I'm hoping you agree that "journalism is the first rough draft of history" because this week one draft will have to do. So please cut me some slack as I rush to Las Vegas to help the TVNEWSDAY team cover NAB.

Just in case you've never attended, NAB is by far the biggest of the media conventions. Just walking the aisles of the massive exhibit floor requires great physical stamina. Unfortunately they don't make GPS systems to guide wayward reporters to the right conference room, so I'm busy studying schedules of press briefings and maps of the convention center.

Still, this notion of history is much on my mind. Recently a friend tipped me that one of my long-ago creations for KDKA Pittsburgh had found its way onto YouTube. It was our 1985 Eyewitness News open which celebrated the iconic splendor of the Pittsburgh skyline exploding into view as it does when you exit the Fort Pitt tunnel. While I'm still kinda proud of the thing, it's so old that it was first designed on a 1984 Macintosh using the original MacPaint software. In fact, my storyboard made the cover of Macworld magazine and became the basis of a 1986 Macworld seminar.

My friend wanted to know if I was the stiffkids2006 who had posted the video clip. I replied with an air of weary sophistication. "Huh?" I asked.  A little research revealed that the aforementioned stiffkids2006 is an industrious if anonymous fellow who has posted 42 video clips on YouTube, most of them recorded off the Pittsburgh airwaves—over a 30-year period! Naturally I was curious as to who this guy is, where he got all this footage and what prompted him to post it online. In fact I asked him these questions via YouTube, but so far no reply. Maybe he thinks I'm a CBS/Viacom attorney looking to sue him.

Far from it. In fact, were Les Moonves to ask my advice (compute the odds) I'd tell him to skip the lawyers and send a gift basket. And not just to stiffkids2006, but also to the hundreds like him I discovered by doing a little digging on YouTube. In just half an hour I found thousands of clips from local TV stations. There was a lot of dramatic footage (a deer runs amok!) quite a few fun feature stories (Mmmm! Cupcakes!) and no shortage of political embarrassments (Hey! That's Congressman Murphy! I know him!). But many, if not most, of the clips were nostalgic moments with bygone news anchors, schmaltzy news image campaigns and the ever-popular bloopers.

And get this: all of these virtual video shrines have been assembled voluntarily by the viewers themselves. I couldn't find a single clip that had been posted by a station. So why should we care about history hobbyists with a sentimental attachment to old VHS tapes? Well, get a load of these numbers, conveniently posted by YouTube:

• A 1982 promo celebrating the 10th Anniversary of WCVBBoston—729viewers since November 2006.
  
  

• A 1981 sign-off (rememberthose?) from WJZ in Baltimore, preceded by a station promo featuringshots of a promising kid named Oprah Winfrey—almost 1,300 viewerssince January 2007.
  
  

• My own 1988 KDKA News Open?Over 3,500 viewers since November 2006. Sorry, Oprah.

But that's nothing! KDKA's Nov. 2, 2006, report confronting Congressman Murphy with evidence of campaign violations has drawn over 28,000 viewings! Even in smaller markets, say Hartford-New Haven, Conn. (DMA 28), they're drawing over 10,000 viewings of a 1986 WFSB blizzard blooper, and over 3,000 viewings each for this WTNH tornado footage—not to mention a delightful satire of their Super Doppler radar promo.

And all of these viewings occurred after zero marketing or promotion. I'm thinking that stations smart enough to maintain a good footage library may be sitting on a new revenue stream. If nothing else, those numbers validate the business model of companies like ClipSyndicate.com, which is poised to aggregate clips from stations and split the revenue from the ads that accompany them. Of course, ClipSyndicate maximizes ad revenues by marketing clips topically to highly-targeted websites (e.g., fire footage for EMS workers and insurance companies.)

But sadly, I doubt that most of the stations now represented on YouTube even have copies of the clips that viewers have posted there. Most stations have done a disgracefully poor job of preserving their on-air history. I've always attributed this to our industry's schizophrenic separation of content from business. For decades, stations were usually managed by former sales guys with little emotional attachment to the on-air product.  They tended to see footage libraries as a large annual expense with very little return on investment. But now the new broadband technologies are granting broadcast history a reprieve. And there could even be serious money in it!

Now is the time to reclaim your station's history by recruiting your viewers to retrieve those videos from the attic and to share them with others. If my personal experience is any guide, the best place to start is with your present and former employees. A lot of us have the only known copy of, well, lots of things. And hey, even an old VHS aircheck is better than no video at all.

But what will you do with this stuff? Easy. Clean it up, sponsor it and stick it on your station's Web site. Now that the average baby boomer is well into his or her 50s, the market for TV nostalgia is bigger than ever. What a perfect tie in for a local bank, or even a national brand like Coca Cola. And if you follow the YouTube model, production costs are close to zero. But you should also consider the more ambitious option of freshening old clips with new interviews to create nostalgic theme pieces or even primetime specials. (One terrific local model is the Pittsburgh History Series, written and produced by my friend Rick Sebak at WQED there.)

I'm tempted to list some of the clips I especially enjoyed, but I think you'll have more fun exploring on your own. Where to begin? Well you could start by entering your own call letters. There's a good chance you'll be surprised and delighted by what you find.

Market Share by Arthur Greenwald highlights successful station promotions every Monday in TVNEWSDAY.COM. Will you be at NAB this week? Ask every guy you see whether he's Arthur Greenwald. If he is, make sure you tell him about that great station promotion you just ran. Or save yourself days of exhausting frustration and send an e-mail to Arthur at greenwald@tvnewsday.com.