Nightline celebrates 45 years!
by Nicolette Dobrowolski, Director, Special Collections Research Center
Did you know it has been 45 years since ABC News' iconic news show Nightline debuted on March 24, 1980? And did you know that English-born American broadcast journalist, television news anchor, author, and SU Alum Ted Koppel ’60 was Nightline’s founding anchor?
For nearly three decades from its inception (1980 -2005), Ted Koppel anchored the innovative late-night show that featured a unique mix of in-depth reporting, extended live interviews and live updates on breaking news stories. In the era before the emergence of the 24-hour cable news cycle, Nightline was often the only conduit for breaking news between the evening and morning news reports. In addition to creating the mold for the modern television news magazine program, Nightline contributed important innovations to the practice of television journalism, including the use of simultaneous live satellite interviews with multiple participants; the use "natural sound" narration (the "Petacque" technique); the town-meeting discussion/debate format; and the use of Hi8 and hand-held video cameras for the collection of original news footage.
A daily in-depth chronicle of the late 20th century, Nightline represents an invaluable historical resource, covering a wide range of important topics and events, including ongoing events in the Middle East, Cold War politics and the fall of Soviet communism, the emergence of AIDS, political coverage of five presidential administrations, coverage of the 9/11 events and aftermath, and Gulf War and Afghanistan war reporting. Enhanced with detailed descriptive data, the program archive offers rich possibilities for research and discovery in subject areas such as history, politics, the arts, public health and medicine, media analysis, journalism, social policy and the criminal justice system.
The Special Collections Research Center is the home of the Ted Koppel Collection. In 2012, Koppel donated to SU his personal video archive, a primarily videotape-based collection that contains over 7,000 items covering the latter half of the 20th century, including a complete run of the nightly news program Nightline from 1980 to 2005, during Koppel’s tenure as anchor. The now digitized collection (located at https://koppel.syr.edu/) also contains final broadcasts of other news programs and documentaries produced and anchored by Ted Koppel, as well as hundreds of hours of accumulated source video that was utilized in the making of aired programs, including unedited original footage of complete interviews, field footage of important places and developing events, clip reels of relevant news footage and historical footage, documentaries and original performance material.
Episodes of Nightline are now available for online exploration and viewing at the link above by SU students, faculty and staff.
Happy 45th birthday, Nightline!