EmailOn November 22, 1963, Dallas based dressmaker Abraham Zapruder was playing with his Bell & Howell 8mm film camera.
President John F. Kennedy was scheduled to appear in the city that afternoon, and his pathway into downtown Dallas would take him through Dealy Plaza, just a few blocks from Zapruder's place of work. a great opportunity for a film hobbyist.
As the motorcade sped by, Zapruder, standing on the grassy knoll to get a good shot, hit the record button and the film coursed through the gateway. 8mm film reels could only shoot 3 minutes of film. Zapruder only needed 26 seconds.
As Zapruder watched through the viewfinder, Lee Harvey Oswald, ensconced in the Texas Book Depository at the far end of Dealey Plaza fired three shots that killed the President.
Zapruder watched it all take place through his viewfinder. He knew, in a moment, he had recorded something historic.
His granddaughter, Alexandra Zapruder has now written a book about the film and how if effected her family. It is a long and interesting story.
Today, we have a natural assumption that we are going to see every act, historic or otherwise. If something happens we immediately go to CNN or Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, and expect that withing minutes, if not seconds, we will see - live now - whatever 'thing' has happened that has caught the attention of the nation or the world at the moment.
We are 'on camera' all the time.
It was thus astonishing to read that the original Zapruder film was not even seen by the public until 1975, when a pirated copy was shown by Geraldo Rivera on his show Good Night America.
It was a different world.
Abe Zapruder was the first Citizen Journalist.
Today, we are all citizen journalists, and everything that happens is recorded or live streamed.
We are all better informed, but are we better off?
Featured Courses
Recent Posts
No News Today — or tomorrow for that matter.
March 26, 2024
For most of human history, people lived in a world without news. The concept simply did not exist. The idea of news is really a 19th-century phenomenon, driven first by newspapers, and then by electronic media which brought us radio, then TV and now the web. Now, it seems, we are headed back to a world without news. Not because the technology is not there, but rather because, increasingly, people are no longer interested in news, at least in the way it is packaged now.
What TV News Could Be
February 26, 2024
When television was invented in the 1930s, no one knew what TV news was supposed to look like. The medium had never existed before, and so, like Gutenberg half a millennium, prior, the first creators of TV news had to fall back on a medium with which they were familiar, and that was radio.
What Is News? What Should it Be?
February 20, 2024
Maybe scary stories drive ratings… or maybe they don’t.