Questions About News Network Feeds during the 1970's and 80's

[js6592]

I have a fascination with older broadcast technology, so I was wondering if there are any engineers (or people with similar knowledge) who can answer my questions regarding the transmissions of network news before they began using satellite.

When I first visited my local radio station in Potosi, Missouri in 1982, I asked the DJ where the network news was coming from (the station carried news from the Missouri Network and Brownfield Network, based out of Jefferson City). He replied, "through the phone lines." My question is, how did this become possible? I'm sure that the radio station wasn't making a daily long-distance phone call to the networks and turning up the "telephone" channel on their control board. Long-distance during that time was not cheap. So obviously, it was done through a dedicated line. How were these lines set up, given that there was no public internet and very few computer lines at that time? Did the local phone company link a phone line from their exchange to the next town's exchange, and then the next town's exchange do the same, until there was a chain of phone lines coming out from Jefferson City to Potosi? Or did AT&T somehow do this from their long-distance toll building in St. Louis? Just curious.

 

[PTBoardOp94]

The network studios (primarily in New York) would get their programming onto AT&T Long Lines, which then distributed the audio around the country over the same network as regular phone traffic.

A dedicated phone line was set up from the switching office in town to the radio studio for "the network". As you have surmised, this was enormously expensive, which is why ABC's network operations were all done over one physical phone line even though ABC branded its news services as four different networks.

If the studio and the tower were not located at the same property, another dedicated phone line could be set up for the studio to transmitter (studio to transmitter could also be done over an RF link).

Note that satellite time isn't cheap, either. A handful of radio networks now operate over the public internet, and most have at least a backup system over the internet.

 

[ncradioeng]

In western NC, ABC Radio leased a subcarrier on WMIT FM near Mt Mitchell (6600 ft ASL) to provide their news feeds to affiliates in the area.

 

[K.M. Richards]

A dedicated phone line was set up from the switching office in town to the radio studio for "the network". As you have surmised, this was enormously expensive, which is why ABC's network operations were all done over one physical phone line even though ABC branded its news services as four different networks.

That was an important factor is ABC's decision to create the four "branded" networks back in 1970. With the demise of long-form network programs -- my recollection is that, outside of extended-length newscasts (including Paul Harvey), ABC had only Don McNeill's "Breakfast Club" left on its schedule -- ABC was paying the standard AT&T Long Lines rates to feed a single newscast at :55 every hour. Even though the local loops from the AT&T central offices to the stations could be downgraded in quality for savings (only the absolute biggest markets got high-quality feeds), it was an enormous expense to them ... especially since they had only recently made the huge investment to make the television network full color, being at a competitive disadvantage to NBC and CBS, which had done so years earlier.

They also had to get FCC approval for the idea, since the rules very specifically prohibited a company from owning more than one network; in fact, ABC itself had been created when that rule was adopted, having originally been NBC's second (Blue) network. ABC got Commission approval by using the very novelty of the concept plus an agreement to strictly control affiliate clearances in a way that ensured one of the "American" networks never overlapped with another in the same market.

Here's how it worked in the Oxnard-Ventura, CA market (where I grew up and was living when the four-network concept began operation):
* American Information: Cleared live at :00 by KAAP/1400, sportscasts on delay at 7:35am/4:35pm
* American Contemporary: Delayed from :55 to :20 on KACY/1520, Howard Cosell sports not carried
* American Entertainment: Delayed from :30 to :55 on KVEN/1450 (with one exception noted in next entry), carried Cosell on delay instead of own network's sports at 7:05am/5:05pm, Paul Harvey at 7:30am and 12:05pm
* American FM: Delayed from :15 to :30 on KPMJ/104.7, except 6:15am and 7:15am, delayed to 6:25 and 7:25 because of syndicated half-hour religious program at 6:30am and 15-minute syndicated feature at 7:30am; this allowed KVEN to carry the 6:30am Entertainment newscast live at 6:30 and Harvey at 7:30

The mess with KPMJ only lasted a few years; it turned out that the original concept for American FM, news tailored to easy-listening formats, was replaced very quickly with news tailored to album rock stations, to accommodate ABC's newly split O&O FMs to that format in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Detroit, and KPMJ jumped to Mutual when that affiliation became available. The market never had another FM network affiliate, which essentially gave KVEN more flexibility; when they went news/talk at the end of the decade the :30 newscast was carried live during the drive-time news blocks. (By that time, KAAP was only carrying the newscasts in drive-time anyway, only clearing the commercials the rest of the day.)

Even now, remembering it to write it out, the whole exercise in logistics makes my head spin a little.

 

[JohnnyElectron]

I remember you could leave the network feed on your board on "Audition" and watch the meter swing for the warning tone 5 or 10 seconds before the TOH, have your TOH jingle playing, then after the meter swung for the tone, flip network over to 'Program' and then "hit he post" for the top of the hour news from the "ABC Information Radio Network".
IIRC, in 1978-80, the station had one or two dedicated network lines from AT&T for the ABC network, a dedicated line to the sports arena for hockey games and even one local 'general store' line for live remotes over the equalized line before the 450MHz UHF unit went into service. Ah yes, the days when real people used their talent for live radio - I liked it then.

PS: Almost forgot, we had the UPI and AP printer 'teletype machines' rolling at the end of the hall too.

 

[js6592]

O.K., well here's how I remember it from my local radio station KYRO in Potosi, Missouri. In the early 1980's, they had only one phone line which carried Missourinet News at approximately five minutes before the hour. This same newscast was re-fed at five minutes after the hour and again at :30. At various times throughout the day, there would be farm reports from the Brownfield Network. These would run during the times that Missourinet was not broadcasting news. Both networks were based out of Jefferson City and operated through the facilities of Learfied Communications. At the top of the hour was world news from UPI. I have no idea where UPI news came from (Washington, D.C., maybe?), but obviously it was being fed live to Jefferson City and then, somehow, Learfied was able to feed it live on that same phone line (which explains why Missourinet and Brownfield did not broadcast reports at the top of the hour). So basically, KYRO had three networks transmitting reports over one phone line, but at different times. Well, in 1983, KYRO's top of the hour newscasts started coming from RKO instead of UPI. Apparently, Learfield decided to dump UPI in favor of RKO, so that's what was being sent down the phone line, now. (Another change made by Learfied is that the Missourinet newscast re-feed at :30 was changed to a two-minute news brief.) Then, sometime in 1985, they switched again from RKO to ABC Direction News. At this time, KYRO purchased a satellite dish and all three networks (ABC, Missourinet, and Brownfield) were being fed by satellite from Learfied in Jefferson City. One interesting thing about this arrangement is that ABC Direction News (which is obviously based in New York City, not Jefferson City) actually sent its newscasts at :50, but Learfied sent them at :00. Obviously, this means that Learfied had some sort of recording mechanism that would record ABC Direction News off of its original network at :50, then re-broadcast it at :00 from it's facilities in Jefferson City. And naturally, this is when it had to be carried when broadcast on KYRO. Does anyone have any experience of this kind of arrangement in other states?

 

[js6592]

By the way, it's Learfield, not Learfied. I apologize for the misspelling.

 

[JRH]

We (in Iowa) started picking up programming from Learfield's Satellite service sometime in the late 80s.

At that time, they fed Missouri Net & ABC Entertainment News on one channel and Brownfield Farm programming & ABC Direction on another. They also added a bunch of sports, syndicated features, etc. The idea was a station could have just one satellite dish, get national programming, regional farm news, state news, sports play by play all from one dish. They had NBC Talknet at night on one of the channels, even a Saturday night oldies show (fed in mono). Their third channel had Radio Iowa state news & some sports.

All of this was picked up by satellite in Jefferson City, then re-fed by Learfield. The ABC News at :50 was recorded by their automation system and played back at :00. Radio Iowa news comes from Des Moines, is fed to Jefferson City, then up to the satellite.

We picked up ABC Entertainment from Learfield along with Radio Iowa. Eventually, we started getting ABC directly from the ABC satellite feed. Today, all the major commercial radio satellite offerings are available from the same satellite, so from one dish we get Fox News, Radio Iowa, Brownfield Farm Network, and music programming from Westwood One.

 

[b-turner]

I may be incorrect but I think our station was daisy chained somewhat. As I understood, our feed for The Texas State Network/TSN and something called Continental News Service, a 4.5 minute UPI rip and read cast at the top of the hour came via dedicated phone line from the affiliate 75 miles away. As I recall of dedicated lines, they were run from the nearest substation right to your door. And they cost a bunch! I recall in 1980 it took $5,000 a month for our station to break even. My salary was $750 a month and jocks got minimum wage, $1.80 an hour x about 84 hours a week. We were a daytime only.

I think we had to pay the dedicated line charge regardless of if we used it. I recall UPI gave us a hiatus on monthly fees for a period of time when we approached UPI about how we had very little billing when the new owner took over. In other words, they'd give us X months before the remaining months in our contract were billed. At first we took TSN news right off the translator from the station in the next town but I convinced the owner to negotiate with UPI, that apparently had the Continental News Service product and our station went from teletype to network feed to satisfy the contract.

It seems you got to pay the dedicated line charge and for products like UPI that had no commercials embedded, you paid a monthly fee for the service. In our case, it was cheaper to take the network than run the UPI ticker.

I'm sure each 'product' required its own dedicated line. When I was at another station we had TSN News, an AP ticker and the National Weather Service ticker. I'm guessing that meant 3 dedicated lines. I don't recall monthly fees for the dedicated line, but it was at least the price of a fulltime employee or more. When you start adding all the costs of running a small market station back in the day, it was amazing they survived. You had to have dedicated lines, pay for services received, pay jocks for every hour you were on the air, have at least a contract first class engineer that made very frequent visits, a traffic department that built program logs per FCC Rules and other fees and costs. Based on that alone, I understand why so many small town stations opted for a satellite programming service once that became possible.

Keep in mind that until 1981, you had a much more rigid operating format required by the FCC like non-entertainment programming requirements and more (8% on AM and 6% on FM but almost everyone did more and you had to live up to what you promised including number of PSAs broadcast per week per your promise).

The computer likely saved radio as more stations inhabited the AM and FM band and cable TV came of age. As radio's share dwindled via numerous other options for advertisers, it was the computer and satellite dish that helped keep the radio station afloat. If operational costs had not gone down, I suspect many stations would no longer be with us. In fact, at one station I worked twice, we once owned the market billing about $45,000 monthly but 15 years later that FM was barely cracking $18,000. There simply were more newspapers, a local TV station and easily double the radio stations. When we were at $45,000 there were two stations, a weekly newspaper and cable TV was little more than the big city stations, WTBS and WGN (both called Super Stations then). At $18,000, the station was still the top station but the days of a getting 43% of the radio listeners as one of the legit audience measurement companies determined was long gone, splintering to the other 4 stations.

In fact, there were other factors at play. Think Walmart and national chains coming to towns, including McDonalds and such that certainly were not spending at the level the mom and pop business did. The business community slimmed down. New competition usually appeared, sometimes several. And towns, many times, lost population showing negative growth as the youth sought greener pastures. When you factor this in the equation, radio has had a bumpy ride as has all other media..mo media is a cakewalk.

 

[landtuna]

The network studios (primarily in New York) would get their programming onto AT&T Long Lines, which then distributed the audio around the country over the same network as regular phone traffic.

A dedicated phone line was set up from the switching office in town to the radio studio for "the network".

As an old Long Lines tech in the 60's I have a minor correction. Dedicated phone lines were used but they were most often "conditioned" to minimize noise and provide expanded frequency range.

 

[JohnnyElectron]

Speaking of the Long Lines, IIRC, didn't our old pal Leonard Kahn come-up with a way to emphasize the bass response on those lines, rather than the midrange to enhance voice audio quality?

 

[BigRed]

I seem to remember that the dedicated telco loop from the AT&T Long Lines building to the station that I worked for back then was equalized to 5-kHz. It was a "dry" copper, twisted-pair circuit "loaded" on each end by going from 600-ohms to 150-ohms at the send end and back to 600-ohms at the studios. And then the low end was further attenuated by a filter to make the circuit "flat" from around 50-Hz to 5-kHz. It was supplied by United Telephone, at great expense. Got the main program audio to the transmitter via a similar means but that circuit was equalized to 15-kHz, for an AM station, no less. Both "runs" were short enough that the phone company didn't need to "amp" either circuit. That was actually pretty common back in the mid 70's and earlier. I think I might even have a copy of the Bell System standards for that system floating around somewhere. They included a phase standard for "stereo" pairs as well. (Just try and find someone at the ILEC that even begins to have a clue about that stuff these days . . . ) Acient technology, but I don't remember of either circuit ever going out.

 

[BigRed]

A couple of comments about ABC Radio News to add to K.M. Richards comments about ABC . . .

If I remember correctly the American Contemporary main newscast ran from 54:00 to 59:30, allowing 30-seconds to clear the line for American Information at the top of the hour. But there was an American Contemporary New In Brief feed that ran at 50:00 and lasted for either 2:30 or 3:00? Don't remember exactly on that one because the station I worked for then seldom cleared that feed. I do remember that Contemporary had a "Rock Jock" flavor, almost to the point of "puking" the news. One anchor name comes to mind for being particularly bad for that, Kiev Berman (sorry if I spelled his name incorrectly)

 

[K.M. Richards]

As an old Long Lines tech in the 60's I have a minor correction. Dedicated phone lines were used but they were most often "conditioned" to minimize noise and provide expanded frequency range.

That jogged my memory a little. Weren't there lettered "classes" for the local loops indicating the frequency response, and therefore the amount of conditioning?

 

[frankberry]

In Florida (and possibly LA), GTE designated the circuits as:
Class A: 15kHz
Class B: 8kHz
Class C: 5kHz

and later:
Class AAA: 15kHz
Class AA: 8kHz
Class A: 5kHz

GTE had a problem admitting that their circuits were anything less than "class A."

 

[K.M. Richards]

If I remember correctly the American Contemporary main newscast ran from 54:00 to 59:30, allowing 30-seconds to clear the line for American Information at the top of the hour. But there was an American Contemporary New In Brief feed that ran at 50:00 and lasted for either 2:30 or 3:00? Don't remember exactly on that one because the station I worked for then seldom cleared that feed. I do remember that Contemporary had a "Rock Jock" flavor, almost to the point of "puking" the news. One anchor name comes to mind for being particularly bad for that, Kiev Berman (sorry if I spelled his name incorrectly)

:55 to :59:30 ... it was a 4½ minute cast. The brief was at :52:30 to accommodate one minute of headlines and the network commercial. In the 1980s the brief was replaced by a convoluted "customcast" which let station's select the news types they wanted and by using the low-level network cue tones and a specially modified cart recorder a customized newscast was assembled every hour. The concept didn't last very long, IIRC ... probably few stations considered it worth the effort and extra expense.

American Contemporary was the "top-40" newscast, designed to fit in at O&Os WABC, WLS and KQV. So the announcing style was rather forceful, to put it more politely.

The late Mr. Berman (d. May 18, 2008)'s first name was spelled Keeve, just for the record. He was not part of the original anchor team at ABC/C, coming there in 1974.

 

[dumber than a box of hair]

:55 to :59:30 ... it was a 4½ minute cast. The brief was at :52:30 to accommodate one minute of headlines and the network commercial.

Not while I was working there. I was a vacation-relief engineer at ABC Radio during the 1970's and ran the board for probably several hundred newscasts. Contemporary News-in-Brief began at :50:30 and ended at 51:30 with a 60-second commercial. Contemporary News began at :54:30, went to a 60-second commercial after an intro and a headline, continued until :58:55, broke for a 30-second commercial or a news filler, and ended with a 5-second close ending at :59:30.

 

[Chuck]

A lot of smaller markets got their network feeds off the air from another station, usually a flamethrower in a major city. If you were out in the hinterland far enough, you could be the second or third station in a daisy chain. It certainly increased the likelihood of something going wrong, but it was much more cost effective, especially for small Mom & Pop operators who really couldn't afford the cost of dedicated phone lines.

 

[K.M. Richards]

Not while I was working there. I was a vacation-relief engineer at ABC Radio during the 1970's and ran the board for probably several hundred newscasts. Contemporary News-in-Brief began at :50:30 and ended at 51:30 with a 60-second commercial. Contemporary News began at :54:30, went to a 60-second commercial after an intro and a headline, continued until :58:55, broke for a 30-second commercial or a news filler, and ended with a 5-second close ending at :59:30.

Must have changed by the time I needed to know the start and running times (admittedly, the mid-1980s). Thanks for the additional history from the perspective of someone who was there.

 

[ContinuousWave]

Speaking of the Long Lines, IIRC, didn't our old pal Leonard Kahn come-up with a way to emphasize the bass response on those lines, rather than the midrange to enhance voice audio quality?

No, not really (AFAIK, Kahn had no connection with AT&T/WE/Long Lines)...The Long Lines microwave channels were originally FM multiplex....(deviation equal to land mobile or two way radio...5-10kHz per channel resulting in a 20kHz bandwidth....so on a 300 channel system, the overall bandwidth was over 6 Mhz wide)...later SSB mux was used and the audio was 300-3400 Hz per channel...making 600-800 channel systems per m/w carrier possible...since the main RF carrier was still FM, pre-emphasis was added on LOCAL insertion and DE-Emphasis was used at LOCAL drops...the THRU baseband which was merely repeated on to the next site had no pre-/de-emphasis. This kept a good S/N on the higher channels which had been avoided in the FM/FM only systems

Actually MOST normal telephone lines used in "normal" voice communications had was is called "C Message Weighting" on them....which caused a peak around 1800Hz or so...but this was on 2wire dial up lines...

The capacitance of a LONG run of cable causes the high end to roll off first (the inductance of the wire added to the capacitance between the pairs form a LC low pass circuit).....Most landline conditioned loops would have the higher freqs emphasized (similar to FM pre-emphasis) so they would have a flat response from 300-whatever the upper limit was needed...Broadcasting and 9600 baud QAM data circuits (like the IBM 3750 series) would use such....the data circuits good to 3400 or 5 kHz usually would have a xxPLPA or similar in the circuit ID from the Telco....also used a lot in two way radio "tone remote" systems that had to pass 2175 Hz and those using voting circuits with 1950 to 2805Hz idle tones...15 kHz broadcast loops were designated with a different ID and would be EQ/amplified at shorter intervals to maintain the flat response to 15 kHz..

At one company I worked for, we ran 100 pair 22 ga pilot cable over a mile from the main office to an annex for telephone and data use. There were several punch blocks in between because the cable sections came from different sources. However, after we were finished installing it, we ran audio freq sweeps...at 120 kHz on a HP4935 TIMS, the response was only 3db down from the 1kHz level...we successfully ran ROLMPhones from a ROLM CBX telephone switch..The "ROLMLink" was a 512kb ISDN BRI styled stream....with only 256kb used by the phone and the other reserved for possible remote terminal use. ROLM only guaranteed 3000ft on 18 ga as max length the phones would work on. But we were over 6000ft in length , thinner gauge and even with the 66M blocks (I think there were 4 splices in all), we could make the phones work...just had to spread the current load among the circuits cards in the CBX..otherwise, adding another RP at the annex on the same card as others at the annex would cause too much current draw and the card would start to shut down...we only needed 25-35 phones for the annex so that was easy for us to keep up with

Nowadays, a broadcast loop may go less than 1/2 mile to a SLIC or MUX hut or DSLAM then ride fiber or T1 to the other end....and then back to copper for the last "mile" at most....back in the days when "power" matching was used (600 ohm terminated, etc), and over a LONG run, you needed to worry about matching...today, with voltage sourced outputs with low Z broadcast gear (< 100 ohms output in an "active balanced mode") and the SHORT run of a copper run to the nearest MUX cabinet, impedance matching is somewhat a thing of the past. However, INSIDE the Telco system, they still use xmfr loaded matching....but a 100ohm voltage sourced DA can easily drive a 600ohm input Telco loop and at the xmtr, the xmtrs are usually still ~600ohm input....but if the processor is at the xmtr site, it will have an active balanced input...~20K Z.