WHAT MARGARET THATCHER TAUGHT ME ABOUT NEWS

The question to ask about every story: what will it mean tomorrow?

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

Newspeople have the attention span of a gnat.  We are bred to cover today's big thing, get the facts, find the story line, write, print, and move on to tomorrow's big thing.  

"Yesterday's news," as the phrase once went, "is tomorrow's fish wrap."  Or as you might say today, with a roll of your eyes and a toss of your head, "that is soooo 15 minutes ago."  

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on an official visit to Washington shortly after her election in 1979.  ​

But news is also, as longtime Washington Post publisher Philip Graham once said, the first rough draft of history.  When former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died at the age of 87, I was reminded again of the difference between a routine headline and a story that people would actually remember in 30 years.

In 1979, I was the newly-minted morning news editor of WOR, New York's proud establishment radio station.  In a time well before the Internet or even cable news, WOR was one of the most listened to stations in the country, and certainly among the most profitable.   

(I was in my early 20's at the time, and the next youngest newsroom employee was almost twice my age.)    

New York was a very different place in 1979.  The city had nearly gone bankrupt just a few years before, and was only now starting to recover.   Public services like street cleaning and garbage collection were notoriously undependable.  

On one side of WOR's 23rd floor studios at 1440 Broadway - where world figures routinely came to be interviewed -Times Square was dirty, sleazy, and dangerous.   On the other side, Bryant Park was a well known location for drug deals.   Crime of all kinds was setting records.   

Then, on April 19, more than six thousand New York State prison guards went on strike, in direct violation of a law which prohibited public employees from walking off the job.   Correctional facilities were already overflowing.  Now there were palpable fears for public safety.  The National Guard was called in to man the prisons, prompting cries of "scab" and leading to violence on the picket lines.  

The prison guard strike was our lead story at WOR for the better part of sixteen days.   It felt like sixteen months.  

But on the early morning of May 4 came a surprise.  Negotiators for the state and the guards' union, working all night, unexpectedly reached an agreement to end the walkout.  The city and the state breathed an almost audible sigh of relief.   

I arrived at WOR at 4 am, and part of my job was to consult with our writers and anchors and identify the big lead story of our morning news shows, with a cumulative audience of more than a million people.

Had the strike ended on almost any other day, my choice would have been a slam dunk.  But May 4 was also the day that Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of Great Britain.  

A section of the WOR Radio newsroom as it appeared  in 1979.  The editor's desk is the large "box" in the center.  At right, behind the manual typewriter, is editor Jim Yoell.   Courtesy New York Radio News.  

My team and I all debated and reflected on the pros and cons for a few minutes - something that doesn't happen very much in the news industry these days.  An end to a labor dispute that endangered the public, we decided, surely meant more to our listeners than a new leader across the sea in England.  

So we led with the prison strike.  Thatcher would be our second story.  

After the end of our first 15-minute news block at 6 am, I got a call at the desk from WOR's News Director, Reg Laite.   He had just heard our broadcast from home, and had other ideas.  

"Why are you leading with the strike?  Your lead-all has to be Thatcher," he instructed me.   "Move the end of the prison strike down to the second slot."  

I asked Laite why.  After all, we'd been leading with the prison standoff for more than two weeks.   Wasn't it just a more significant story?  

"Thatcher is bigger," he grunted.  "It's huge.  It's historic.  Maybe you're too young to see.  She is the first woman to lead a Western power.  Go with it."  

You can debate about what the right call was on that particular morning.  But history, the ultimate judge, would prove my boss correct, and me wrong. 

Remember - this was before the rest of the world had ever really heard of Margaret Thatcher.  It was before she faced down unionized coal miners, heralding a changed game for Britain's economy.  And it was well before the election of Ronald Reagan, the rise of democracy in Poland, fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism - all events in which Thatcher's resolve played a key role.

And, of course, Meryl Streep won an Oscar for portraying an iron lady - not a prison guard.   Today it seems downright silly to compare the two.  

Now, more than ever, we live in an era where moonbeams pass as news.  Now you see it, now you don't.   The lesson I took from the election of Margaret Thatcher still prompts me to ask a simple question about every story I write, and read:  

What's it gonna mean in 30 years?  

REMEMBERING BOB TEAGUE: Just get the job done

The no-nonsense philosophy of a groundbreaking New York TV journalist

by Doug Spero

I am sick to hear the news about Bob Teague's passing.  Teague and Gabe Pressman were my two mentors, both of whom I used to field produce a lot before I went on the air myself in 1985. 

The "Black Arrow," as Teague was known in a day when there were only a handful of African-Americans in TV news, was the fastest reporter I ever worked with.  And as a field producer, I can tell you he was also one of the best.  
 
Teague came out of the newspaper business.  His philosophy was straightforward.  Get in and get out.  Just set him up.  Put him on the story... and day is done.   No nonsense... no BS. 

The sooner his story was shot and edited, the quicker he could go downstairs to Hurley's, the longtime NBC watering hole, for his "Martin."  His sheer feel for news  allowed him to do better work with less sweat than anyone. 

A few special memories:
 
- Teague was the first reporter on duty (7am) when I was WNBC's assignment editor.  Just give him a story and get him out the door.  

Bob Teague in an NBC publicity photo from the 1960's.  One of New York's first black television journalists, Teague, whose colleagues nicknamed him ":The Black Arrow" for his straightforwardness, died on March 28 at age 84. 

- He would accept any reasonable story.  But if it was BS, and he knew it and you knew it, as an assignment editor, you gave him something else.
 
- He would sometimes complain if he had to go back out again and cover another story - why should he be punished because he had worked so efficiently on the first one?

- Race was never an issue with Teague.  He was equally tough when interviewing blacks and whites.  He also detested laziness in anyone, whatever their race or gender.
 
- Bob was the only reporter I ever worked with who memorized a script, word for word,  on the way to a story in the crew car.  He would hold the end of a pencil to his lips (as a microphone) and start to rehearse his lines on the way there... and it worked for him.  How on earth can you write a script in your head before arriving at a story?  If you're Bob Teague, you can. 

- Then - as he was thinking through the story in his head and mumbling into the pencil - when he hit something he didn't like, he would say "dammit" (or something stronger)  and start over, like slamming return on the carriage of a manual typewriter. You never let on what a riot this was to watch.  You never bothered Bob Teague when he was "composing."
 
I never had a bad word with Teague, either on the assignment desk or while field producing.  Wherever we worked, if we wrapped up early and there was a bar nearby, we would have an adult beverage or two before the courier came for the videotape.   Today, as with so much else in New York, the local dive has been replaced by a gourmet sandwich and espresso bar.  
 
So, Bob -  as Bob Hope used to say - thanks for the memories.  Wish I could attend his funeral, if there will be one.  I will have a drink for him at my card game tonight.  

Doug Spero, a former reporter and assignment editor for New York’s WNBC TV and Radio, is a special consultant to Dunlop Media.  He is a professor of Communications at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. 

NAME IT TO CLAIM IT: With one word, the new pope can tweet what he hopes to achieve

by Steve Dunlop

We've heard it for some time now.  The Roman Catholic Church is in an extraordinary crisis.  It is haunted by corruption, dogged by scandal, held back by hidebound traditions, and beset by a creaking bureaucracy. 

Crisis, corruption, bureaucracy.   Extraordinary, haunted, dogged, creaking, hidebound.  Those words are what we call "value terms" in communications training. 

They are not plain vanilla language.  Each of those words is an argument - a self-contained claim.  And claims, by their nature, are conceptual. 

Powerful claims evoke images.  They are shorthand for the pictures in our heads.  And while you can see them throughout storytelling, our always-on culture has made claim words indispensable. 

Enter Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergolio - who must have recognized that in the 140-character age, even the pope has to walk the walk.  He needed a claim word that would instantly capture his hopes for the Church, and enable the world - especially the Catholic world - to quickly grasp his mindset.   

Pope Francis in his first appearance on the balcony of St. Peter's in Rome.  ​

He settled on Francis.   It's only seven characters long, but it's not just tweet-friendly.  It is one of the strongest value terms in the Catholic world. 

Among the last 10 popes, we have seen three Piuses, two Benedicts, one John, one Paul, two John Pauls, and a Leo.  None of those monikers stakes as strong a "claim" as St. Francis of Assisi - and you don't have to be Christian to appreciate that. 

There are at least four core values that the name Francis stirs up in the imagination:

Francis of Assisi is one of the strongest "value terms" in the Catholic world.

• Poverty.  Although born into a rich merchant family, Francis of Assisi renounced his wealth and lived among the poor in 13th century Italy.   The new pope shunned the palatial Archbishop's residence in Buenos Aires in favor of a small room in a downtown apartment building, heated by a single stove.  He did his own cooking and took the bus to work.

• Love of nature.   Francis is the patron saint of animals and ecology, and for many Catholic and Episcopal churches, an annual "Pet Blessing" on his feast day is their biggest public outreach of the year.   Already, you can find posts from animal rights and global warming groups blogging the hope that Pope Francis will be speaking out on their behalf. 

• Humility.  "Lord make me an instrument of Thy Peace," begins the Prayer of St. Francis, one of the most familiar prayers in the Catholic armamentarium.  "Where there is hatred, let me sow love."   In asking the crowd at St. Peter's to "bless" him before imparting his own blessing to them, Francis signaled an intention to approach his papacy with a model of servant rather than master. 

• Rebuilding.   This is the most obscure of Francis of Assisi's attributes, but in the context of today's church, perhaps the most relevant.   While praying before a crucifix in a crumbling, abandoned church, Francis experienced a vision of Christ commanding him to "rebuild my house which has fallen into ruin."  It doesn't take a theologian to make the obvious connection to  today. 

Which brings us full circle to the challenge of any leader in a culture driven by headlines and hash tags.  Value terms need evidence to be credible, and the evidence needs to be concrete. 

While even Pope Francis can't predict everything that his term has in store for the world, he is off to a great start - perhaps moreso than any of his recent predecessors - by strongly naming his claim. 

GRAND CENTRAL VISION: How early "distance learning" helped create the world's pre-eminent rail station

Commentary by Steve Dunlop

If you've ever doubted the potential of what we know today as "distance learning" - whether you're watching a streamed lecture from a Yale physicist, or working on your own presentation skills online - pay a visit to Manhattan's landmark Grand Central Terminal.  It turned 100 this month.   And it holds the key to a very early distance learner you probably haven't heard of: William J. Wilgus. 

Or, as I call him here for reasons I will explain momentarily, Upstate Bill.

William J. Wilgus (1865-1949), the unheralded driving force behind Grand Central Terminal.

Upstate Bill is not the first name that's usually associated with the building of Grand Central.  That honor has often gone to Whitney Warren, the wealthy, white-shoe Manhattan designer who co-founded the prestigious architectural firm of Warren and Wetmore.   

(Wealthy white-shoe Whitney Warren Wetmore William Wilgus.  Whoa.  See why I opted for "Upstate Bill?")

However you refer to him, Upstate Bill Wilgus had almost nothing in common with any of those other W's. 

Whitney Warren was born into the cloistered parlors of 19th century high society New York.  Upstate Bill was reared in blue collar Buffalo.  Warren's cousins were Vanderbilts.   Bill's cousins, if he had any, never mattered to historians.  

The highlight of Warren's schooling was the 10 years he spent in study at L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.  Upstate Bill attended Buffalo Central High School, and never went to college.  The apex of his education was a course in drafting, which he took via that well-known precursor of the Internet, the US Mail.  The class was offered by a small but growing institution, which we know today as the Cornell University College of Architecture.

But that unremarkable mail order course, which Bill took in Buffalo while Whitney Warren was packing for Paris, was about to become critical to the future of New York City. 

Railroads were the technology giants of their time, and Bill Wilgus rose rapidly in that field.  By the turn of the 20th century, he was chief engineer of the New York Central Railroad.  As trains in increasing numbers trundled at street level into the overcrowded, 1869-vintage Grand Central Depot, they left a ubiquitous blanket of cinder and ashes - and, sometimes, human bodies - in their wake. 

Exposed railroad tracks along Fourth Avenue, now Park Avenue, leading to the old Grand Central Depot, circa 1898.  Courtesy beautyofnyc.org.  

The rail line acceded to residents along Park Avenue (then known as Fourth Avenue), and lowered the tracks into a vented tunnel between 59th and 96th Streets.  But these were steam engines, and visibility in the tunnel was always poor. 

On the snowy morning of January 8, 1902, an express train from White Plains missed several signals in the tunnel.  It rear-ended another train waiting to enter Grand Central.  Fifteen people were killed.   Fed up with the growing toll of deaths and injuries, the State of New York promptly moved to ban all steam engines from Manhattan. 

Bill Wilgus was the railroad's chief engineer.  He had to do something.  (Besides, Whitney Warren probably couldn't spare the time - he had just finished building the New York Yacht Club.) 

Combining his hands-on experience as an engineer with the drafting skills he acquired in his learn-by-mail course, Wilgus came up with a grand vision - a grand central vision - that the classically trained architects of his time could not see. 

Antique postcard illustrating the excavation for the new Grand Central Terminal.  Courtesy beautyofnyc.org.

Coal and steam would be kicked to the curb.  There would be a new terminal with multiple levels below ground, blasted 60 feet into the Manhattan bedrock.  Trains would no longer arrive in Gotham spewing dust and soot.  Like the new terminal itself, they would be electrically powered, and enter midtown Manhattan cleanly and safely underground.   Digging down allowed for a double-deck approach for long distance and suburban trains.  It effectively tripled the old depot's capacity. 

The project would be outrageously expensive, consuming nearly an entire year of the railroad's revenue.  But again, Upstate Bill had an out-of-the-box solution.  Once the new underground train yard was covered over, he proposed leasing the space above it to developers.  It would become one of the largest single real estate endeavors in US history.   He called it "taking wealth from the air."   We call it the start of high-rise Manhattan.  Upstate Bill's ingenuity led to the creation of buildings that became home to many of today's Whitney Warrens.  

There is no record of what a Cornell correspondence course in drafting might have cost Bill Wilgus.  But it had to be one of the best investments he ever made.  And if he were alive today, there is no question he would dispense with the US Mail.  He would be taking that correspondence course online. 

And he would have plenty of company.  Around the world, as we are seeing every day, millions of Bill Wilguses are now discovering the virtual classroom.   Online lectures, MOOC's (massive open online courses) and distance learning will change not just their lives, but the lives of their teachers, their educational institutions, and without a doubt, our lives too. 

Is the university world ready?  How about the rest of us?  And if the first generation of distance learners could give us Grand Central Terminal, what will the next one bring? 

###

(For further reading, consult: "Grand Central's Engineer: William J. Wilgus and the Planning of Modern Manhattan," by Kurt C. Schlichting.  The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.) 

WHEN YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING: What Les Miserables (the film) teaches us about reaching an audience

Media commentary by Steve Dunlop

There has always been something a little misleading about the term "mass media."  What we call mass media, like anything else, is actually consumed one person at a time.  And specific forms of media resonate more with some people than others.  Just as many drivers prefer a stick shift to automatic, some of us absorb information better with newspapers than TV.  Or with podcasts than radio. 

Or, for that matter, with movies than with plays. 

Tom Hooper's film adaptation of Les Miserables, the Victor Hugo novel that became the fourth longest running play in Broadway history, reminded me of that fact over the weekend.  There are many sad moments in Les Mis, but for me, there was one more: realizing how close I had come to missing it.  

I had walked into the theatre preparing to nap for 2 1/2 hours.  My wife and I saw Les Mis the play in its prime, and we had been both disappointed and bewildered.  Despite all the positive buzz, It struck us as a disjointed story with an overly orchestrated script and a pretentious cast.  

We resolved to bring our middle-school-student son to see the film, so he could get extra credit in French class.  But we secretly wondered why 60 million playgoers around the world were so enamored with this story.

Which is why we were so pleasantly surprised when the film rolled.  Les Mis the movie had the opposite effect.  Unlike the stage production, it not only kept us awake.  It captured us.   (Our son was bored, but hey, at least he didn't nod off.)  

Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman in the 2012 film version of Les Miserables.  Courtesy Universal Pictures. 

After the long Broadway run, the core narrative is familiar to many of us.  Set in the turmoil of post-revolutionary France, Les Miserables revolves around Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), a petty criminal who changes his ways following an act of kindness from a Catholic bishop.  Christians, especially, may find it refreshing that a priest is finally one of the good guys. 

Valjean is being pursued by Javert (Russell Crowe), his former jailer, for breaking parole.  Both Jackman and Crowe surprised us with their command of singing.  In a gutsy production choice, the songs were done live to film, not in a tracking booth. 

Perhaps if I had read the book first - all 1500 pages of it (or 1900 in French) - I would have appreciated the stage production.  But the play's complex story line was almost completely lost on me.  Les Mis is a deeply moral tale, an allegory of the primordial struggle between good and evil, and the transformative power of forgiveness.

But this lavish film - with its computer enhanced beauty shots of 19th century Paris, close-ups at critical moments, and an audio mix where I could understand every lyric - proved a far more effective vehicle for communicating Hugo's story, at least to this member of the audience. 

Many veteran reviewers are lukewarm on Hooper's effort.  Top critics on rottentomatoes give Les Mis only a 58.  It may not have the same effect on you that it had on me.  But where one form of the narrative had failed with us, another succeeded.  At the very least, this remarkable film is powerful evidence that whatever your story, there's more than one way to reach your audience.

When it comes around again, I may even give the play another shot.