ABSTRACT
ENG – or Electronic News Gathering – is, as its name suggests, the gathering or collection of news stories intended for broadcast during different television newscasts. This technique is based on the use of portable units – camcorders, which combine electronic colour cameras and recorders in one single unit. In most cases the recorder part is based on analogue or digital magnetic tape recording, but in the 1990s other recording supports have appeared on the market, such as retractable computer hard disks. A quarter of a century ago ENG was a great novelty. Like
every novelty, it was greeted by some as a big step forward, a very important development in the field of television production, but also sneered at by some others (‘‘ . . . perhaps nothing is more innovative in ENG than its name and acronym’’).1 However, this new way of television newsmaking swept the industry in no time and became very quickly a standard procedure (see Figure 5.3.1). Today, some 25 or so years later, ENG is a ‘mature’, well-
established and fully developed technology, to the point that it is now practically the only news production technique. At the same time, over these past years, ENG was permanently at the centre of developments. The high competitivity of news programmes lead to important investments in the area of news gathering and presentation. That effort resulted in a considerable advance of the ENG technology and of its operational practices. In addition, the dawn of the digital era and the resulting merging of technologies brought IT techniques into the field of news operations, thus opening new vistas of operational versatility.
