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Oldest Local/National Newscast You Have On Tape/Beta

I have part of a newscast from WHDH-7 from 3/8/93. It features the channel 7 logo with the balls used in the late 80s/early 90s, and the piece of music called "Advantage." This tape also includes the "Lottery Live" drawing with Dawn Hayes.
 
I have a full newscast on tape of WAVY-TV 10 (Portsmouth/Norfolk, VA) 6pm Weekend - March 1989.
 
An old thread revived temporarily...

In the last few years, I've begun collecting old tapes (mostly from my work experiences in the school system but I've also acquired tapes from outside sources).

About newscasts (even partial ones)... I have some/most of you guys beat. Among partial frames, I have one with Don Carrigan (then of WLBZ in Bangor) in November '84. It's just one frame but it was enough of a frame for me to capture and ask around to see who it was (as I had no idea who he was at the time).

I do have a couple minutes of the ABC News Weekend Report from 3/24/1985. On the Canadian side of my tapes, however, an interview by CBC Here and Now's Anne Budgell from late December '85 or early January '86. She was interviewing a "mummer" (and if you want to know more about mummers, you can Google it; their disguises are quite clever at Christmas time).

If you think outside the regular realm of home-recorded news clips, and do count studio master tapes, I have some excerpts from as far back as 1964 going up to the '80s.
 
The oldest clip I have was dubbed from VHS to DVD. It was from an 11 PM newcast of WTNH-TV (ABC) channel 8 New Haven, back in April of 1988. The story was from New Britain's Beehive Field, then-home of the AA-Eastern League Boston Red Sox (the franchise is in Portland, ME today). Charmaine Wilkerson interviewed a couple of freezing fans that night, one of which was my brother, hence the reason I have the piece to begin with. :)
 
OH, my heavens, to have owned a VCR (or whatever they called them ::) in the 70's. The KHQA (Quincy, IL) weather forecasts would be the first thing I would watch. Rotary dials for the temp, humidity, and barometer, magnetic bottons for high (H) and low (L) pressure, fronts and national temps drawn and scribbled with magic marker(Great Falls and Denver were always the last two he did, that's all I remember).
 
The oldest *complete* local newscasts that come to mind in my collection:
KGO-1965 weekend report and a 1968 morning report (each only 15 minutes)
WCBS-evening newscast from June 1966 (Robert Trout's last broadcast; this has been around the trade circuit)
KABC-Evening newscast on the Watts Riots
WTOP-an 11pm newscast from May '68 covering the primaries
WTLV-a 6pm broadcast from 1972

Incompletes-a WBAL-TV 11pm report in color from August '66, and a segment of WJZ-TV's version of "Your Esso Reporter" from I *believe* November of '61. Both of these broadcasts have gotten out in trade circles as part of a Baltimore-centric tape that also had self-contained weather forecasts (nearly all "The Atlantic Weatherman"), bloopers, and local commercials.
 
Stitch said:
Incompletes-a WBAL-TV 11pm report in color from August '66, and a segment of WJZ-TV's version of "Your Esso Reporter" from I *believe* November of '61. Both of these broadcasts have gotten out in trade circles as part of a Baltimore-centric tape that also had self-contained weather forecasts (nearly all "The Atlantic Weatherman"), bloopers, and local commercials.
Click to expand...

Both of those newscasts have popped up online over the years though I don't think neither are available online right now. It really is amazing that the WJZ newscast from 1961 was saved at all considering as the same time of that newscast WJZ was airing the Buddy Deane show, only about 7 or 8 minutes of that show is around today. Wonder if WJZ regrets not saving those shows since Buddy was the inspiration of two movies and a broadway show...we know it as Hairspray !!
 
Mike said:
I do have a couple minutes of the ABC News Weekend Report from 3/24/1985. On the Canadian side of my tapes, however, an interview by CBC Here and Now's Anne Budgell from late December '85 or early January '86. She was interviewing a "mummer" (and if you want to know more about mummers, you can Google it; their disguises are quite clever at Christmas time).
Click to expand...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=c7wtnSDqk2U - to be more specific, this was on CBC Newfoundland & Labrador.

Another Youtube user has a very dated looking newscast from CBLT in Toronto, from August 1984. Every single report is on 16mm film, but the music should be familiar to viewers of WNEV (now WHDH) in Boston. http://youtube.com/watch?v=kgD3P2RScuE
 
Stanislav said:
The best thing I found so far was 2 hours of CBS coverage of the Challenger Disaster from 1986.
Click to expand...

A co-worker of mine back then used to set her VCR to record her favorite soap operas during the day so she could watch them at night. On January 28, 1986, of course, she ended up with a full tape of the Challenger, which I copied. It's amazing how that Y-shaped smoke cloud is still such an indelible image.

Also from 1986, I recorded several tapes of the 100th birthday celebration of the Statue of Liberty. I just let the VCR run, with the intention of copying the highlights onto another tape and editing out the commercials. I never got around to doing that, so now it's even better unedited with all the commercials intact.

One of the things I do now is keep a tape handy for a few minutes of big news stories going back to Hurricane Hugo in 1989.
 
Although this doesn't qualify as "oldest newscast", I have a full 6-hour tape of NBC airchecks (including inserts from WDIV) from 1988 with some sound problems that could mess up the VCR playing the tape. It has only been viewed once since I discovered it 3½ years ago. I'm in the process of having it sent out to get transferred to another tape of equal or longer length (so I don't have to do the dirty work myself).
 
Oldest newscasts I have:

KABC from 65
WMAQ from 67
WTLV from 72
WAGA from 79
WXIA from 80
WIIC (now WPXI) from 80

The two oldest newscasts I recorded myself (and still have the Betamax tapes - and machines - for):
KCEN/6/Temple, TX from 87
WMAR/2/Baltimore from 87 (station's 50th anniversary, but includes a segment on the NAMBLA convention that Baltimore was protesting being held there...)
WTVJ/4/Miami from 12/21/88 (the night before the station switched from CBS to NBC)

The WTVJ was intentional, as it was the late night rebroadcast (minus the end), but then leads into the movie "Saturday Night Fever" with the "official switch" announcement during the middle of the movie (at like 2:20am).

KCEN was "semi-intentional" - I was recording NBC's Thursday night lineup, and the tonight show, but my original VCR only had a 1-event tuner, so I ended up with the newscast...

WMAR was intentional, since it was the night of their 50th anniversary (just a short piece on the news...)

The older ones are from the trading circuit; I have a few other older ones on VHS, but need to find them in the masses of tapes...

Jim
 
...I bought my very first VCR in January of 1986 at the Sears, Roebuck store in Eau Claire, Wisconsin (aside from drinking and/or skiing, there's not much else to do in Eau Claire come January, heh heh). That very night I taped both a Sneak Previews from KTCA/2 Minneapolis and an At the Movies with Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert from WGN-TV/9 Chicago, and the next afternoon I taped an ABC News special titled 45/85 from WQOW-TV/18 Eau Claire. I still have that tape and looked at it the other day...
 
I don't have it on tape....but digitized into a video file on my PC.....a good portion of ABC's World News Tonight from 7/20/1983 devoted to coverage of the death of Frank Reynolds. It was from a broadcast of ABC News Now's Time Tunnel from a couple of years ago. I found it while trying to find a video of the first WNT from 7/10/78 online. (Speaking of....does know where I can find the first WNT online? I've been trying to find it for a while with no result. Someone once told me that the full program was on ABCNews.com, but I haven't been able to find anything.)

Buried on some tapes somewhere in my house also are some old NBC News Capsules (before they changed to NBC News Digest) from 1982.
 
I almost forgot about this one, although it's more into the sports category than news... I got a CBC NHL preview from May 5, 1984 (featuring two reporters: Peter Watts (from Edmonton) and Dick Irvin (from Long Island)). The only game being played that day was Game 6 of the Wales Conference Final, where the New York Islanders were at home trying to finish off the Montreal Canadiens. (And the Isles did win the series, but would lose the Cup Final to Edmonton, and have never made the Finals since. Edmonton, meanwhile, won four more Stanley Cups through to 1990, and appeared in one more final in 2006.) The item aired as a part of CBC SPORTSWEEKEND, where the rest of the footage I have is on the Men's and Women's University Volleyball Championships from Vancouver.

I've transferred it to DVD and this is the end result...

http://www.sendspace.com/file/lqx3om (requires VLC Media Player or Media Player Classic to watch)
 
I have a VHS tape with excerpts of ABC/NBC/CBS evening newscasts from the week of Aug 19-25, 1966. The clips are all of Vietnam stories and features, some of them minutes long. What this really is, is a compilation of how the networks covered the weeks war news. (I believe it was called a Weekly Network News Summary.) The clips were spliced together by the Defense Department into about a half-hour long reel of 16mm film which was duplicated and sent out to area commanders in Vietnam to give them an idea of what the folks at home were seeing for war coverage. Some of the features are real "Yea-for-our-side" flag wavers, while one was a very emotional translation of a North Vietnam soldier's diary and his relating of how awful war can be. Newscasters on this tape included Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings and David Brinkley with Chet Huntley providing filmed interviews and features from the war zone.
 
A couple of years ago I was reviewing a stack of old VHS tapes I found in a closet - and discovered a complete edition of "Channel 7 News at 11:00" (San Francisco) from the mid 1980s. The anchor was Steve Davis, an intelligent guy who also filled in on KGO News/Talk radio. He has since passed away.

Unfortunately, I didn't find any editions of "Channel 7 NewsScene" from just a few years earlier. That was during their sensationalistic "if if bleeds, it leads" period with over-dramatic anchor Van Amburg. It would have been fun to see one of those again, and laugh.

Van was fired when Capital Cities bought ABC and discovered (to their shock) how much money he was making.
 
I recently found a tape of almost an entire WBIR-TV 10 Knoxville newscast from 1988 with the original commercials at a local thrift store.
 
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