Stacey Woelfel spent 35 years on the faculty of the Missouri School of Journalism.
And for 24 years, he was the news director for KOMU, the University of Missouri-owned NBC affiliate for central Missouri.
News Blues does accept submissions for Guest Commentaries, but we reserve the right to publish or edit them. Send your commentary to Paul@NewsBlues.com
When is Going ‘Live’ Going to Work for the Viewers Again?
We’re still treating live shots like a novelty decades after they became commonplace.
Fifty years ago, the television news profession was revolutionized by two pieces of groundbreaking technology—the RCA TK-76 “minicam” and the dedicated ENG live truck.
The TK-76 and its trademark blue body was the first lightweight (sort of—it weighed about 30 pounds), practical electronic newsgathering (ENG) camera that could go into the field and bring back footage on tape to be quickly turned around for air on the local news.
Until its advent, journalists used film cameras that produced footage that needed to be processed before it could be aired, adding 90 minutes or more to the news turnaround.
I was lucky enough to use a TK-760 (the electronic field production version of the TK-76) in my first job at WESH-TV in Orlando (that’s me with it in the cover picture this week). Mine was quite a historic piece of gear, bearing serial number 000001.
With a video camera rather than a film camera, we could also connect directly to a transmitter and beam images and sound live for air.
The dedicated ENG truck facilitated that process, serving both as the vehicle to travel to the story and the transmission point from which to send back footage and live reports. This equipment was expensive and thus served as a bragging point for the first station in any market to get ENG gear.
To show it off, stations went live all the time with stories that were questionable to cover that way.
Now, five decades later, we’ve gone back to going live in many questionable ways. It’s as if the novelty of this technology never faded for us newsroom nerds, even as the digital revolution substantially changed almost everything about the way we gather news.
Few stations use ENG trucks (or their satellite cousins) regularly anymore, opting instead for far cheaper live backpacks that carry a squadron of cell phone cards to send video and audio back via a cellular connection.
The function of these backpacks is basically identical to the old ENG truck, still a piece of technology by which to send footage back to the station or for a reporter to go live.
In a perfect world, going live would serve just two functions in any newscast.
First—and more valuable—is the ability to cover an ongoing story as it happens.
If city hall is on fire downtown at 6 pm, we don’t want the reporter to record footage and drive it back to the station to assemble a report that will be an hour or more old by the time it airs.
If the news event is happening at newscast time, we want to have a reporter live to show us the very latest visuals and give us the very latest facts.
Viewers at home can get the most up-to-date information that way.
The other primary function of live technology is to allow a reporter to send back footage from an event or story that has ended, but doesn’t allow enough time to physically travel back to the TV station to assemble a report.
For instance, a city council meeting (imagine city hall hasn’t burned yet) ends at 5:30 pm.
The newscast at 6:00 pm would like a report on that meeting, so live technology allows the reporter to stay at the scene, send back video, and put together a script to either read live herself or send back for the anchors. Going live in this case eliminates the travel time and gets the story to air sooner.
Those two functions of our live technology do still happen, but their instances are dwarfed in number by the times when a reporter “fronts” a story live in the field. Fronting consists of sending a reporter to the scene of a story that has already ended hours before or to the scene of a story that will happen at some point in the future, merely to introduce the story from the field.
This is done for a number of reasons, including showcasing a big story, giving a reporter more on-air time and—strangely—showing off our live technology.
But this flex comes at a cost. In many cases, a reporter who’s been out in the field on a story returns to the station to write and edit it and then goes BACK out to the scene of the story to front a live shot. That’s a huge waste of time that could be spent on more reporting or better crafting of a story.
Many of these “live for the sake of live” reports make us look dumb.
Morning newscasts have expanded to cover many hours before people head off to work. The audience is there in the morning, distracted as they are getting ready for work or school, to put resources in the morning to attract the eyeballs already open at that hour.
One common element in morning newscasts everywhere is the live shot previewing something coming ahead that day.
I strongly applaud morning newscasts that look to the day ahead rather than rehash the news of the day before, but where can you go live at 4 am that has any real value to a story?
If your story is about an issue going before the state legislature that day, why stand in the dark outside the capitol building to front it?
The reporter wastes travel time getting there she could better use writing multiple versions of the story, doing research or planning for the day.
The same criticism holds true for 10/11 pm newscasts that insist reporters be live outside a dark building now locked up tightly since the story that took place there has been over for hours.
The audience doesn’t care about our live technology.
In 1976, an ENG camera and truck were cutting edge technology. One of the things that drew me to a career in TV news when I was in college was how cool the technology was at the time.
But we are no longer technology leaders. And the audience that was wowed by sending pictures flying through the air back then now has everyday working knowledge of technologies far beyond whatever we can show them.
Going live to be live is a time and money expense that brings very little in return anymore.
So what should we be using our live technology for?
Aside from the two main functions I mentioned before—which remain vital uses of live technology—we should be focusing the ability to “broadcast” video and audio live to the place it could be consumed the most—social media and other online outlets.
As newscast audiences continue to dwindle, putting all our best resources toward those fixed periods of time squanders their value to the audience.
We don’t have to hope a story will still be going on at 6 pm to show live to the audience.
We can put a live stream out on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other platforms to let those interested in watching the news at it happens do just that—all throughout the day. And we don’t even have to tie up a truck or backpack to do it.
An extra phone in a reporter’s bag will serve the purpose of putting the live stream on social media. We can send that stream out raw or have the reporter give us a play-by-play of what’s happening.
If we want it to be more sophisticated than that, we can set up a stream from the station giving social media editors (or anchors in the studio) the chance to fully produce and host the live stream while leaving the reporter to do her own legwork in the field.
As some of the TV ownership groups experiment with newscasts that are assembled in advance rather than broadcast live, the value of going live—for good reason or bad—will most certainly diminish.
That doesn’t mean the audience doesn’t want to see stories as they happen.
We just have to be smarter about choosing the right stories and delivering them where the audience can make the most of them. That may actually put some value back into going live just to be live.
- Guest Commentary
April 6, 2026When is Going ‘Live’ Going to Work for the Viewers Again?
By Paul Greeley
817-578-6324, Paul@NewsBlues.com
NOTE: This is from Stacey Woelfel’s Substack column, The Last Editor by Stacey Woelfel.
Stacey Woelfel spent 35 years on the faculty of the Missouri School of Journalism.
And for 24 years, he was the news director for KOMU, the University of Missouri-owned NBC affiliate for central Missouri.
News Blues does accept submissions for Guest Commentaries, but we reserve the right to publish or edit them. Send your commentary to Paul@NewsBlues.com
When is Going ‘Live’ Going to Work for the Viewers Again?
We’re still treating live shots like a novelty decades after they became commonplace.
Fifty years ago, the television news profession was revolutionized by two pieces of groundbreaking technology—the RCA TK-76 “minicam” and the dedicated ENG live truck.
The TK-76 and its trademark blue body was the first lightweight (sort of—it weighed about 30 pounds), practical electronic newsgathering (ENG) camera that could go into the field and bring back footage on tape to be quickly turned around for air on the local news.
Until its advent, journalists used film cameras that produced footage that needed to be processed before it could be aired, adding 90 minutes or more to the news turnaround.
I was lucky enough to use a TK-760 (the electronic field production version of the TK-76) in my first job at WESH-TV in Orlando (that’s me with it in the cover picture this week). Mine was quite a historic piece of gear, bearing serial number 000001.
With a video camera rather than a film camera, we could also connect directly to a transmitter and beam images and sound live for air.
The dedicated ENG truck facilitated that process, serving both as the vehicle to travel to the story and the transmission point from which to send back footage and live reports. This equipment was expensive and thus served as a bragging point for the first station in any market to get ENG gear.
To show it off, stations went live all the time with stories that were questionable to cover that way.
Now, five decades later, we’ve gone back to going live in many questionable ways. It’s as if the novelty of this technology never faded for us newsroom nerds, even as the digital revolution substantially changed almost everything about the way we gather news.
Few stations use ENG trucks (or their satellite cousins) regularly anymore, opting instead for far cheaper live backpacks that carry a squadron of cell phone cards to send video and audio back via a cellular connection.
The function of these backpacks is basically identical to the old ENG truck, still a piece of technology by which to send footage back to the station or for a reporter to go live.
In a perfect world, going live would serve just two functions in any newscast.
First—and more valuable—is the ability to cover an ongoing story as it happens.
If city hall is on fire downtown at 6 pm, we don’t want the reporter to record footage and drive it back to the station to assemble a report that will be an hour or more old by the time it airs.
If the news event is happening at newscast time, we want to have a reporter live to show us the very latest visuals and give us the very latest facts.
Viewers at home can get the most up-to-date information that way.
The other primary function of live technology is to allow a reporter to send back footage from an event or story that has ended, but doesn’t allow enough time to physically travel back to the TV station to assemble a report.
For instance, a city council meeting (imagine city hall hasn’t burned yet) ends at 5:30 pm.
The newscast at 6:00 pm would like a report on that meeting, so live technology allows the reporter to stay at the scene, send back video, and put together a script to either read live herself or send back for the anchors. Going live in this case eliminates the travel time and gets the story to air sooner.
Those two functions of our live technology do still happen, but their instances are dwarfed in number by the times when a reporter “fronts” a story live in the field. Fronting consists of sending a reporter to the scene of a story that has already ended hours before or to the scene of a story that will happen at some point in the future, merely to introduce the story from the field.
This is done for a number of reasons, including showcasing a big story, giving a reporter more on-air time and—strangely—showing off our live technology.
But this flex comes at a cost. In many cases, a reporter who’s been out in the field on a story returns to the station to write and edit it and then goes BACK out to the scene of the story to front a live shot. That’s a huge waste of time that could be spent on more reporting or better crafting of a story.
Many of these “live for the sake of live” reports make us look dumb.
Morning newscasts have expanded to cover many hours before people head off to work. The audience is there in the morning, distracted as they are getting ready for work or school, to put resources in the morning to attract the eyeballs already open at that hour.
One common element in morning newscasts everywhere is the live shot previewing something coming ahead that day.
I strongly applaud morning newscasts that look to the day ahead rather than rehash the news of the day before, but where can you go live at 4 am that has any real value to a story?
If your story is about an issue going before the state legislature that day, why stand in the dark outside the capitol building to front it?
The reporter wastes travel time getting there she could better use writing multiple versions of the story, doing research or planning for the day.
The same criticism holds true for 10/11 pm newscasts that insist reporters be live outside a dark building now locked up tightly since the story that took place there has been over for hours.
The audience doesn’t care about our live technology.
In 1976, an ENG camera and truck were cutting edge technology. One of the things that drew me to a career in TV news when I was in college was how cool the technology was at the time.
But we are no longer technology leaders. And the audience that was wowed by sending pictures flying through the air back then now has everyday working knowledge of technologies far beyond whatever we can show them.
Going live to be live is a time and money expense that brings very little in return anymore.
So what should we be using our live technology for?
Aside from the two main functions I mentioned before—which remain vital uses of live technology—we should be focusing the ability to “broadcast” video and audio live to the place it could be consumed the most—social media and other online outlets.
As newscast audiences continue to dwindle, putting all our best resources toward those fixed periods of time squanders their value to the audience.
We don’t have to hope a story will still be going on at 6 pm to show live to the audience.
We can put a live stream out on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other platforms to let those interested in watching the news at it happens do just that—all throughout the day. And we don’t even have to tie up a truck or backpack to do it.
An extra phone in a reporter’s bag will serve the purpose of putting the live stream on social media. We can send that stream out raw or have the reporter give us a play-by-play of what’s happening.
If we want it to be more sophisticated than that, we can set up a stream from the station giving social media editors (or anchors in the studio) the chance to fully produce and host the live stream while leaving the reporter to do her own legwork in the field.
As some of the TV ownership groups experiment with newscasts that are assembled in advance rather than broadcast live, the value of going live—for good reason or bad—will most certainly diminish.
That doesn’t mean the audience doesn’t want to see stories as they happen.
We just have to be smarter about choosing the right stories and delivering them where the audience can make the most of them. That may actually put some value back into going live just to be live.
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