KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound (TAMIS) shared the earliest known surviving news broadcast from WBIR for World Television Day.
The broadcast is anchored by Carl Williams and "weather girl" Jean Brooks. You can watch the video below.
"During the early days of television in the 1950s and 1960s, much of the programming was broadcast live. As magnetic videotape had yet to become widely used, especially in regional television stations, and digital recording was decades away, very little footage of early local television survives," TAMIS said in its post.
Some occasional kinescope recordings did occur. This process is where engineers would film a broadcast directly from a monitor. According to TAMIS, a lot of historic TV programming is around today because of this process.