Re: Running Network News!

[mwaters@wesleyan.edu (Martin J. Waters)]

>Bump Martin wrote (about the AP Radio network audio quality):
>>It was *always* awful, wasn't it.  No matter what station you went to.
>I believe when APR was being used the most...it was completely made up
>of phone lines of questionable quality. There came a time though when
>the newspapers started getting their feed via satellite.  If you were in
>the same town as a paper that had a dish, you could hook into them.

        Yes, it was awful. In the 70s and early / mid 80s, when I was
there, the AP considered UPI Audio the competition, not the major networks.
The market mostly was stations without a major network affiliation. Neither
wire service ran ads in its newscasts, but provided breaks with PSAs over
which the locals could run their ads. The stations paid a fee for the
service. Both AP and UPI were fed over what I think were called 5k lines.
It sounded like someone reading the news to you over the phone, which
basically is what it was. Junk. But these were radio networks for stations
that wanted to do it on the cheap-cheap-cheap, mostly smaller and secondary
stations, so the main thing was to keep the price down. Many medium and
larger stations used just the audio cuts in their own news, and the
phone-call quality wasn't such a problem with a 35-second voice report from
Paris or whatever. The smallest stations tended to be the ones that ran the
hourly news. (Remember, this was back when many radio stations actually had
their own news departments). When AP began installing satellite dishes,
which almost always went at the local newspaper location (once again
reminding broadcasters that they were the second-class members of this news
cooperative), a much higher quality APR feed could be obtained by putting
in a good local audio circuit from the satellite dish. Eventually, of
course, as dishes became smaller and less expensive, the broadcast stations
began to get their own dishes, too.

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