In the weeks to come, you may notice that the background shots of the News4 newsroom look a little different.
The NBC Washington team has moved to a new newsroom to finish out 2022. It's about time, too -- we'd been using the old newsroom since late 2009.
But to ring in the new, we first had to clean out the old. That 13-year newsroom history means a lot of stuff on desks, in drawers, and on walls.
Not everything will come with us into the next newsroom. But if journalism is the first rough draft of history, that makes for some wild historical artifacts at the bottom of desk drawers.
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For example, the equipment News4 has used through the years has evolved just as much as it has for anyone else in the U.S. When our reporters and photographers are in the field, sometimes a small, portable camcorder is just as necessary as our heftier news cameras.
That's been the case since sometime between 2009 and 2012, when this camera was in use.
For a brief moment in time, before the age of the iPhone, those field crews would use BlackBerry phones like the one below to get updates.
Even further back in time, pagers like the one below were used to get in touch with reporters and photographers at a moment's notice. A short message from the assignment desk would tell them an event and the intersection where it took place, and they'd hit the road.
For something complicated or urgent, a short "911" at the end of the message would let the reporter in the field know they needed to find a payphone and call the station for more information.
To make sure they were sending reporters to the right place, and to give them an idea of the most efficient route to drive there before reliable GPS, assignment editors would pull out paper maps.
This well-loved map of D.C. from around 1990 is News Assignment Manager Charlie Bragale's favorite.
And before the mighty Cloud, when News4 journalists filed a Freedom of Information Act request for publicly available data, we'd sometimes get a CD or DVD back with the information we asked for.
No internet bandwidth for downloads? No worries -- just pop the CD of an interview into the disk drive of your desktop computer to get the clips you need for the 4 p.m. newscast.
The low-tech approach has also been necessary out in the field, especially when the story is in a location where the Wi-Fi is subpar.
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In 2014, when former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, were on trial in Richmond for corruption, News4 was in the state capital to cover the story. But according to Senior Digital Content Producer Matt Stabley, the Wi-Fi in the building was terrible -- to the point that messages weren't going through to the reporters and photographers outside.
So the field crew improvised, with the help of a marker and some manila folders and paper.
Some folders had the various counts written on them -- 2, for the second count, for example.
Others had B for Bob, and M for Maureen.
And then there were two more: N, for "Not Guilty," or G, for "Guilty."
By flashing each sign from the sixth-floor window outside the courtroom's media overflow room, the ground crew was able to determine the verdicts for News4's Julie Carey to read live on the air from outside the building.
"Nobody knew how we were getting [the verdicts] so fast," Stabley said.
Some of the historical artifacts are truly remnants of U.S. history. In his desk drawer, News4 anchor and reporter Leon Harris found a couple of MREs from his time in New Orleans in 2005, reporting on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
"Have no idea how they got here -- I was at ABC7 at the time!" Harris said.
Sometimes that history is international in scale. News4 is included in NBC's exclusive American broadcasting rights for the Olympics, which leads to commemorative souvenirs floating around the newsroom up to a decade later.
For example, News4's Digital Managing Editor Carissa DiMargo found this sand-globe pin from the 2016 Rio Olympics, and a red phone box pin from the 2012 London Olympics, while cleaning out her desk.
Other times, the history comes to our backyard. On Sept. 11, 2001, after American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, News4 received a copy of the U.S. Park Police's news briefing on VHS.
And the audio of the initial 911 call, which Bragale says was first thought to be about a plane hitting the 14th Street Bridge, was sent on a cassette tape.
With the federal government in our backyard comes easy access to events of national importance, like presidential elections.
This notebook from the 2012 general election was one of many found floating around various drawers and desks in the newsroom. But despite this particular notebook's beat-up appearance, the inside was completely empty.
We also get a front-row seat to presidential inaugurations.
For the 2017 inauguration of now-former President Donald Trump, News4's beloved Jim Vance received a research handbook with information about the new president and vice president, the expected performers at the inauguration and the parades and balls that followed it, and expected protests.
NBC researchers who helped write the handbook knew that activists were planning a Women's March on Washington, and that it was likely going to be a larger protest than previous ones during other presidential inaugurations. Vance even highlighted some facts about previous protests in his binder.
Even so, our researchers estimated that around 200,000 people would show up in D.C. to protest against Trump's presidency. The actual crowd size was closer to half a million people.
Also on the list of things News4's stellar research teams couldn't have predicted? The COVID-19 pandemic. This calendar from 2020 -- like so many others -- optimistically laid out a series of planned holidays and busier Nielsen-rating-related periods that employees could look forward to in the coming year.
Then there's the remnants of NBC4-focused history.
This miniature xylophone plays the signature NBC chime -- notes G, E and C.
This one, found in a desk, was slightly broken sometime in the 10 or so years since it was created as a holiday party favor. But it still plays an approximation of the notes:
And in our Assistant News Director Matt Glassman's office, we found wall décor celebrating the very beginnings of the station.
One photo shows construction on the NBC Washington building all the way back in the 1950s.
A little further along in the building process, this photo was taken while construction workers laid a cornerstone of the station in 1957.
And last but not least, here's one of the original advertising announcements of NBC Washington's call sign.
Every radio and TV station gets their own series of letters to distinguish their transmissions from everyone else's, and in 1954, the D.C. station for NBC chose to change theirs from WNBW to the one we use to this day: WRC.
