Video Amateurs Make Quake News

By noon on Wednesday, the morning after the earthquake, nearly every TV station in the country had aired a videotape of the Bay Bridge collapse made by a vacationing Oklahoma couple. It appeared everywhere--not because competitors were sharing footage, but because the couple sold it three times, taking it from station to station.

There was an unusually large amount of amateur footage in the television coverage of Tuesday’s earthquake. More people own video cameras and keep them at hand--and television always needs pictures. Few of these amateur movie makers were paid for their earthquake footage, and none was paid very much. Video cameras are ubiquitous now: in the hands of tourists and stay-at-homes, in stores, banks, bars and classrooms.

The new market for amateur photojournalism is already crowded. It’s more difficult for TV stations to find exclusive coverage when everyone can do it. And while many amateurs capture something extraordinary, often it’s not unique--a far cry from Abraham Zapruder’s 1963 film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination that was bought by Time Inc. for $150,000. But then, that was the only footage made.

Thomas and Debbie Kelly, of Ringwood, Okla., were driving to Oakland on the lower deck of the Bay Bridge when the earthquake struck. They were subsequently ordered off the bridge at Treasure Island, and then, inexplicably, were ordered to get back onto the upper deck and exit toward Oakland, although the upper deck of the bridge had collapsed near the Oakland side. As their videotape shows, they saw the break just ahead, stopped, grabbed their video camera and began filming, catching the picture of a vehicle ahead of them plunging into the break in the bridge.

Finally coming off the bridge back in San Francisco, they picked up a news photographer from a CBS affiliate in Sacramento, who suggested they take their film to KPIX-TV, the CBS affiliate in San Francisco. KPIX paid them--”under $300,” says a station spokesman--got them to sign a release, but no promise of exclusivity, made a copy, which was aired for the first time shortly after 7:30 p.m., and interviewed the couple on the air about 8 p.m.

KGO-TV, just down the street and the ABC affiliate, apparently missed the KPIX airing, and had the impression, says publicity director Leslie Jones, that the tape would be exclusively theirs. KGO also made a copy, paid a fee that the station will only say was less than $1,000, and arranged interviews on ABC’s “Nightline” that night, and on “Good Morning America” the next morning.

KRON, the NBC affiliate, was offered the tape Wednesday at noon; the Kellys, says spokesman Jodie Chase, were asking for $500 but accepted $150--the same amount the station offered a woman who showed up later that afternoon with a tape of similar footage from the Bay Bridge. And CNN, the fourth major network to get the tape, took it from KRON, with whom they have an exchange agreement.

For all the chaos of the moment, a surprising number of cameras were not just nearby but were turned on to record it. Some were in the hands of tourists such as Debbie Kelly, who told “Good Morning America” that “we thought this was a great vacation video, and all of a sudden, the car fell in.”

Indeed, says KRON’s Chase, “whenever I’ve gone over the Golden Gate Bridge with people here on vacation, they’re thinking cameras, and they’re rolling (as we go).”

Some were local, recording another moment, a different event. When “PrimeTime Live,” ABC’s prime-time news show, put out a call for any and all amateur tape over local radio stations in the earthquake area, one of the responses came from a father who had been filming his 1-year-old’s birthday party at a day-care center near San Jose. Everything, says a spokesman, started shaking--the camera fell, even the baby fell, but no one was hurt.

Many video cameras now are not even in human hands. One of the amateur tapes that came in to “PrimeTime Live” was from the security camera at a restaurant-bar in Campbell, which showed a woman patron running past the shelves of bottles and glasses just before they exploded off the wall. The black-and-white film was quite dramatic when the show ran it in slow motion.

Another film, as widely aired as the Kellys’ bridge footage, came from The Good Guys in San Mateo, one of a chain of 20 Northern California electronics stores filled with TVs, speakers and photo equipment. Recorded on one of several security monitors, the tape “showed one of our sales counselors running for the door, and things coming off the counters,” says assistant manager Steve Sterling. It went blank when the electricity failed.

The store showed it a number of times the next day, as has almost every TV show, network and local, by now. “As they request copies,” Sterling says, “we make them.” At no charge.