A great deal of the duties of Sailors who served in the Journalist (JO) rating that was disestablished in 2006 were related to news reporting and public affairs, but one of their lesser-known tasks involved a technology which we today take for granted: closed-captioning of televised programming.
Very few are aware of the role the U.S. Navy played in the development of the technology that led to the implementation of closed-caption services. As closed-circuit televisions began to be employed as part of the Navy’s Shipboard Information Training and Entertainment system, replacing outdated technologies such as film or overhead projectors, the advantages of augmenting the display with informational text became obvious. But the early method of adding images or text to the bottom of a TV display—scanning the text or data with a second TV camera and then superimposing them over the picture being generated by the main camera—was costly, slow, and highly imprecise.
In 1972, a patent was submitted for a “Digital Television Character Generator” that solved this problem by adding electronic pulses being sent to the scan display used on a cathode ray tube, creating black or white text that would be superimposed crisply over the primary image. Invented by Gary Hartman, the system was granted a patent in January, 1974 and assigned to the United States Navy; it was frequently cited in subsequent patent submissions related to the closed-captioning process.
Of course, someone must create the text that is displayed, and that job was for the Sailors in the JO rating. They were specifically tasked with writing, editing, and proofreading what were called “CG Rollers,” shorthand for "character generator rollers.”
Sailors from the Journalist, Illustrator Draftsman, Illustrator Draftsman, Lithographer, and Photographer's Mate ratings were merged into the Mass Communication Specialist rating in 2006.