I came across this wonderful story on Gizmodo (https://gizmodo.com/15000-vhs-tapes-and-counting-meet-the-guys-preserving-the-weirdest-parts-of-the-analog-era-2000816383) about two guys who have collected more than 15,000 VHS tapes. And yes, the VHS tapes are interesting. But that is not really why I liked the article so much. I liked it because it is such a good example of storytelling.
Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett have spent decades collecting strange VHS tapes. Not Hollywood movies or famous television programmes, but the stuff that normally disappears: training videos, exercise tapes, promotional videos, dating videos, instructional tapes and all kinds of productions made for very small audiences. They use material from it for the Found Footage Festival, a live comedy show they have been running for more than two decades. At the same time, they are slowly digitising their collection because, obviously, VHS tapes don’t last forever.
That in itself is already a nice story. But what makes the Gizmodo article work for me is that it doesn’t stop there. The story starts with something incredibly small. In 1991, Prueher was working at McDonald’s when he discovered a rather strange training video intended for janitors. He showed it to his friend Joe Pickett. The two started looking for more weird tapes in thrift stores, showing them to friends and providing their own commentary. A small and maybe even silly discovery eventually turned into a collection of thousands of tapes and a project that has lasted for decades.
I love stories like this. There is no huge announcement. No billion-dollar acquisition. No new AI model accompanied by another set of impressive benchmarks. No CEO explaining how his company is going to transform the world. Just two people, an old videotape and a fascination with something most other people would probably throw away.
There is obviously a technology angle to the story as well. VHS was important because video production gradually became accessible to many more people. You didn’t need to be a television station or Hollywood studio anymore. Small companies, organisations and individuals could make videos themselves. And they did. Lots of them. Some were professional, many were not. Today, that lack of polish is actually part of what makes the material interesting. These tapes capture a period in which people were experimenting with relatively affordable video technology without thinking that somebody might watch the result 30 or 40 years later.
But again, the technology isn’t really the story. The people are. Behind every one of those tapes is somebody who decided that a video needed to be made. Who made that strange instruction video? Why? Who appeared in it? Who watched it? And what happened to those people afterwards? Prueher and Pickett sometimes actually try to find the people appearing in their tapes. A forgotten VHS recording then suddenly becomes the starting point for another story.
Perhaps that is what I like most about articles like this. They remind me that journalism doesn’t always have to start with something that immediately appears important. Sometimes it can simply start with a question: What on earth is this? And then you keep asking questions. Who made it? Why did they make it? Who was it intended for? Why has somebody kept it for 35 years? What does it tell us about that period? Where are the people involved now? Before you know it, a story about somebody collecting old VHS tapes has become a story about technology, popular culture, preservation, creativity and ordinary people. That is quite a lot to get out of a dusty videotape.
There is another interesting aspect to the story. We are quite good at preserving things we already consider important. Famous films, books, newspapers, photographs, television programmes and official documents end up in archives, libraries and museums. Everyday culture is much easier to lose. A corporate training tape from 1987 probably wasn’t considered culturally important in 1987. Neither was an obscure exercise video or a homemade instructional tape aimed at a tiny group of people. Decades later, however, these things can tell us something about how people lived, worked, communicated and experimented with technology.
That makes a collection of 15,000 seemingly unimportant VHS tapes something else as well: an accidental archive. Material that nobody originally intended to preserve has survived because two people happened to find it interesting enough not to throw away. And now they are digitising it because the physical medium itself is slowly deteriorating.
For me, however, the biggest lesson from the Gizmodo article is still about storytelling. You could write an article about VHS. You could explain the technology, when it appeared, how it competed with Betamax, how the market developed and how DVDs eventually took over. Perfectly useful information.
Or you can find two people who have collected 15,000 strange VHS tapes and have spent decades watching them. Suddenly you have characters. You have history. You have strange discoveries. You have humour. You have a mission. And, perhaps most importantly, you have a reason to keep reading. That is why I enjoy these kinds of articles so much. They demonstrate something that is easy to forget when so much of the information we encounter every day comes in the form of press releases, research reports, corporate announcements and carefully prepared statements. Good stories don’t necessarily start with important subjects. Sometimes they simply start with two guys and 15,000 old VHS tapes.