Pryor Center Presents 'Arkansas News History: Exploring the KATV Collection'

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Implosion of the Marion and Manning Hotels in Little Rock on Feb. 17, 1980.

Join a Pryor Center Presents encore of 'Arkansas News History: Exploring The KATV Collection' on Thursday, Aug. 12. The Pryor Center Presents lecture series is presented by the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.  

For the past year, Randy Dixon has been a weekly guest on Ozarks at Large hosted by Kyle Kellams on KUAF, the NPR radio station in Northwest Arkansas. They examine historical personalities and events highlighted with audio clips that Dixon has discovered in the KATV Collection archives. In this encore presentation, they will revisit some of their favorite Pryor Center Profiles radio segments and show you the historical footage.

This free event is offered online via Zoom at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 12. Please register in advance.  

KATV Channel 7, the ABC television affiliate in Little Rock, began broadcasting in 1953 when all news footage was captured on film. In the late 1970s, when the station was making the transition from shooting news stories on film to recording on videotape, the news director, Jim Pitcock, created the KATV News archive. 

In 2009 KATV donated the collection of 300 hours of film and 26,000 hours of videotape to the Pryor Center. The MediaPreserve, a Pennsylvania-based company, is currently restoring and digitizing the collection.

Randy Dixon is the director of news media and archives at the Pryor Center. Before coming to the Pryor Center, Dixon spent more than three decades of his media career at KATV News in Little Rock. He oversaw the donation of the collection to the Pryor Center in 2009 and is now organizing the digitization of the archives.

Kyle Kellams is the news director at 91.3, KUAF, the NPR affiliate for Northwest and Western Arkansas. For more than 30 years he has produced the station's news magazine, Ozarks at Large. The program is heard at noon and 7 p.m. every Monday through Friday and at 9 a.m. Sunday morning.

About the The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History: The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History is an oral history program with the mission to document the history of Arkansas through the collection of spoken memories and visual records, preserve the collection in perpetuity, and connect Arkansans and the world to the collection through the Internet, TV broadcasts, educational programs, and other means. The Pryor Center records audio and video interviews about Arkansas history and culture, collects other organizations' recordings, organizes these recordings into an archive, and provides public access to the archive, primarily through the website at pryorcenter.uark.edu. The Pryor Center is the state's only oral and visual history program with a statewide, seventy-five county mission to collect, preserve, and share audio and moving image recordings of Arkansas history.

About the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences: The Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is the largest and most academically diverse unit on campus with three schools, 16 departments and 43 academic programs and research centers. 

About the University of Arkansas: The University of Arkansas provides an internationally competitive education for undergraduate and graduate students in more than 200 academic programs. The university contributes new knowledge, economic development, basic and applied research, and creative activity while also providing service to academic and professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the University of Arkansas among only 2 percent of universities in America that have the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the University of Arkansas among its top American public research universities. Founded in 1871, the University of Arkansas comprises 10 colleges and schools and maintains a low student-to-faculty ratio that promotes personal attention and close mentoring.