StoryTech Antica Productions

Famed broadcaster Ted Koppel talks about the birth of the show that defined his career: ABC’s Nightline. Advances in satellite technology allowed him to do the kinds of interviews that had never been done before, connecting people from around the world live on TV.

Bob Dotson spent four decades as a reporter at NBC. For most of that time, he hosted a segment on The Today Show called The American Story, which created intimate portraits of Americans who wouldn’t normally make the news. In this live episode of StoryTech, Bob Dotson talks about changes in technology, from wireless microphones to home video to iPhones, changed the way he told The American Story.This episode was recorded at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, where Bob Dotson is a visiting professor. Archival footage from The American Story courtesy of NBC News.

Life was one of the most important magazines in American history, but it never could have existed without a crucial change in camera technology. Kelly McCormick, who teaches the history of photography at the University of British Columbia, tells the story of how the LEICA camera was crucial to the development of LIFE magazine, and how Life in turn was a game changer for photojournalism.

Carolyn Cole is a Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist and staff photographer with the LA Times. She has covered wars, social change and the environment. She talks about how the transformation from film to digital changed her craft, for better and for worse.See the photos that Carolyn Cole won a Pulitzer for: https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/carolyn-cole

If the image of a man in a top hat on a horse isn’t quite what comes to mind when you think of a tech founder, then you haven’t heard of David Gestetner. He was one of the most successful tech inventors of the 19th Century. Decades before the Xerox machine, the Gestetner duplicating machine brought printing to the masses, revolutionizing the way people communicate through text. The invention changed the workplace, the way social groups organize and allowed aspiring writers to self publish for the first time.Jeff goes on a quest to find out more about David Gestetner and his invention, the Gestetner copying machine. He speaks to David’s grandson Jonathan Gestetner, as well as business historian Roger Horowitz , Director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library.

John Colapinto is a best-selling author of non-fiction books, including How Nature Made Him, and novels, including Undone. But he doesn’t think he could have written those books until he abandoned his manual typewriter and switched to a computer. He talks about how he started his career hammering out magazine articles on the typewriter, how he thinks that shaped his writing for better and worse, and how the typewriter shaped the work of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac.