news

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.

An Infinite Number of Monkeys

~ Lee Swanson ~ 3 Comments

I opened Facebook to find that a friend had posted on my timeline. And to think that just a few years ago I didn’t even have a timeline. This was a link to an NPR story and a suggestion, actually more like a directive. “This story has your name all over it. I’ll be waiting for your blog!” she said.

I could have ignored that. I’m sitting here now thinking I should have ignored that. But my ego kicked in and I started wondering what it was about this article that made her think it would interest me. I mean, she is right. I am interested, somewhat appalled and feeling rather smug all at once. But that’s my problem. Why should I write about it?

So here’s the deal. The story is about a computer program that writes news stories. Hundreds of thousands of them, for places like Yahoo and the Associated Press. Because the AP is using them, there’s no doubt you are reading them – if you read news. It writes pretty basic stuff; there is after all a difference between news writing and news reporting. The computer isn’t gathering any facts. It gets that stuff from somewhere – maybe even someone – else, ingests it, digests it and defecates it out onto the screen.

NPR got this idea to put the computer to a test by pitting it against an actual reporter. They chose their White House correspondent Scott Horsley. And they chose a business story, the quarterly earnings of Denny’s. Scott might have had a leg up. Back when I used to bump into him at the NPR station in San Diego he was a business reporter and he is comfortable enough in his own skin to admit he was once a regular at Denny’s.

The competition had two parts. One was to judge the end product and the other was to get to that end first.

We all know where this is headed. The computer has already won at chess, Jeopardy and trying my patience. So it’s no surprise it was done with Denny’s in two minutes while Scott was savoring his greasy spoon prose for seven minutes. But part two, what did they write?

Here’s what the computer program shit out:

Denny’s Corporation on Monday reported first-quarter profit of 8.5 million dollars. The Spartanburg, South Carolina-based company said it had profit of 10 cents per share. The results beat Wall Street expectations. The average estimate of four analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of 9 cents per share. The restaurant operator posted revenue of $120.2 million in the period, also beating Street forecasts. Three analysts surveyed by Zacks expected $117.1 million. Denny’s shares have risen nearly 6 percent since the beginning of the year. In the final minutes of trading on Monday, shares hit $10.90, a climb of 61 percent in the last 12 months.

And here’s Scott’s:

Denny’s Corporation notched a grand slam of its own in the first quarter, earning a better-than-expected ten cents a share, as restaurant sales jumped by more than 7-percent. Operating revenues topped $120 million. Adjusted net income jumped 36 percent to $8.7 million. Denny’s is one of the nation’s largest full-service restaurant chains. The growth in sales suggests consumers are opening their pocketbooks for pancakes, eggs, and hash browns. Earnings were also helped by lower costs for raw materials. Denny’s results were also helped by the re-opening of the high-volume location inside the Las Vegas Casino Royale restaurant. After sales grew faster than expected in the first three months of the year, managers raised their sales forecast for the remainder of 2015.

The computer program may have come out ahead in search engine optimization, but Horsley comes out ahead in everything else.

The truth is, however, if these are supposed to be broadcast stories, they both suck. Honestly Scott, you get props for “grand slam” and did manage to mention Las Vegas, but what took you so damned long?

The cardinal rule of broadcast news is don’t bore the audience. If people aren’t still paying attention by the time you get to the end of the story, or if they forget what you said as soon as you’re done saying it, you’ve failed.

Scott lost me at “adjusted net income.” But in his defense, the story is a loser to begin with. Earnings at Denny’s for godsake. Nobody cares. Nobody. I doubt Denny even cares. The only reason anyone ever goes to Denny’s is because it’s still open after the bars close and you want something in your stomach when you throw up on your way home. So maybe you care if they announce they’re raising prices of their inedible menu, but that’s as far as it goes.

This whole computerized writing is another sign of the deterioration of news. Years ago the television station where I worked wanted news writers to both write the news and edit the video. I argued against it because, first, they are distinctly different skill sets and second, it takes longer to write and edit a story than it does to just write or just edit one. Yet the writers will still have the same number of stories to write and the deadline doesn’t change. When I said it would hurt the quality of the product the general manager actually snorted and I looked over to see him shaking his head.

Quality is such a quaint idea.

Not that we shouldn’t keep trying. I remember lamenting the consolidation of ownership in the media and was complaining to a friend who had worked at a couple television stations, a few newspapers, a magazine and at least one university that someday we would all be working for the phone company. “Yeah,” he said, “but those fuckers will need editors too.”

Apparently not.

August in December

~ Lee Swanson ~ 5 Comments

There was a retirement celebration last night at the television station where I used to hang out. Surrounded by friends, co-workers past and present, and a few dignitaries, J. W. August was lauded with deserved accolades, honors and, because it is television, the inevitable tribute video.

He accumulated an obscene number of awards and honors in his career, but his greatest accomplishment may have been working at the same television station for 32 years. I traveled through seven stations in that time span; leaving some because I wanted to and others because they insisted.

At one time or another he held a lot of jobs and job titles there, but his devotion and his heart is in investigative journalism. And more than once last night I heard him described as a journalistic pit bull who grabs on to a story and won’t let go.

It’s been said of him before and, while it’s true as far it goes, it strikes me as an odd compliment. After all, isn’t that in the definition of the job? Get a lead and follow it to the end, wherever it takes you. The thing is, he does it better than most.

But those who see him only as a pit bull don’t know the same guy I do. They have never been in the newsroom with him when a child walks in. Never seen him drop whatever he is doing, deadline be damned and plop down on the floor in front of the kid, pulling a box of toys and a bag of candy from his desk while magically producing quarters from thin air and giggling and smiling.

They’ve never gone to him with a problem, large or small, real or perceived and had him turn his full attention and energy to them, not to ask what he can do, but to tell you what he’s going to do.

A pit bull? The J. W. who is my friend is a puppy dog. Kind, caring, undyingly loyal and – if you stand next to him – likely to lick you on the cheek.

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.

On Writing

~ Lee Swanson ~ 9 Comments

Funny thing happened this week. San Diego’s chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists held its awards dinner and along with a great many well-deserved recognitions,  gave the Herbert “Woody” Lockwood Award for Humor Writing to this blog.

I was not there to accept it because the last time I stood in front of a large group of people and got a woody it wasn’t a pleasant experience.  I was probably about 13 but like receiving this richly undeserved award, it was both memorable and embarrassing.

The difference is I’m talking about this one. Having spent something more than 30 years writing what passed as serious news stories, getting recognized for humor writing is a major change of pace.

It is also the only sort of formal recognition I’ve ever received for writing.  There are writing categories in television awards, but I never thought my stuff qualified.   Writing television news doesn’t feel like writing, even to me, because if someone wearing makeup and reading out loud is the only person to read it, it’s not really writing, no matter how many people hear it.

Of course by that standard—and several others—this blog is still just barely writing.  Not that anyone is reading this out loud, I hope, but the loyal following is somewhere between the middle single figures and the low double figures.

Spending a career writing stories that are measured in seconds instead of pages means I don’t really have anything to show for it. Once it’s read on the air it’s in the air and on its way to Mars.

Several years ago, a friend who was also a news producer was at my apartment and pulled a book from my bookcase — How to Make $30,000 a Year Writing. “You do, you know,” she said.  That says a lot about a lot of things, primarily my impression of what I think writing is, and the kind of salaries news producers get.

So thank you SPJ for this misguided recognition of which I’m rather proud.

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.

All I Know

~ Lee Swanson ~ 2 Comments

As a kid, I was filled with misinformation.  Not just the normal kid misinformation like mud is good to jump in and dogs like to have their tails pulled.  I thought the signs pointing to “frontage road” were directing cars to a street named Frontage; like First Street, Washington Avenue and Frontage Road.  It wasn’t until I understood there had never been an explorer, developer or president named Frontage that I realized it was just the nondescript street leading to the strip mall.

When people said “no news is good news,” I thought it meant there was no such thing as good news.

For a long time, I thought Spago, Drano, Pepto and Bromo were the names of the least talented of the Marx Brothers.

Fortunately I lived next door to a kid who knew everything.  And this was before Google. I know he knew everything because I asked him.   In high school, he once (at least once that I heard) made an offhand reference to some totally obscure fact that no one else could possibly have known.  I looked up and asked, “Tom do you know everything?”

Without a moment’s hesitation he said “actually, I don’t know anything at all about hydraulic pumps.”  I figured he was just being modest, because as he explained what it was he didn’t know about hydraulic pumps it was clear that he didn’t know less than I didn’t know.  I didn’t…and still don’t…know enough about hydraulic pumps to know what I didn’t, and still don’t, know.

For that reason and others, I’ve always found it easier to quantify what I do know than what I don’t.  On our first date I told Cheryl there were only four things in the world I knew anything at all about.  I said I knew a little about television news, a fair amount about golf, a great deal about college basketball and absolutely everything about embalming.

That led to a long discussion about growing up as the son of a mortician, but she went out with me again anyway.

I’ve clung to that claim, though the order has changed now and then. For most of my adult life it was exactly reversed.  Now I don’t think I know much at all about any of those four topics.  I am far removed from the ins and outs of embalming, as it were, though I am closer to being embalmed than I ever have been.  (Not that I’ll learn anything from the experience).  I don’t follow college basketball well enough to get into a Final Four pool any more, even though every college team in the country now makes it into the tournament.  I’m playing golf whenever I can and follow the game somewhat, but it’s been a long time since I was able to name the player of the year for every year of the decade.

And television news? Well, despite spending thirty years working at it, I’m fairly out of touch with it now as a profession and don’t really even watch it very much.  I can expound upon how it used to be done, back when we did it well – or at least as well as it’s ever been done.

Perhaps most disturbing is that nothing has crept in to fill the cranial voids.  I just know less and less – stuck with dwindling levels of expertise on four subjects and an urge to read up on hydraulic pumps.

Headlines

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

An Associated Press a headline today said Executives Don’t See Reason to Panic, Yet.  It was the first I realized panic is a reasoned response, arrived at only after long and considered study.

“Elizabeth, arrange a conference call with the board.  I’ve been looking over these balance sheets for two days now and I think it’s time to take a vote on panicking.”

“A videoconference, sir?”

“No, just on the phone.  I don’t want to tip my hand by letting the board see that my hair is on fire.”

Wile E. Coyote

Acme Industries’ Board Votes 7-6 Against Panic

Director Wile E. Coyote Casts Deciding Vote

“I’ve seen worse,” Coyote explained.  “Once you’ve run off the edge of a cliff with an anvil and a case of dynamite strapped to your leg, a few drops in stock prices don’t scare you much.”