Iowa

Lunch

~ Lee Swanson ~ 4 Comments

One day, probably soon, someone will ask about our trip to Maui. And someone will ask what I liked best about it. And you would think that would be a hard question.

We had a great rental condo, with a view of the ocean and easy access to the beach. We walked in the sand to a bakery for coffee and pastries for breakfast. The temperature was in the 70s and 80 every day, a little windy a couple of times, but balmy in every sense of the word.

On my birthday, we had a wonderful meal at a restaurant on the beach. We found other great places to eat and drinks with umbrellas and pineapples stuck in them.

The road to Hana was as advertised if for no other reason than to say that we had done that, been there, didn’t buy the t-shirt.

We shopped, we relaxed, we did what we pleased. Even retired people need to get away and chill. And as much as we enjoyed all of that, and enjoyed each other, none of it was the best thing about the trip.

The best thing was lunch on Friday. The food was fine. But that’s not the point. One day on Facebook I said we were in Maui, and a friend named Tom Petersen saw it and posted “we’ll be there on Thursday.” I emailed him and we knew we had to get together. Because Tom Petersen is not just a Facebook friend.

In 1976 Tom hired me, despite my rather thin qualifications, to anchor the weekend sports and report news three nights a week at KWWL TV in Waterloo, Iowa. I worked the second shift as a reporter, and, let’s face it, there’s not a lot going on in Waterloo, Iowa, after dark. Not in 1976 any way. So while I was hanging around the newsroom in the evening, I started fooling with the scripts. Tom was not only the news director, he was also the anchor, and he had stuff to do. And it was just the two of us, a photographer, the weather guy and sports anchor. So when I asked if I could rewrite some things and edit some tapes, he told me to go ahead and see what I could do.

It wasn’t long before I was producing the ten o’clock newscast for him. It was as much fun as I’ve ever had in news. He trusted me. He didn’t even proofread the scripts before he went on air. He said he liked reading through it on the air and figuring out where it was going. So from time to time, I’d try to trip him up. Never could.

Once he told me people had stopped him in the grocery store and quoted a story from the previous night’s newscast to him. You can have the awards; in a world where the words are gone as soon as they are spoken, having them remembered is a high compliment. I still remember the story.

I stopped reporting news and sports and was producing two newscasts a day. It was what I was supposed to be doing. I was a poor excuse for a reporter. But I could write for other people. I write reading better than I read writing. And I had a sense for how to put together a newscast.

Tom made that possible. Somewhere along the line we went from boss and employee to friends. After about three years, he did the unthinkable for a boss. He encouraged me to move on. He got me an interview at a station in Dayton Ohio, and I was offered the job. I was too insecure to take it. Tom let me learn. The next time he arranged an interview for me, I was ready.

He left KWWL for Detroit and when I left shortly thereafter, he flew back just to help me pack. Tom would later go to WGN radio in Chicago where he did morning drive and became news director. When you Google him, the word “legendary” pops up. And he’s in the WGN Walk of Fame. Google doesn’t know that he’s my friend. But I do.

Plain and simple, I wouldn’t have had a career in television news had it not been for Tom Petersen.

I wouldn’t have a nickname either. The first time I turned up in the newsroom, driving into Waterloo with a U-Haul trailer behind my car, he looked up from his desk and said “oh look, it’s Leo Swanberg.” Swanberg didn’t stick, thankfully, but Leo followed me to four more television stations and forty two more years, so far. I am still Leo to my closest friends in broadcasting. It’s what the grandchildren call me. 

Though we’ve stayed in touch, it’s been about 27 years since we’ve seen each other. It was, you might imagine, quite a lunch.

Broadcast Writing

~ Lee Swanson ~ 6 Comments

A friend commented on one of my posts recently that I seemed to have lost my ability to write in complete sentences. Fact is, I never could write in complete sentences. Microsoft Word points out the same thing. My page is filled with squiggly green underlines and the admonition “Fragment (consider revising).” I don’t consider it, and not only because the advice is a fragment in itself. It’s just the way I write.

After all I spent most of my adult life in and on television.

I owe my career in broadcast news to whoever invented the ellipsis. Proper punctuation has no place in television.

It’s a language of phrases… pauses and emphasis and nuance. You can write complete sentences, but they better be short. It’s being read out loud after all and it is best read aloud by the people who write it. It’s hard to write in another person’s voice; to construct a sentence the way they are comfortable reading it. Yet that’s what I tried to do for most of my career. I gave up reading my own writing very early on. It became apparent to me that I could write reading a lot better than I could read writing. (And that says more about my reading than it does my writing). Even at that, I wrote for very few people who could read my writing. For everyone else…I wrote their reading.

For instance. Shortly after I went to work in Greenville South Carolina I wrote this little story:

DAVID JANSSEN .. WHO RAN ACROSS OUR TELEVISION SCREENS FOR FOUR YEARS AS “THE FUGITIVE”.. DIED TODAY.

HEART ATTACK.

48.

The anchor couldn’t read it.

He went on the air with “Actor David Janssen, who played “The Fugitive” for four years, has died of a heart attack. David Janssen was 48 years old.”

He ruined my story. But in those two sentences I learned I couldn’t write for him the way I wanted to. I had to write the way he wanted to read. That’s the job.

I think my story had emphasis and even a little drama. “Heart attack” “48” were meant to stand alone, to make people say, god he died young.

The rewrite had no soul. It was wire copy. I was expecting him to end it with “he’ll be missed.” But if he had, I would have walked out then and there and never come back. As it was, I worked in Greenville a total of 89 days before I got a job in San Diego.

There, I would drop by the station on weekends just so I could write for Mitch Duncan. He could read my writing. Because it’s how he wrote too. He paused when he was supposed to; not when he was out of breath from reading some ridiculously long sentence full of prepositional phrases. The copy was a mess. Filled with enough dots and dashes to be Morse code. But he could read the hell out of it.

Pick up any textbook on broadcast writing and if the first paragraph of the first chapter doesn’t say it should be conversational, burn the book.

Think about it. When you first told someone Robin Williams had died you probably said “hey, did you hear? Comedian and Oscar-winning actor Robin Williams has died at the age of 63, according to a spokesperson for the actor. The Marin County Medical Examiner’s office reports it is suspected to be a suicide.”

Didn’t you?

If you did, you could anchor the news in Greenville South Carolina.

I learned most of what I know about broadcast writing by listening to other people write. You can’t figure out broadcast writing by reading it. (Or reading about it for that matter, so if that’s why you’re here you can stop now). It’s meant to be heard. I listened to one person in particular.

David Brinkley.

If you didn’t see David Brinkley, or if you only know him as the gray haired old man slumped in a chair on a Sunday morning talk show, you missed a great opportunity. The news anchor with the staccato style and razor-sharp wit. He single-handedly changed broadcast news. And my god could he write.

Brinkley anchored the NBC Nightly News, first with Chet Huntley and then with John Chancellor, and unlike a lot of news anchors, he wrote every word he read. He wrote without flourish but not without flair. With purpose, but without verbs.

Take for instance the night in 1977 when he did a little story about James Earl Ray’s arraignment for escaping from prison. As best I remember (it was 1977 after all) Brinkley wrote it this way:

JAMES EARL RAY… WHO KILLED MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR… ESCAPED FROM THE BRUSHY MOUNTAIN STATE PRISON IN TENNESSEE. FOUND THREE DAYS LATER… MUDDIED, BLOODIED AND LYING UNDER A PILE OF LEAVES.

WENT TO COURT AND SAID HE DIDN’T DO IT.

EVEN THOUGH HE DID.

It has stayed with me all this time because he had the gravitas to tell the truth. Too many broadcasts would have reported “James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King has been charged with escape and today pleaded not guilty to the charge. Ray is accused of escaping from prison in Tennessee and was captured three days later after an extensive manhunt.”

It is boring, sterile, confusing and ridiculous.

That last line….”even though he did”…took some guts. But I’m sure Brinkley didn’t see it that way. It was just the right thing to do.

Or consider this one —

P.K. WRIGLEY … THE CHEWING GUM MAGNATE… WHO STOOD BY THE CHICAGO CUBS THROUGH THIN AND THIN… DIED TODAY.

Also Brinkley. (Also 1977).

Irreverent? Maybe. Memorable? Definitely.

I wrote and produced television news for more than thirty years and can honestly only remember bits and pieces of three or four stories I wrote. After all, as soon as it’s off your fingertips, you’re on to something else. You don’t languish over it… you knock it out and move on. There’s a pile of other work that still need to be done and the clock is ticking. Plus, as we were fond of saying, as soon as the anchor has read it on the air it’s “on its way to Mars.” (I did most of my work before You Tube. Can you tell?)

My first story as a reporter in Waterloo Iowa was about a developer who wanted to turn an abandoned stone quarry into a residential tract. There were a lot of people still in the newsroom when it aired and I felt as though they were watching to see what the new guy’s story was like.

Or maybe I’m just self-conscious.

OK, I’m definitely self-conscious. Leave me alone, all right?

Stop staring.

I mean it, stop.

Anyway, the opening line was – A LOT OF PEOPLE LOOK OUT AT THE OLD (insert forgotten name here) STONE QUARRY AND SEE …. A STONE QUARRY. (insert forgotten name here) OWNS THE PLACE. HE SEES CONDOS.. SHOPS AND PARKS.

(For the uninitiated, I’m not shouting. Broadcast copy is written in all caps. Except by Brinkley who wrote in upper and lower case. Or so I’m told.)

Some time later, still in Waterloo, I was producing the news and wrote a sentence I like.

First, some background. There are several bridges across the Cedar River in Waterloo and one of them needed some repair. The Army Corps of Engineers was doing the work, and said the bridge would be closed for six weeks. It took longer…of course…and…of course…was a major inconvenience. When they let us know they were going to cut a ribbon and let the Mayor drive across the bridge one evening and then open it the next morning to traffic, it was welcome news.

So we shot the ribbon cutting and I wrote the story, that ended with … AND THE ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS PROMISES .. THE FOURTH STREET BRIDGE.. CLOSED FOR SIX WEEKS…. FOUR MONTHS AGO.. WILL BE OPEN IN THE MORNING.

It was all true. And it made several points, all at once. There’s a little bit of Brinkley in there.

Then there’s the David Janssen story. That didn’t go so well.

In San Diego in 2001 there was a shooting at a school. Our coverage won the National Headliner Award for Spot News coverage and an hour special that we turned around in short order won the Headliner for Public Service Program. It was pompously called “Preventing the Pain: Real Solutions for Stopping Youth Violence.” It could have won honorable mention for worst broadcast title, but that wasn’t a category. Colons have no place in broadcast writing. Ever. But then, I don’t write titles.

We didn’t succeed in stopping youth violence, maybe you noticed, but I had a line in the anchor copy somewhere that said

THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT THE WAY KIDS GROW UP IN THIS COUNTRY.. THAT MAKES THEM WANT TO HIT.. AND HURT.. AND HATE

I know, by itself it’s a pretty much indefensible statement. But it was in amongst a bunch of other phrases about studies and sociology. Those don’t matter now. It’s about the alliteration.

So there it is. A career of daily news writing summed up in four sentences. For the rest, you’ll have to go to Mars.

In Just One Week

~ Lee Swanson ~ 1 Comment

The week between Christmas and New Year is supposed to be slow in the news business.

Donald Trump left the Republican Party and changed his registration to unaffiliated, causing unaffiliated voters everywhere to reconsider their lack of commitment.

Rick Perry was asked about the proposed Keystone oil pipeline from Canada to Texas.  He’s in favor of it because “Every barrel of oil that goes south is one barrel of oil that we will not have to import from foreign countries.”  I’m not making this up.  You don’t have to make up stuff about Rick Perry.  He does it to himself. Maybe he knows something about Canada that the rest of us don’t, like that it’s really part of Montana?

Aren’t you going to miss Rick when he packs up and goes back to Texas?

Gary Johnson became the fourth candidate to officially leave the Republican Party presidential cavalcade (Not counting those who were courted but refused to run in the first place, including Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Haley Barbour, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan, John Thune and the aforementioned Trump) and became the Libertarian Party’s tenth candidate for president. In so doing, he went from obscure to invisible.

Rick Santorum is being talked about as a viable candidate.  Really.

Newt Gingrich, facing the prospect of finishing fourth in the Iowa caucuses, continued his positive campaign by promising not to say anything negative about the people he considers incompetent ignoramuses who are challenging him for the nomination.

Gingrich proved unable to find 10,000 people in Virginia – the state where he lives – to sign a piece of paper saying he ought to be allowed to run for president.  Not that they would work for him, vote for him and even consider him, but just that he should be allowed to run if he wants.  Having failed to thus qualify for the primary ballot, Gingrich declared Virginia has a “failed system” because nothing is ever his fault. He then announced he would launch a vigorous write-in campaign, unaware that his home state does not allow write-in candidates in primaries.  If he didn’t know that as a resident or a presidential candidate, then as a self-described renowned historian he should have know Virginian has never in its history allowed write-ins in primaries.

Michele Bachmann’s Iowa campaign manager quit her campaign because, he said, she couldn’t win the nomination.  Later that day he joined Ron Paul’s campaign, presumably because he thinks Paul can win.  Bachmann claims the campaign manager told her he was given a large sum of money to defect.  What he really said was more along the lines of “you couldn’t pay me enough to vote for you.”

Mitt Romney campaigned at a corporate headquarters in Des Moines where he spoke mostly to the building because, as only he knows, corporations are people.

It appears likely either Romney or Ron Paul will finish first in the Iowa caucuses.  Either way, Romney wins.

Coincidence?

~ Lee Swanson ~ 2 Comments

Time was, if I told someone I grew up in Minnesota I would get one of two reactions; either, “Oh, Min-n-ne-s-o-h-t-ah” in what they thought was a Scandinavian accent or, “B-r-r-r, it’s cold there.”

I had answers for those; “ya-a-ah” a three syllable word in what truly is a Scandinavian accent or, “nine months of winter and three months of bad sledding.”

Times were simpler then. Now, if I mention Minnesota, people invariably say “Ooh, Michele Bachmann.”

Rather than roll my eyes and shrug, I have decided I need a snappy comeback.  Something that will explain that a geographic quirk of fate is the only thing she and I could possibly have in common.

After all, I have one “l” and two “e’s” in my first name and two “n’s” in my last name.  She, on the other hand has….ONE “L” AND TWO “E’S ” IN HER FIRST NAME AND, OH MY GOD, TWO “N’S” IN HER LAST NAME.  But I have ten letters in my name; she has fifteen letters in her name.  I’m five years older than she is.

Five, ten and fifteen are all divisible by five. Coincidence, or conspiracy?  We could be twins.

But really, that’s all there is to it. I swear.

When she announced she was running for President, she confused John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy.  I would never make that mistake.  Serial killer Gacy lived in a city where I worked for a time – Waterloo, Iowa – where Bachmann was born.  That can’t mean anything.  It’s just a quirk, a fluke, an accident, a mistake, a total embarrassment to me.

Is it too late to claim I was born in Kenya?

-0-

Funny little side story about Waterloo Iowa.  After Gacy was tried and convicted of murdering 33 teenage boys, someone sent a pen to the television station newsroom where I was working.  It was one of those cheap promotional pens, probably very similar to the pen that’s nearest to you right now.  And it was imprinted “John Gacy for President – Waterloo Jaycees.”

I guess when he (and Bachmann) lived in Waterloo in the sixties he was active in the Jaycees and was named “outstanding vice president.”  So he decided to run for president and had those pens made up.  For a day, I had that pen in my desk drawer.  The next morning it was gone.  I’ve regretted it ever since.

So you want to talk about coincidences?  Michelle Bachmann of Waterloo Iowa mentioned John Wayne as being from her hometown when it was actually John Wayne Gacy who is from Waterloo Iowa, and both Bachmann and Gacy ran for president.  And the happiest coincidence:  neither of them wins.