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Reporting traffic on WSVN 7 in Miami

by | Feb 17, 2024 | Television

Inspired by my involvement in a grant-funded project to digitize all 26,000 videotapes in the archives of Arkansas PBS, I recently dug into storage containers for videotapes of my own work which haven’t been viewed in decades. They included a few tapes from the brief period of my career when I worked as a traffic reporter for radio and TV stations in Richmond, Virginia, then Miami, Florida in 1997 and 1998.

I have long been digitizing audio tapes of my work and posting those here, but hadn’t made an effort to preserve videotapes. The traffic reports certainly don’t have the historic value of important news stories I’ve covered or the treasure trove of material Arkansas PBS shipped off to be digitized, but after working in the seemingly calm world of public broadcasting for the past 21 years, it’s kind of funny seeing reports I anchored for WSVN, channel 7, the Fox affiliate in Miami. It had the most dramatic presentation of any TV station in the market.

What I appreciate about the video below is that it’s an unedited segment of “Today in Florida,” the station’s morning news program, including three of my traffic reports. Most other tapes I have only include my reports. I would follow weather every 15 minutes, updating traffic conditions while showing live helicopter footage of accidents and backups. I was off-camera. The first report shows a dramatic shot of a vehicle on its side, blocking all lanes in one direction on a major roadway.  

South Florida had terrible traffic congestion, with morning rush backups beginning before 6 a.m. WSVN aimed to give people information they would need about potential problems in their morning commute before leaving for work.

I had only been in Miami about a month at that point and received a quick orientation on the complicated layout of roadways and the lingo before starting on the air. I was working for Metro Networks, a provider of traffic reports for radio and TV stations nationwide, first at its Richmond office, then was able to transfer to Miami. Needless to say, it was a challenge arriving in a new market and trying to talk about the highway system like a local. 

I didn’t find reporting traffic to be as interesting as reporting news. Most days were very redundant with backups in the same places at the same times with a few scattered accidents mixing things up. But working at Metro Networks gave me a lot of good exposure, not only on WSVN, but also being heard at one time or another on about half of the English language radio stations in South Florida. One of those was WIOD, Newsradio 610, where six months after arriving in Miami, I was hired as a news anchor and reporter. 

I’ve never had any nostalgia for my short lived traffic reporting days, but learning recently just how badly videotapes deteriorate after a couple of decades, especially in poor conditions like what I subjected these to while moving around the country, I knew that if I wanted to preserve this footage, I should take action as soon as possible. These tapes weren’t digitized using the most professional standards — I simply slid them into a VCR I still have and dubbed them onto DVDs, which were then ripped to MP4 files. The project I’ve been involved with at Arkansas PBS is using a company that follows a much more formal archival process.

PRESERVING ARKANSAS PBS ARCHIVE

Last year, Arkansas PBS received a $1.13 million grant from the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council to digitize all 26,000 audio and videotapes that have been saved over the years. Some are 2-inch videotapes going back to when the station went on the air in 1966. I served on a committee that heard proposals from vendors, then selected the George Blood company, which is now digitizing those tapes. It’s a fascinating process with the deteriorating media being carefully handled using an archival process to assess the tapes, then record them into a digital format to get the best footage possible. The first truckload of carefully-wrapped tapes was shipped out on Nov. 27, generating a lot of excitement.

Included in that first shipment were many tapes featuring episodes of “Arkansas Week,” which I now oversee as part of my duties here. Last year, the program marked its 40th anniversary.  Many of the most important stories in the state during that time were discussed in the program, so it’s an important record of Arkansas history. The footage will eventually be available through the website of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. In December, a second shipment left our building.

On Feb. 15, Arkansas PBS received a hard drive featuring the first digitized footage, which was compared with an inventoried list of tapes that had been sent. Needless to say this has been an exciting project, especially for employees here like David Elmore, who for years has been setting aside and watching over these tapes.

More pallets filled with tapes are in position and will soon be part of a third truckload of tapes to be shipped. For me, having been involved in small personal projects to digitize tapes of my own or radio stations I’ve worked for, it has been a joy seeing this happen on such a large and professional scale.