Uploaded July 2015 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Though it started life as another item “borrowed” from the Hearst idea pool, this is a case where the story evolved. Despite the promo, which plays things fairly neutral, and the prior Hearst stations’ positive reports, the report that wound up airing was fairly meaty (something which is, sadly, increasingly rare in lawsuit-fearing local news operations), and some real dirt was dug up about the author of the book in question and his credentials.
A NOTE ABOUT VIDEO QUALITY
I began archiving my work-related video years before YouTube existed. It was an age of darkness, an age of limited web storage, an age of... {shudder} ...dial-up connections.
More to the point, my work archive at my site was all dependent on... {shudder some more} ...Adobe Flash. These videos were converted, usually from either the master MII or Beta tapes or from VHS dubs, with a program called Sorenson Squeeze. Sorenson is great for what it does, but with scenes featuring a lot of motion, there's often a lot of pixellation and motion artifacting that's considered unacceptable these days. The Sorenson files were also generated at a very small resolution, and thus the video extracted from them could only be the same resolution. (I no longer work at any of the TV stations for whom I produced these spots, and as such no longer have access to the master tapes.)
I hope you enjoy this little walk down local TV memory lane.
Though it started life as another item “borrowed” from the Hearst idea pool, this is a case where the story evolved. Despite the promo, which plays things fairly neutral, and the prior Hearst stations’ positive reports, the report that wound up airing was fairly meaty (something which is, sadly, increasingly rare in lawsuit-fearing local news operations), and some real dirt was dug up about the author of the book in question and his credentials.
A NOTE ABOUT VIDEO QUALITY
I began archiving my work-related video years before YouTube existed. It was an age of darkness, an age of limited web storage, an age of... {shudder} ...dial-up connections.
More to the point, my work archive at my site was all dependent on... {shudder some more} ...Adobe Flash. These videos were converted, usually from either the master MII or Beta tapes or from VHS dubs, with a program called Sorenson Squeeze. Sorenson is great for what it does, but with scenes featuring a lot of motion, there's often a lot of pixellation and motion artifacting that's considered unacceptable these days. The Sorenson files were also generated at a very small resolution, and thus the video extracted from them could only be the same resolution. (I no longer work at any of the TV stations for whom I produced these spots, and as such no longer have access to the master tapes.)
I hope you enjoy this little walk down local TV memory lane.
