even "portable" audio tape recorders were reel-to-reel jobs that weighed a couple dozen pounds.) News reports were still filmed, and the film needed to get run through a processing lab at the station or the network before it could be edited, much less aired. The assassination broke that rule, in that "raw" film was being rushed to air still warm from the lab that weekend. (A friend's dad was a film processing technician for CBS, so I heard a bit of this from the horse's mouth, so to speak.) Film that was processed in Dallas had to then be backhauled up to New York or Washington before the networks could air it.
@secondchoice mentioned that the tube TV cameras in the newsroom were cold when the first wire service reports of the shooting hit the network newsrooms, and the tubes needed to warm up before they could be used. CBS threw a "Special Report" or "News Bulletin" (or something similar) slide onto the video feed as soon as Master Control switched to them -- soap operas ran in those time slots -- and Cronkite, who was quite used to radio, treated the situation as radio coverage until the video could catch up to him. It might have been America's first experience with "cinema verité" in real time. Keep in mind that the networks were live for something like 52 hours straight, until the funeral finally wrapped up on 11/25 and the network threw it back to their local affiliates. And that Thanksgiving was only three days away, and for most people an atypically somber one.
I think it helps to recall what didn't exist back in 1963. There were no satellite trucks. No satellite communications at all. No fiber optics. No cable TV, much less 24x7 cable news operations. Coaxial cable was limited to Ma Bell -- there were no domestic competitors to the incumbent telephone companies, most of whom were owned by the original AT&T, which also owned and controlled the long distance network -- and the television industry. Except maybe for hams and engineers, nobody had coax in their homes. What anyone saw on TV was a handful of fuzzy, low definition channels, all of which came over the air to a rooftop or set-top antenna, and through to a CRT television set, the vast majority of which were still black & white.
There was no ENG. Reporters and correspondents communicated via pay phones or two-way radios with their newsrooms. That wasn't an option for network people, and analog mobile phones were few and very pricey, so they needed to beg, borrow or steal a phone line, or call collect. Long distance on a pay phone could be dollars per minute (in 1963 dollars). Cell phones were decades in the future.
Radio meant AM in most places. FM existed, but it was largely simulcasting the co-owned AM in the market. FM's total market share was in the single digits in most places. But every station still had a news commitment, so every station ran newscasts somewhere in their schedules.
Videotape was new, and definitely not portable. (Even "portable" audio tape recorders were reel-to-reel jobs that weighed a couple dozen pounds.) News reports were still filmed, and the film needed to get run through a processing lab at the station or the network before it could be edited, much less aired. The assassination broke that rule, in that "raw" film was being rushed to air still warm from the lab that weekend. (A friend's dad was a film processing technician for CBS, so I heard a bit of this from the horse's mouth, so to speak.) Film that was processed in Dallas had to then be backhauled up to New York or Washington before the networks could air it.
@secondchoice mentioned that the tube TV cameras in the newsroom were cold when the first wire service reports of the shooting hit the network newsrooms, and the tubes needed to warm up before they could be used. CBS threw a "Special Report" or "News Bulletin" (or something similar) slide onto the video feed as soon as Master Control switched to them -- soap operas ran in those time slots -- and Cronkite, who was quite used to radio, treated the situation as radio coverage until the video could catch up to him. It might have been America's first experience with "cinema verité" in real time. Keep in mind that the networks were live for something like 52 hours straight, until the funeral finally wrapped up on 11/25 and the network threw it back to their local affiliates. And that Thanksgiving was only three days away, and for most people an atypically somber one.
