Monday, October 14, 2024
Continued from last week
In July of 1971, WLUK quietly reentered local news broadcasting and never looked back.
In 1972, General Manager Tom Hutchison and News Director Tom Torinus brought in Bob Thomas — who was promoted as the “only professional meteorologist registered with the American Meteorological Society north of Milwaukee” — in an effort to develop a fully-instrumental broadcast weather service, along with a high-power meteorological radar model.
The equipment was noted as just one in six in the country at the time.
And then came Scoop.
“Technology in the industry was rapidly progressing. Black and white cameras were replaced by color in the mid-60s. Film gave way to videotape in the early 70s,” Hutchison said.
In 1974, manufacturers introduces more affordable video cameras, and then news director, Wally Zimmerman, was able to locate one that fit in the station’s budget.
“Although the old-timers pooh-poohed the idea, Wally insisted the new gear should be tried, and he was right. Once the news crew started taking the video camera into the field, we had a great advantage over the other stations whose crews were still shooting film. WLUK crews could come back and put the news right on the air while the other stations were still processing their film,” Hutchison recalled.
“While WLUK had a clear jump on its competition with use of the video camera versus film, no one imagined what came next. With the Green Bay market so scattered, there was still no chance of getting a story on the air until the crew had time to record it and return the tape to the station for playback. This was solved in 1976 when Sony announced it had developed a transmitting unit that didn’t depend on a line of sight and claimed that the user could take a camera, drive 30-40 miles, pop up a small antenna and have the reporter live on the air.”
And that’s just what they did with “Scoop,” gaining an advantage in the market.
“We didn’t come up with the name. It was born at an ABC station in Detroit, which was using the same camera and promoting it with the name ‘Scoop.’ I talked with the general anager of the station and he gave us permission to adopt their promotional theme,” he added.
“It took almost a year for the other stations in the market to purchase the same equipment, but by then, they were following the leader.”
To be continued
Many thanks to Dan Spangler, Jay Zollar and Juli Buehler of WLUK and Tom Hutchison for their assistance with this article.
