[QuadList] Broadcast Engineering to cease publication effective Oct. 31--Reflections--

[Ted Langdell]

I spotted this piece of news about BE in a post to the SMPTE LinkedIn discussion group, this morning.

http://broadcastengineering.com/

My initial reaction:  "Wow!"  Followed by "business must not be sustainable."

Broadcast Engineering magazine (and its deceased competitor Broadcast Management/Engineering) have been a part of my on-going education as a broadcaster since 1965, when I discovered a stack of back issues in a closet at a radio station I often visited as a pre-teenager.

They were water. I was a sponge.  Much practical information in the form of engineer-written articles about how to do this or that were enlightening to me as young person very interested in the technical and production aspects of the business.

Circling bingo card numbers brought information and product knowledge, and on occasion, sample cases of Miller-Stephenson products that included freon-based video head cleaner, various degreasers and a number of things you can't get today.

Over the years, they kept me informed about new products, techniques and trends in the broadcasting business.

Looking at back issues recently on David Gleason's American Radio History website
http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Broadcasting_Individual_Issues_Guide.htm
brought home just how things have changed, and how useful publications of this kind are.

Even today, the magazine's pages were useful in helping to understand and navigate the layers of the shift to digital, whether propped up in bed, or making good use of time in other spaces, although I'd noted that the magazine had become more "advertorial" in the last several decades... articles written by advertiser employees beginning opposite an ad for the product whose benefits were being described in the article, accompanied by useful information about the niche into which the product fit or the problem it addressed.

I hope that the staff and freelance writers and designers find paid outlets for their work, and that the kind of useful information that graced the pages of BE continue to be found in print or on-line.

Those of you who have just received print copies of the October issue may want to put them in plastic bags with the note:  Last issue.  

Twenty years from now, looking back at NBC's new sports studio or other articles regarding the integration of IP architecture into broadcasting may provide a chuckle, or a recollection of your own work with the technology described... A time-capsule of where the state of the "art" was in 2013.

And it will provide the answer to today's trivia question:  "What do NBC Sports and Clairol have in common?"



Born 1959 in the heyday of the first generation of Quad, passed on in 2013 after 54 years of service.


Ted

Ted Langdell
Secretary
Skype: 	TedLangdell
e-mail:	ted at quadvideotapegroup.com



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