Local Television News Collection
King 5 Vintage Logo
Often described as the “first draft of history,” local television news is a primary resource that documents the events, personalities, issues, and concerns of what is important to any given region. The fate of local television news is ephemeral, poorly preserved, inaccessible, and in danger of deterioration due to a number of factors, including format and equipment obsolescence. According to a report from the U.S. Library of Congress, less than 10% of the news film libraries survive in public archives. In an effort to preserve this material, Special Collections has committed to collecting and providing access to the work of journalists, directors, and producers from across the Puget Sound Region.
The Local Television News collection is comprised of programming and daily broadcasts from NBC affiliate KING-TV and CBS affiliate KIRO-TV:
King Broadcasting public affairs, programming, and news shows collection, 1959-1992
Phil Sturholm moving image collection, circa 1965-1992
KIRO-TV sports and special programs video collection, 1952-2013
KIRO-TV CBS Newspath video collection, 1983-2008 and
KIRO-TV Daily News Broadcast Videotape collection, 1958-2003
KIRO Eyewitness News
The Local Television News collection numbers close to 20,000 videotapes and films. The content dates back more than 50 years with hundreds of hours of special programs and daily broadcasts that explore race relations, immigrant rights, women’s issues and local politics that are every bit as relevant today as they were when they were first broadcast.
The Local Television News collection includes a significant record of Northwest and national history from the 1950s-2000s. Stories worth noting in the collection are: the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer, the first Seahawks, Mariners, and Storm games, the collapse of the Hood Canal Bridge, the WTO protests, the rise of technology, the Nisqually earthquake, the growth of cultural trends such as Grunge rock, building the new Seattle Art Museum and the construction of Seattle Center.
UW Libraries, Special Collections has been working to preserve and provide access to archival films and videotapes, including local television news, for almost two decades.
Copyright to any of the material in the Local Television News Collection is retained by KING-TV and KIRO-TV. Permission for use must be sought from the copyright holder.
About the Database
This digital collection was researched and prepared by the UW Libraries Special Collections Division in 2022 with funding from the KING-TV Preservation Project and additional funding from the Historic Film Fund. The collections were donated individually to the UW Libraries Special Collections Division in 2007, 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2021. Complete programs have been made available where possible. Individual stories from KIRO-TV were pulled from longer tapes filled with stories included in the daily broadcast. Some selections were shot on 16mm and transferred to videotape (One Inch or BetaSP) by the station before disposing of the original. 16mm films were captured using 2k edge-to-edge scan resulting in 10 Bit FFV1/Matroska files (created via RAWcooked tool from DPX source and including RAWcooked reversibility data) and h.264/MP4 access files cropped to content area maintaining constant quality setting of CRF 18. Videotapes from KING-TV were digitized to a 10-bit uncompressed FFV1 version 3 file in a Matroska container or an 8-bit raw DV stream. Streaming files are H.264 MPEG4 AVC. KIRO-TV files were reformatted from Umatic, VHS, and BetaSP using BlackMagic encoding software. Digitized films and videotapes were imported into Final Cut Pro. Titles, watermarks, logos and captioning were added to the master files, then exported to Handbrake, and transcoded to mp4s and linked with descriptive metadata.
