Studio B Dims Lights for Good as 'Hancock Era' Comes to an End

Studio B in the Allan Hancock Foundation Building has been the home of Annenberg TV News since the inaugural ATVN newscast aired in 1998.

Annenberg TV News aired its inaugural newscast from Studio B in 1998. Faculty members who remember ATVN's first days said they had to work with broken lights and outdated cameras before they had the budget for new equipment.

Professor Joe Saltzman, a 46-year veteran of USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, created the university's broadcasting sequence and played a key role in transforming Studio B into a fully functioning news studio.

"It was horrible in the beginning," said Saltzman.

"When I first came in here, there were these huge cameras from the 1950s that you could hardly get an image on, the lights were broken [and] nobody bothered to fix them because there was no budget."

Saltzman said he took hilariously desperate measures to turn Studio B into what it is today.

"I got on the phone, put a handkerchief over [the mouthpiece] and said, 'I'm a student at USC. I'm taking broadcast classes and I think Studio B is a fire hazard. You should send somebody out to check it.' And I hung up."

Inspectors from the fire department showed up, declared the studio a fire hazard and left the university with no choice but to buy new lights and cameras for ATVN, beginning an era of Hancock broadcasts that launched hundreds of careers.

Tim Yuge, a Specialized Equipment Assistant at The Annenberg School, said it was "humbling" to remember all the journalists who got their first taste of television news in the studio he helped create.

Serena Cha, Executive Director of the Annenberg Media Center and founder of ATVN, posed with members of the 2014 news team after they aired their last newscast from Studio B. ATVN will have a new home in Wallis Annenberg Hall this fall.

Marina Perelman, now an Executive Producer at KNBC, was among the team of student producers who crafted ATVN's very first newscasts in 1998.

"We were definitely the muckrakers of 1998," said Perelman.

"That's what we wanted to be. That was our goal. And we believed in the product so much, we didn't care that it was for a student television station. We acted like we were in the network."

Perelman credits ATVN with teaching her the skills she needed to succeed as a producer.

"What I did in Studio B was really my first job, and I'm looking forward to seeing what students are able to do in the new Annenberg building."