Chuck Quinzio
Retired Chicago News Photographer
A life behind the cameras
Chuck Quinzio is a retired Chicago news photographer who worked for multiple local and national outlets, including Fox, CBS, NBC, and CNN.
Quinzio spent over 30 years as a news cameraman, but being a photographer wasn’t his original media goal: he wanted to be a radio DJ. He says he switched gears after noticing staffing and pay issues at local stations, and that only a few employees were ever able to advance to a larger market.
Quinzio landed his first TV-cameraman job in 1981 in Rockford, Illinois. Despite being paid only $4.50 an hour, he says he developed good storytelling skills that eventually landed him in Chicago. He captured his decades in the business in a memoir published in 2013, “Life Behind the Camera.” As Quinzio chronicled in that book, he witnessed massive changes in the industry that included union strikes and the rise of multimedia journalism.
By Bill Meincke
Stations nowadays like to get these younger guys, multimedia journalists (MMJs), who will walk through fire. Companies know full well they can get new reporters to do anything for a fraction of the money, because they are young and inexperienced. They’re given assignments that are less desirable to veteran reporters — bad neighborhoods, shootings, etc.
In a large market, it used to be that the cameraman would shoot, the editor would edit, and the reporter reported. Paying one person to do the entire job is the company’s goal. At the same time, colleges began teaching journalism students everything.
Nowadays, MMJs shoot the story, do the interviews and voiceover, and edit the package.
These MMJs who are supposed to create these stories don’t have the time to make it look good. They’re what we call a “wham, bam, thank you ma’am.”
Stations in large markets are hiring people from smaller markets like West Virginia. They’re hiring these reporters, which they would have never done back in the day. Cleveland, Detroit, Boston, the top 20 markets would all go for high-quality, experienced journalists. Not anymore. The top markets don’t care. I know for a fact that now when they’re looking for somebody, the kid also has to be able to shoot and edit.
Chasing Tech Evolutions
During my first job in Rockford, we covered house fires, traffic accidents, city-council meetings, and the occasional shootings. I remember I covered the Rolling Stones’ only Midwestern stop at a place called the Metro Center. It’s their downtown stadium, which was huge.
As I was covering it, in came news station WMAQ from Chicago with a legion of guys. They had, like, 10 guys and a live truck outside of the stadium, and they beamed their microwave signal up to a chopper and the chopper beamed the signal back to Chicago. That was state of the art back then. I’m watching these guys and I’m thinking, “Man, I want to do that.”
When I got to Chicago in 1984, it ramped up from there.
I covered a school shooting in Winnetka, Illinois, in the late ’80s. A woman named Laurie Dann walked into an elementary school, killing one child and injuring five others. I had footage of this teacher who walked out and was covered in blood. The station sent a satellite truck and we wound up doing live shots all over the country. It was like, “Oh my god, here’s the technology.” And today, we can go live with the click of a button.
In the ’80s and ’90s, we were held in high regard. Media companies like ABC and NBC were very, very complimentary of us. They tried to give us what we needed. But during my last tenure at Fox, they could care less. They were like, “You guys are great,” but when COVID came, they locked us out — and we lived out of our cars during the workday until they needed us.
But we took whatever we could get in the pandemic. Our union cut a deal with the company saying we could do Zooms. Stations had never really done Zooms before. It was the only way for them to stay in business during the pandemic, and now it’s here to stay. Why send a crew crosstown or to a different city when someone can sit in front of a computer?
The Beginning of the End for Cameramen
People have a million ways to access information these days. I always tried my best as a cameraman, but the world has changed. There are cameras everywhere now. Everybody’s got their cell phones, and TV stations have adapted to that.
A film magazine held 300 feet of film, that’s all the cameraman had. You had to shoot conservatively, unlike today where a video card has over 200 minutes to it. Sometimes cell phone stories would appear on social platforms before we’d find out about it. All the stations would do is pull the video and ask the creator for permission, which they always granted. Everything’s changed. The stations get spontaneous videos for free without caring about picture quality or anything. TV crews used to be the only source, but not anymore.
I’d like to see cameramen be cameramen. Learning the way to put together a story, the proper lighting, creative shooting — a good cameraman should be able to tell the story through his pictures, without a voiceover if need be.
Fresco News started in Philadelphia in 2016. [Fresco News was a citizen journalism app that provided users with first-person footage of breaking news.] It eventually filtered to Chicago. They did press conferences, voiceovers, light stuff, and that was distributed to every station. But it lasted a couple of years and died.
Then when COVID hit, the stations all got together and decided to do pool video again. Sharing video essentially eliminates any competition between stations and will probably cost jobs. That’s when I knew it was the beginning of the end for cameramen as we knew it.
The mentality of news-station managers has also changed, where they think they can do the news without us. I’d like to see cameramen be cameramen. Learning the way to put together a story, the proper lighting, creative shooting — a good cameraman should be able to tell the story through his pictures, without a voiceover if need be.
They’ve always been there, since the birth of broadcast news. I don’t know how you have news without them. But there seems to be a consensus out there among young management that cameramen are not that big a deal. Today, it’s about quantity, not quality. As long as there is an image to fill time, it’s all they care about.