The Daily Nightly began on May 31, 2005. As Brian wrote in his first post it aims to provide a narrative of the broadcast day and a window into the editorial process at NBC Nightly News. Brian weighs in every weekday and NBC News correspondents and producers post regularly.
Brian Williams became the seventh anchor and managing editor in the history of NBC Nightly News on December 2, 2004. Read his full biography.
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For all of us at NBC News, there is one name that encompasses the history of this network and our industry - Reuven Frank. In an era of cathode tubes, long before the digital age, Reuven understood that television news was destined to transmit "experience," not only information. In his words, "pictures are the point of television reporting."
He was the originator of network news coverage of political conventions, pairing Chet Huntley and David Brinkley in 1956 to co-anchor NBC's coverage. That launched them to fame and became the precursor to their long run on weeknight television as hosts of the Huntley-Brinkley Report.
Reuven was quiet, with a soft voice, but still had a commanding presence because of his sheer intellect. We all knew that we were in the presence of greatness when he was in the producer's chair. Reuven was twice president of NBC News, but perhaps his greatest contribution was not as an executive, but as a hands-on producer. He originated programs like NBC NEWS Overnight, the wry, offbeat late-night broadcast anchored, and more importantly, written, by Linda Ellerbee and Lloyd Dobyns. He treasured not only pictures but words, but still understood better than anyone before or since when a correspondent or anchor should just shut up and let the viewer experience an event. He cherished the writing of craftsmen and women like Ellerbee, Brinkley, Doug Kiker, Tom Pettit, Roger O'Neill, John Hart and Tom Brokaw.
In 1984, before the Republican National Convention in Dallas which was renominating Ronald Reagan, Reuven called me with an assignment. The Reagan campaign was producing an eight minute biopic on Reagan timed to be presented just as the networks were all going on the air with their prime time evening convention coverage. In essence, the Reagan team was trying to hijack our coverge, locking us in, they thought, to carrying a campaign advertisement. Reuven said my mission was to report a political biograpy of Reagan of the exact same length to substitute for the RNC's video.
At the time, eight minutes of prime time television news was an extraordinary allotment of time. We had only a few days to produce it. There was intense pressure from the Republicans to broadcast their version, produced by their crack advertising team. Reuven refused to cave.
Television news has changed a lot since the days when Reuven and his anchor team commanded eighty percent of the viewers watching television. But even now, wittingly or not, men and women in television news are trying to just tell stories as Reuven would have us do.
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This week in the House
For most of my life, I aspired to be a journalist; and in the way young boys wanted to grow up to play on a team like Willie Mays or Roger Staubach, I wanted to play on a team like David Brinkley. While my friends were pretending to be ball players and spies, I pretended to be covering political conventions. So in my adolescence, during my first years as a practicing journalist, I made it a point to learn about the "coaches" of the teams I admired. That's when I learned about Reuven Frank. He became the coach whose principles I'd want to emulate, at about the time he rejoined NBC News to produce "Weekend," the TV version of "NBC News Monitor," and "Overnight" with Linda and Lloyd. It was always an ambition of mine to meet him and thank him personally, but as hard as I tried to engineer the coincidence, our paths never crossed. And so it goes. Good night, Reuven.
Scott M. Fulton III, Indianapolis, IN (Sent Feb 6, 2006 8:43:26 PM)
Reuven Frank IS a giant. He's in the pantheon of behind-the-scenes people such as Don Hewitt of CBS who shaped broadcast journalism from its infant black-and-white newsreel beginnings to live and in color from anywhere in the world.
Unlike Hewitt, Reuven Frank was a quiet, thoughtful type. Hw was never one to seek personal publicity, letting his work say it all.
Like Hewitt, he was an innovator, especially in developing special coverage for events such as political conventions, elections and space shots, and was a master of the film documentary.
He worked with legends such as David Brinkley, Chet Huntley, John Chancellor, Edwin Newman, Tom Brokaw, and so many other talented journalists.
Frank was one of the first in broadcast news to let the pictures tell the story - incredible as it may seem to many today - his on-air people, producers, and editors cut the film first, then wrote words to go with those pictures ... rather than what it is today ... write the script and fill in the holes between soundbites.
Grab Franks's book "Out of Thin Air" from a used book site if you can ... a fascinating history of tv news from John Cameron Swayze to Tom Brokaw and all the stories in between.
Reuven Frank will be sorely missed.
William Miller (Sent Feb 6, 2006 7:27:12 PM)
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