Channel 7 News Little Rock, KATV, has a rich history in Arkansas. The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History will host a presentation, “Arkansas News History: Exploring the KATV Collection by the Decades,” delving into this history. The event will feature Randy Dixon and Kyle Kellams and will take place at 6 p.m. on Thursday, January 23rd, at the Pryor Center in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.
Dixon and Kellams will showcase historical KATV video footage from the 1960s onward, exploring defining news events of each decade. This presentation marks the fifth installment of this popular series. KATV, Little Rock’s ABC affiliate, began broadcasting in 1953, initially capturing news on film.
In the late 1970s, during the transition from film to videotape, KATV News Director Jim Pitcock established the KATV News archive. This invaluable collection, comprising 300 hours of film and 26,000 hours of videotape, was donated to the Pryor Center in 2009. The MediaPreserve is currently working to restore and digitize the archive.
Randy Dixon, director of news media and archives at the Pryor Center, brings over three decades of experience from KATV News to this project. Having overseen the archive’s donation, he now leads its digitization. Joining him is Kyle Kellams, news director at KUAF, Northwest and Western Arkansas’s NPR affiliate. Kellams, producer of the long-running news magazine Ozarks at Large, brings extensive knowledge of Arkansas media history.
The Pryor Center, located at 1 E. Center St., Suite 120, offers free admission and parking in the Town Center parking deck on East Avenue. This event provides a unique opportunity to delve into the history of Channel 7 News Little Rock and its impact on Arkansas.
The Pryor Center’s mission is to document, preserve, and share Arkansas history through oral and visual records. Its website, pryorcenter.uark.edu, provides public access to this rich archive. As the state’s sole oral and visual history program with a statewide mission, the Pryor Center plays a vital role in preserving Arkansas’s heritage. The Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, the largest and most diverse academic unit at the University of Arkansas, houses the Pryor Center. The University of Arkansas, a leading research institution, contributes significantly to the state’s economy and provides a world-class education.
