Back then and now

Imagine a world without WiFi. You’d have to be over 40 to at least have a glimmer of memory of those days. In sports journalism, the Internet only really came into use by the mid-1990’s, and was a research tool that began seeing significant play by the time the 1996 Atlanta Olympics came along. This was what Alvin Toffler branded as the third revolution in human history: the information revolution. All information that was once exclusively in the hands of intellectual snobs and experts (like doctors and lawyers) was now available to the masses. Now, you don’t just take anyone’s word for it. You can check.

Before all of that happened, you had to work up a sweat to get a story. When we formally started ABS-CBN Sports in late 1986, I and my cameraman, the late Rey Teodoro, would go out, often seven days a week for months on end, to find stories. And if I needed additional research, I’d have to do it on my own time. My favorite library only had a 1957 book on sports broadcasting, which was an update of the 1953 edition. Microfilm, photographic strips of old local and foreign newspapers, provided some help and leads to other sources.

Without wireless technology, journalists – without exception – had to personally go to practice facilities and playing venues to do their homework and conduct interviews. Remember, there were no mobile phones in the Philippines in the late 1980’s. In order to verify information, even columnists had to get it straight from the horse’s mouth. Even if you had someone’s home phone number, if they weren’t there, you’d scramble to find them before your deadline. Luckily, traffic was not as horrendous then, so your subject’s routine lent a certain predictability. Even for live broadcasts, phone patches were not as common, since early evening broadcasts aired while most people were in transit from office to home.

Recall that we used magnetic tape back then. Magnetic tape meant bigger cameras, and bulkier cameramen. Our original set of Betacam cameras (which used smaller, betamax-sized cassettes with thicker magnetic tape) weighed 16 kilos. Lifting that overhead to get a clear shot required a lot of muscle power. Some cameramen developed oversized right arms (cameras were designed right-handed), and looked like burly tennis players. Previously, the camera’s recorder was a separate device, which was also heavy. Thus, two people were needed to get basic video, plus a light man when necessary, all connected with cables.

This also meant that beating deadlines was a tremendously stressful experience. If you didn’t make it, your story would have to wait until the following day, and you ran the risk of it getting buried behind fresher ones. For us in broadcast, we had to be back in the studio between 3:30 and 4 p.m. and get in line for video editing to cut our packages for the six o’clock news. If the tape got chewed up by the playback machine, got exposed to a magnet, or was otherwise damaged, your story was essentially unusable, and the day’s work was for nothing. And during editing, if an error was made, you would have to redo it from the point of the error onward. There was no way to just insert a new visual without leaving an obvious gap in the magnetic strip of the videotape. The last time I manually edited linear tape-to-tape video was at the end of 2002, for the year-ender of my program The Basketball Show. Since then, the industry has gone completely digital and non-linear, which is a great convenience in most cases.

The advent of digital technology has created an uncontrolled democratization of sorts for journalists. Anyone can now claim to be able to report news. But it has also allowed for the unregulated theft of intellectual property, copyrighted images, and other created works whose owners have not received proper credit or compensation. Under Fair Use doctrine, streaming and sharing sites allow you to repost someone else’s content as long as you add something to it. However, much sports content (like boxing) is rampantly rehashed or merely translated to Filipino, garnering millions of views – and monetary reward – for the people who merely co-opted it. And there’s very little policing done. This is the double-edged sword that technology has introduced.