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

The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences kicks off the new semester with an encore performance of Pryor Center Presents "Arkansas News History: Exploring The KATV Collection" at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 26. Step into Arkansas' past with the Pryor Center's Randy Dixon and KUAF's Kyle Kellams as they revisit some of their favorite Pryor Center Profiles radio segments and share the historical footage.

For the past two years, Dixon has been a weekly guest on Ozarks at Large hosted by 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.

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. The digitized files will eventually be made available on the Pryor Center website when the process is completed.

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 archive.

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 every Monday through Friday at noon and 7 p.m. and Sunday morning at 9 a.m. 

This event will be held in person and via Zoom. If you wish to attend virtually, please register in advance with an email address that is associated with a Zoom account. Registration is not required for in-person attendance.

The Pryor Center is located at 1 E. Center St., Suite 120. The event is free and open to the public, and parking is available on the Fayetteville Square.

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About 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. The college provides the majority of the core curriculum for all University of Arkansas students.

About the University of Arkansas: As Arkansas' flagship institution, the U of A provides an internationally competitive education in more than 200 academic programs. Founded in 1871, the U of A contributes more than $2.2 billion to Arkansas' economy through the teaching of new knowledge and skills, entrepreneurship and job development, discovery through research and creative activity while also providing training for professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the U of A among the few U.S. colleges and universities with the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the U of A among the top public universities in the nation. See how the U of A works to build a better world at Arkansas Research News.