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Bringing News To You
Behind-The-Scenes Making Things Happen
The creation of WRAL NewsChannel took more than compiling news information. The station had to come up with a way to get the information to the screen. Former WRAL OnLine Web Programmer John Clark worked to transfer the news to the audience.
John Clark |
Clark, now an independent contractor for WRAL.com administrator, Internet Broadcast Systems (IBS), has worked countless hours on the project since mid-spring. He learned a new programming language, Visual Basic, then learned how to use Chryron’s programming |
library with Visual Basic and then found a way to get requested information from WRAL.com to the TV screen. He explained, “We just took it one challenge at a time. Of course, some challenges were more difficult than others, but I suppose that is just a part of dealing with new technology. There are basically two systems running the automation of the news channel. I have several processes running a Linux machine at the station that periodically retrieves data from WRAL.com and passes it along to the Duet machine. The Duet machine reads in all that information a certain intervals and displays it on screen.”
Master Control works with broadcasting the video that appears in the central window of the screen. Clark said, “I was just responsible for putting the video that master control sends to the box together with data from WRAL.com in what you see on screen.”
“John Clark’s programming skills are at the heart of this new service,” said WRAL Director of Special Projects John Harris. “He has essentially figured out how to put information that appears on WRAL.com on the NewsChannel–in an automated fashion. He’s a brilliant programmer who has done some fine work on this.”
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