If your station is old enough and doesn’t clean house occasionally of old detritus from ages past and you have a passing interest in the history of broadcast journalism…I suggest digging through the basements and attics and look for a large black binder published in 1964 by the RTNDA called Television Newsfilm Standards Manual. It is the earliest attempt to disseminate to a wide audience of what the ideals of television reporting and photography should be like.

To be fair, the NPPA’s Norman workshop existed then, but you had to physically go to Oklahoma to avail yourself of the knowledge given there. The RTNDA’s newsfilm manual was a binder of wisdom that could be sent to newsrooms instead for ingestion by a larger audience.

In early 1964, Time-Life Broadcast and a number of stations under the banner of the RTNDA decided since local television news had finally matured enough that it was time to come up with some formal ideal of what television journalism should be like. The black binder to the left that ended up in many a newsroom is the legacy of those early newsfilm standards conferences.

A partial explanation by WRCV-TV (now KYW-TV)’s news director, Robert Shafer, over why the newsfilm standards conferences were called and the binder published:

“…Our commitment was drafted originally by Richard Krolick of Time-Life Broadcast. It is “that a real need exists for the establishment of a set of standards for newsfilm reporting at the television station level.”

We do not think the proposition to be arguable.

We do not know all there is to know about what we are doing, why we are doing it, how best to do it, or what comes of it when we do it, to say nothing of the subtle implications of whether we do it well or badly. But even if none of these assumptions was relevant, the fact would remain that there is no stated agreement among us as to the essence of what we are attempting to do and the body of knowledge required of those who would attempt to do it competently.

Without these we deceive ourselves and delude others at a time where the exercise of external judgement regarding public responsibility threatens to make it impossible for us to determine our own standards of individual responsibility.

We deceive ourselves as professionals because we have yet to formalize the characteristics, both technical and ethical, of our occupation.

We delude others because we have yet to make an open declaration to conduct ourselves in accordance with the formal characteristics of what we believe to be compatible with our role in contemporary society…”

If you can’t find the Time-Life/RTNDA binder, Leo G. Willette’s So You’re Going to Shoot Newsfilm was born out of the same ideals of the newsfilm conferences and the 1973 second edition is fairly easy to locate copies of. Strip out the film portion and the basics of the book are the same ones still preached today that were formalized in 1964.