Frank Beacham's Journal

Remaking of “USA Today” is the Beginning of the End

 

It was 1970, after I was hired away from UPI, that I sat in Bernard’s Surf Restaurant in Cocoa Beach, Florida and listened to Al Neuharth’s ideas for the nation’s first satellite-delivered newspaper. It would be some time before USA Today was actually launched, but I was there when Neuharth outlined his original plans. 

He sketched his ideas on a big pad. It would be the first truly national general-interest newspaper. It would be the first to use color widely in charts and photographs. Newstands would be modeled after TV sets. And, due to instant satellite delivery, it would be printed throughout the country at different printing plants and distributed nationally. 

Within five years, USA Today became profitable and grew to one of the largest selling newspapers in the nation. Neuharth, who was chairman and CEO of Gannett, admitted where he got most of the ideas. “We stole most of them from the tube,” he said later.

As a Gannett reporter, I had mixed feelings about the newspaper and its dependance on the television culture. I felt it’s very short, simply written stories dumbed down journalism. I had just come from writing 2,000 word “think pieces” for newspapers at UPI. There was no “thinking” to be associated with USA Today. I was ambivalent as the newspaper grew.

Today, after 28 years, we read that USA Today is in trouble and retrenching. Yesterday, the newspaper announced the most extensive reorganization in its history. It will eliminate about 130 jobs, or nine percent of its work force. 

Most radical, however, is the newspaper said it will shift its business model away from the print edition. More disturbing is that the current management failed to provide any details for this digital transition. It instantly became apparent they are clueless and are making up this transition as they go.

“We aren’t organized to adapt to the changing audience demands on all platforms,” the paper’s management told employees in a presentation last week. The publisher, David L. Hunke, declined to answer questions. A spokesman for USA Today, Ed Cassidy, said that the announcement was all that newspaper had to say on the matter, “and that pretty much closes the book on this for us.”

Actually, it pretty much closes the book on USA Today. The problem is the newspaper is rapidly bleeding subscribers and money. The Wall Street Journal has gained on it. Management is clearly lost about its future. Rather than fire the top people who don’t understand the digital future, management is firing the workers. Dumb move!

What’s worse is the newspaper’s recent track record of crossing the sacred line between news coverage and advertising. In July, the newspaper wrapped its front section in an advertisement for Jeep that obscured the entire front page. In an earlier era, that would have been considered a huge conflict of interest. The newspaper called it “a new way of doing business that aligns sales efforts with the content we produce.”

That’s total bull, of course. The outrageous ad even prompted Al Neuharth, now 86 and retired, to complain in a letter to the publisher that if he were still at Gannett, “I would have led the entire news staff walking out in protest.

“If such a stupid decision is ever made again, I hope that will be the result,” Neuharth wrote.“That would leave those who apparently don’t understand what a newspaper is to try to put one out without a news staff.”

Go Al!  Back in the 1970s, when I worked for him, Neuharth was a tough boss and, as a lowly reporter, I didn’t always agree with his decisions. No newspaper is perfect, I long ago learned. However, when it came to the separation of advertising and news, and the need for good journalistic practices, Neuharth was usually on the side of the staff.

However, today’s generation of news management is so bad it is a major embarrassment to anyone who understands the workings of good journalism. Sadly, the management of USA Today has said everything necessary to assess it’s chance of a future. It’s finished and better off dead. We can only hope something better will replace it.

RIP, USA Today.

The Death of Edward Kean, Head Writer for the “Howdy Doody Show”

                    Edward Kean by Del Ready

Edward Kean’s recent death ends a 55-year journey that started for me as a kid in front of a TV set responding to “Say Kids! What Time is It” when the Howdy Doody Show came on the air.

When my family got our first TV set in 1955, I stared at the test pattern each afternoon waiting for the Howdy Doody Show to begin. I was a huge Howdy fan. I once even built my own Howdy Doody studio, and was part of a kid mob that chased a fearful Clarabell to the roof of my local station.

To make a very long story short, while living in Florida, I was hired to shoot a video interview with Buffalo Bob Smith, the host of the show, at his home. Buffalo Bob and I immediately hit it off. 

When the shoot was finished, we sat around Bob’s piano and sang Howdy songs. I remembered every word. Then he did an incredible thing—he took the real Howdy out of his glass box and let me operate his strings. It was a day I’ll never forget. 

Later, when I moved to LA, I was invited to sit in the Peanut Gallery for a TV taping of Howdy’s 40th birthday party. It was there I met Clarabell the Clown and most of the living Howdy Doody gang. As a writer, I came to appreciate Edward Kean, the man who put words into Howdy’s mouth.

 

When Buffalo Bob died, I wrote his obit. That obit was given to Lew Anderson, the actor who played Clarabell. I was summoned to Birdland to meet Anderson, who in real life was the conductor of a big band. We became friends and even discussed doing a book together to be called “Clarabell Speaks.” It didn’t happen. Anderson died soon after that. I wrote his obit as well.

 

Now, Edward Kean, the final name in the big three Howdy players, is gone. He died at age 85.  Kean conceived many of the puppet characters on the show, including my favorite, the cantankerous Phineas T. Bluster, who always represented “the man” to me. A puppet of Mr. Bluster sat on my desk for many years. There was also Dilly Dally, Flub-a-Dub and the one Buffalo Bob loved so dearly, Princess Summerfall Winterspring.

Kean once said that he was probably best known for coining the word “cowabunga” (originally spelled with a “k”) as a greeting for Chief Thunderthud, another character on the show. The word has become part of American vernacular, used by the cartoon character Bart Simpson and by the crime-fighting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

RIP Edward Kean and all other people who created such a powerful childhood fantasy. It will always resonate with me.

My cat, Willow, has become a close friend of Howdy through the years.

On the 40th Anniversary of “Deliverance” and the Job of Keeping James Dickey Sober

 

James Dickey, the writer of the novel Deliverance in 1970, was on the faculty at my alma mater, the University of South Carolina. As a student working at a local television station, my job one day was to keep Dickey sober for a live television show that afternoon. I failed miserably at the task!

This one-day job from hell came to mind today while reading an article in the New York Times recalling the 40th anniversary of Dickey’s novel. It quotes a biography of the author by Henry Hart, saying the macho Dickey “drank oceanically,” slept with too many women and was a serial exaggerator.

“I am crazy about being drunk,” Dickey wrote. “I like it like Patton liked war.”

Now that I look back, I wonder whether my assigned task of keeping Dickey sober that day was a big joke on me, or just an impossible job placed upon a novice college kid. I’ll never know for sure, but I remember James Dickey as a bigger than life character and one hell of a challenge!

Photo of Dickey playing the sheriff with Jon Voight in Deliverance. Photo from the Everett Collection

Hubert Sumlin and His All-Star Band Burn New York Harbor

Hubert Sumlin is now 78-years-old and carries an oxygen tank wherever he goes. But do not doubt for one second that this legendary blues guitarist of Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters fame is still not one of the absolute best players in the world.

As only seems to happen in New York City, Sumlin assembled an all-star band for an amazing two-hour set on a cruise ship last night in New York Harbor. To be honest, had it not been for some occasional rocking of the ship, I forgot we were even on the water. The music was that good!

 

When Rolling Stone picked him as one of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time, they characterized his playing by "wrenched, shattering bursts of notes, sudden cliff-hanger silences and daring rhythmic suspensions.“ Fair enough and good enough that other artists including Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Robbie Robertson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix cite him as a major influence.

Born in Mississippi, Sumlin first met Howlin' Wolf by sneaking into a performance. Later Wolf invited Sumlin to move to Chicago to play in his band. He stayed there for most of Wolf’s career, except for a brief period when he joined Muddy Waters' band.

Hubert Sumlin is as close to the real thing as you will find anymore. His playing was heavily influenced by not only Muddy Waters, but Charley Patton, Robert Lockwood, Jr. and Robert Johnson. 

   

Sumlin was an inspiration for the British blues boom. He provided a crucial link from the acoustic Mississippi delta blues to electric guitarists such as Clapton, Page, Richards and Beck.

  

For last night’s “Rockin’ the River” cruise, Sumlin brought together David Johansen of the New York Dolls, John Sebastian of The Lovin’ Spoonful, Jimmy Vivino, guitar virtuoso from Conan O’Brien’s TV show, and Joey Spampinato & Tom Ardolino of NRBQ. It was one killer concert!

 

 

David Johansen, who also performed under the name Buster Poindexter, is best known for his work with the New York Dolls. But, to me, his best work was performing the country blues with his group, The Harry Smiths. The group was named in tribute to the man who compiled the Anthology of American Folk Music.

 

  

John Sebastian, a noted songwriter and harmonica player, founded The Lovin’ Spoonful, which was named after a Mississippi John Hurt song. He played solo at Woodstock, and was instrumental in the early jug band movement. Last night, he played harmonica and guitar. 

 

 

Abbey Lincoln on Bob Dylan, Folk Music and How She Wrote Songs

“When everything is finished in a world, the people go to look for what the artists leave. It’s the only thing that we have really in this world — is an ability to express ourselves and say, "I was here." Abbey Lincoln

Abbey Lincoln embraced many things I that I like. Among those was a deep commitment to civil rights, a love of Bob Dylan’s music and a songwriting talent that went to the heart of country music. One night in 2002, backstage at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, I got a few minutes to interview Abbey Lincoln.  Fortunately, I recorded it on tape. She crammed a lot of information into two minutes.

Ms. Lincoln died this weekend and much has been written about her. I won’t repeat everything written about this amazing artist. But here is an except from my interview with her about songwriting:

Abbey Lincoln

(Click on the name to play audio)

Alfred Eisenstaedt's "V-J Day in Times Square" Image is 65-Years-Old Today

 

To a generation brought up on video, it's perhaps hard to understand how a single iconic image can still be so powerful—much less even remembered—after 65 years. But it's true. Alfred Eisenstaedt, on assignment for Life magazine, was in Times Square with his Leica camera on August 14, 1945 looking for a shot that would represent the announcement of the end of World War II.

Just south of 45th Street looking north from where Broadway and Seventh Ave. converge, Eisenstaedt snapped an image of an American sailor kissing a young woman in a white dress. A week later, it was published in Life, in a 12-page section called Victory. Though there were other poses of couples kissing, Eisenstaedt's image stood out and became an icon for a nation that finally was at peace.

Because Eisenstaedt was so busy taking pictures of the crowd that day, he didn't get the names or any details about the people in the famous picture. Their faces are not clear. Perhaps for this reason, many people have come forward through the years claiming to be the man and woman in the photograph. 

Eisenstaedt, whose picture became a cultural icon overnight, copyright protected his image and carefully controlled the rights to it throughout his lifetime. Since his death in 1995, rights to the photograph have passed to the Getty Museum as part of their Life magazine archives.

Today, we would have thousands of pictures—both moving and still—of the same scene in Times Square. But we would most likely not remember a single one of them. Drowning in so much mediocre imagery, we are now blind to the single great icons that define our times. 

George Carlin's "The American Dream"

George Carlin was one of the world's great speakers of truth. He did it under the guise of comedy, but his words stung those in power. In recent days, one of Carlin's best speeches has been making the rounds again on YouTube and Facebook. I post it here because it is so damn true and needs to be heard again and again. 

Dirck Halstead Speaks The Truth About TV News

 

I first met Dirck Halstead in 1983 on the Day in the Life of Hawaii photo project. He was one of the 100 “world’s best” photographers invited to photograph Hawaii in a single day. I was there to do a documentary with my Betacam and to teach the photographers how to use the world’s first camcorder. The documentary was a dream project. To my extraordinary delight, I was directed by Gordon Parks, one of the world’s great photographers and a terrific man.

Dirck worked for Time Magazine for 29 years. During that time, his photographs appeared on 47 Time covers. Now, as one of the best news photographers in a vanishing profession, he edits the Digital Journalist website online and conducts the Platypus Workshops to teach a new generation of photojournalists how to survive in this brave new world. 

His recent comments in a couple of interviews I did with him were not surprising to anyone that follows photojournalism. But since truth is rarely told to the public anymore, his comments are worthy of repeat here.  

TV news, said Dirck, is dying fast. “I stopped long ago watching the three networks,” he said. “Now, it’s all on the web.” Video journalism, he said with certainly, is moving quickly to the Internet.

A total shakeup of the existing media infrastructures has been underway for a long time, Dirck continued. “The whole business is getting smaller. You are going to see far less reporter and anchor driven packages on television. What’s going away is the ‘voice of god’ approach to journalism. It will be replaced by much smaller and less expensive storytelling. Television today is not about video or about pictures. It’s about writing. In order for that to work, you must have the talking head. The talking head is going to disappear very soon.”

 

Rather than writers, the new journalistic storytelling will be driven by the subjects themselves, he said. “There will be a lot less money available to produce pieces. They will be done on the cheap. You will be cutting out the overhead of all those expensive people.”

Today, Dirck said, the very best video journalism is being done by NPR.  That’s right, National Public Radio! They have hired the best video journalists and are paying them to do top quality video pieces from around the world, he said. Go to radio to find the best television.

Television news today is whole new business model. The medium is used to dealing with big money based on advertising budgets. Once the advertising budgets are gone, which is happening very quickly, there will be no money available to TV, Dirck said. 

The web, however, is very inexpensive to work with. It can be produced by individuals, rather than organizations. And it’s quite clear that advertising is never going to recapture the mass audience that way it once did with broadcast and print. “We are in a total shakedown economically now,” he said. “A lot of things we took for granted are not going to come back. One of those things is going to be major news organizations.”

Dirck’s Platypus workshops, the 39th just held at the Maine Photographic Workshops this summer, has trained nearly 500 new storytellers. They come from TV, newspapers and other media seeking a better way to work in this new environment.

Many are using Canon and Nikon DSLR cameras because the video quality is much better than standard video news camcorders. “The quality of the images stops you in your tracks,” Dirck noted. “Previously you could get this only out of a 35mm camera.”

In many ways, the shakeup of television news will do away with much of the mediocrity that we find today on television. The change will shift emphasis back to the photographer from the TV engineer, who has dominated news photography during the growth of the video medium.

“The storytelling is the crucial element,” Dirck said. “That’s what this is all about. It’s moving storytelling into a new arena and in the process is empowering a lot of people who couldn’t have done this before.”

Though the changes will come with a lot of pain, ultimately it means the power is shifting from large media companies back to individuals. That can only be good for truth and honesty in reporting.

Blues Project Founder Danny Kalb to Play Sunday at the NYC’s Living Room

 

Danny Kalb, one of the world’s finest folk and blues guitarists, will play a rare concert at 8 pm. on Sunday night at the The Living Room at 154 Ludlow Street in New York City. 

"Nobody plays like Dan…,”said Al Kooper; "You really got to me,”added Muddy Waters; and “always a powerful guitarist,” said Bob Dylan.

Kalb will play from his new album, I’m Gonna Live The Life I Sing, a record he said he always wanted to make. A protege of the folk great Dave Van Ronk, Kalb has played with them all, including Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. He is one of the survivors of the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s.

He’s the real thing, and there are few chances anymore to experience in person the work of a genuine guitar master. Be there if at all possible.

Seeing "Tommy" 35 Years Later Reveals Much About Today's Filmmaking

When I first saw the movie “Tommy,” based on The Who’s rock opera, I was 27-years-old. It was 1975—35-years ago. Last night, at the Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York, I saw the film again for the first time since it opened. This time, Ken Russell, the film’s director was in the audience.

I was mesmerized by the sheer audacity of the movie. It was like seeing a great work of art for the first time. I always knew filmmaking in the 1970s was far better, but this work is a genuine masterpiece that I had previously failed to recognize. We all took a lot of drugs in the 70s, but it’s clear they didn’t hurt a bit. In fact, the opposite happened. The drugs contributed to a level of creativity that we haven’t collectively experienced since in the arts.

From Tina Turner’s performance as the “Acid Queen” to Keith Moon’s “Uncle Ernie” to Jack Nicholson’s “the Specialist,” the characters in this film are each priceless. Ann-Margaret, Oliver Reed and Roger Daltrey are far, far better than I ever remembered. And Ken Russell...well it takes a brilliant director to pull off such an achievement.

 

Ken Russell has been compared to Orson Welles. Having had the privilege to work with Welles, I certainly can understand the comparison. Ken’s body of work is truly breathtaking—something we simply don’t see anymore in a motion picture business dominated by soulless corporations who cater mostly to dumbed-down mass audiences.

As I left the theatre last night, I reflected on my own good luck to have lived in the years that I have. I got to experience the work of the world’s best filmmakers and meet most of them while they were alive. In today’s down-sized economic environment, most of them will never be able to make the films they want to. That is so sad, but a fact of life that seeing “Tommy” again so clearly emphasized.