St. Louis Pioneered Advances in Technology, Enable News to Be "Up-to-Date" and "Live."

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A lot has changed in the past 25 years. St. Louis has fewer daily newspapers and it has fewer radio stations with news departments. But it does have more television stations doing more news each day.

Some of that can be traced to the birth and development of the Cable News Network. CNN has shown that there is a great appetite for news and information. It exists, in part, because of the technology that has made television news easy to gather and easy to transmit. In St. Louis, as in other markets around the country and indeed around the world, the technology has made it easier for local television stations to gather and report the news.

Television news was gathered on film 25 years ago. Film that had to be properly exposed. Film that had to be processed. Film that had to be physically cut to be edited. And film that had to be projected. Newsfilm from stories outside the local area was rare. Live shots were nonexistent. To go live would have required an army of engineers, a flotilla of equipment and …