television 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.

Why I Write

~ Lee Swanson ~ 5 Comments

Photography is on the long list of things I want to be able to do but for which I have no talent, along with drawing, woodworking and pairs figure skating. And the common thread in all of that is my inability to turn those things I imagine into reality. That, and weak ankles.

I understand photography principles. I took those classes in journalism school and I took good notes. I can talk all about ASA and shutter speeds, and the differences between Kodacolor, Kodachrome and Ektachrome.

OK, so it’s been awhile.

But I can also expound upon the rule of threes; about using natural lines and shapes to draw your eye to a focal point; the importance of getting close to your subject, all that stuff.

But here’s the thing: I can look at something and imagine what the picture ought to look like. I just can’t take that picture. Not in the viewfinder and certainly not on the desktop. No amount of Photoshop can save it. I can’t translate what I think into what I see.

I guess that’s why I write. Reality doesn’t have to get in the way. Whatever I can think I can write. No harsh shadows, no blurs. I don’t have to worry about hitting the shutter just a fraction too soon or too late.

Case in point. I was at the 1982 U.S. Open Golf championship at Pebble Beach. I had conned my way into not only press credentials but a photo badge. I was inside the ropes with my Beseler Topcon. Perhaps you remember, this was the Open that Tom Watson won, beating Jack Nicklaus by chipping in for birdie from impossibly heavy rough at the back of the 17th green. Everyone else crouched in front of the green got a picture of the ball in the air headed for the hole. I got Watson pointing back at his caddie Bruce Williams, saying “I told you so.” Not much of a picture. I missed the moment.

Maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s the camera. But no, a better camera just made my bad pictures more expensive.

On the other hand, I can write the same sentence with a pencil as I can with a Macbook Pro and no one knows the difference. Not that there’s a single thought in these nine paragraphs that anyone would hang on the wall (though the pairs figure skating line was sort of a nice touch).

I’ll admit though, that as a writer I am weak at descriptions and much better at dialogue. I wrote television news for far too long, where descriptions aren’t necessary. You have a photographer for that. I’m told that pictures are worth… a couple of hours of overtime.

In television news, the closest you get to describing anything are the words this and that. As in “the driver of this car drove into that house.” Doesn’t look like much here, but on TV, you’d get it. First rule of television news “say cow, see cow.” Don’t have a picture of a cow, don’t talk about it.

That’s why I want to be able to take pictures. To see cows. Cows that, by their very existence, describe the human condition. Gaunt and standing in a field bare of grass, far from the nearest water, with blank bovine stares silently chewing their cud. Never mind that there is precious little to chew. It is their nature. Standing motionless for hours, only their lower jaw moving.

Oh fuck, never mind, I hate cows. Dumbest animals on earth. Except, you know. Horses.

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.

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.