Date of Award
3-26-2021
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Heritage Studies, Ph.D.
First Advisor
Michael Bowman
Committee Members
Brady Banta; Ruth Hawkins
Call Number
LD 251 .A566d 2020 J66
Abstract
KAIT-TV in Jonesboro, AR, broadcasting on Very High Frequency (VHF) Channel 8 from a rural location on a gravel road five miles north of the city, first began transmitting reqular programming on Monday, July 15, 1963. As one of the first employees of the television station, I took part in the historic event as a high-school student who worked full time as a photographer—and later as a commercial filmmaker and live television director. During the 1970s and 1980, before personal camcorders and the later ubiquity of smartphone videos and internet distribution, KAIT’s news film cameras provided virtually the only public moving image records of Northeast Arkansas history, heritage, culture and politics. In 1986, a KAIT technician named Ronnie Weston was directed to take all archival news film to the Craighead County landfill. Instead, Weston decided that the film should be preserved and arranged to unload his cargo at the Arkansas State Museum. Over three decades later, some of this priceless, discarded news film makes its debut in a scholarly documentary, which introduces and provides historical context to the KAIT/A-State News Film Collection a repository of 206 reels of 16mm news film covering over 6,000 stories, which aired on KAIT-TV in Jonesboro, Arkansas between 1972-80. This dissertation also explores the “participatory heritage crowdsourcing” required to provide vernacular metadata (tagging) about the stories in the Collection and provides some introductory news film contextual analysis drawn from a cross-section (thirty reels—17.31%) of the Collection. Pursuit of these themes incorporates the efforts of the A-State archives to bring the Collection to the public and requires a historical perspective on the early days of KAIT-TV. To that end, the research included interviews with the archivists who shepherded the film’s preservation and digitation and with early KAIT-TV management and on-air talent, as well as news photographers and producers who contributed to some news stories contained in the Collection.
Rights Management
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Jones, Gary William, "The Story...Behind the Stories: KAIT/A-State News Film Collection-- Crowdsourcing Vernacular Metadata" (2021). Student Theses and Dissertations. 323.
https://arch.astate.edu/all-etd/323
