The KATV News Collection Film & Videotape Assets

The KATV Channel 7 television station began broadcasting in 1953 when all news footage was captured on film. From the beginning, KATV kept much of the film; however, in 1960 a fire at the television station destroyed the existing news footage.

In the late 1970s when the station was making the transition from shooting news stories on film to recording on videotape, KATV news director Jim Pitcock created the KATV News archive. He gathered historically significant film footage from previous years, catalogued the clips, and prepared handwritten "log sheets" with a descriptive title for each clip. Pitcock then transferred the film clips to U-matic videotape, and developed an archival system that became known as the Master Cassette Reel (MCR) system. The MCR system served as the model for later KATV newsroom archiving systems.

In 2009 when KATV, then owned by Allbritton Communications Company, donated the collection to the Pryor Center, approximately 300 hours of film dating from the 1960s to the late 1970s had been preserved. The Pryor Center recovered those existing film reels and partnered with The MediaPreserve, a Pennsylvania-based company, to restore and digitize the film. The MediaPreserve has digitized the film frame-by-frame in a high-resolution format. The quality of the digitized video is remarkable. A before-and-after restoration video is provided below to illustrate the difference in quality. The handwritten log sheets have been transcribed and time codes linking the titles to the video files have been added. We began posting the earliest film transfers and descriptions in a searchable format on our website in 2018.

When KATV switched to videotape in the late 1970s, Pitcock preserved significant historical footage, edited news stories, and the descriptive titles for each tape. In September 2019, more than 24,000 videotapes were shipped to The MediaPreserve to be digitized.

We sincerely hope you enjoy accessing the most expansive broadcast news archive of its kind in the United States.

Before and after restoration.