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.
 |
|
 |
|
 |
advertisement
About the broadcast | Biographies
RSS is an easy way to get the news you want as it is updated even if you are not on MSNBC.com. More information about MSNBC.com's RSS feeds.
Podcasting brings you audio and video from each weekday broadcast on your iPod or other portable MP3 player anytime, anywhere. More information about MSNBC.com's podcasts.
Sign-up for our daily e-mail newsletter. It offers a preview of the stories and special reports featured on each weekday broadcast.
When you get to be a certain age -- which I have and I admit to -- you find yourself writing obits for friends of many decades.
Two weeks ago it was for the legendary Gordon Manning, broadcast executive par excellence.
Today it is for R.W Apple, known to almost everyone as Johnny, who died Wednesday and was in so many ways the gold standard for journalists. After an early start in broadcast news -- 1963 with NBC and the Huntley-Brinkley report -- he went back to his first loves: the written word and the New York Times.
He was one of the first of the really prescient Vietnam war reporters in 1966. He saw that war for what it was -- a quagmire -- and he said so. Then he became THE must-read/must-know political reporter if covering politics was what you did. He just knew how it worked. Knew it.
I was lucky enough to meet and become friendly with Johnny in 1971. We lived in the same apartment complex in Washington, D.C. I was a young press secretary for a presidential candidate and Johnny took my wife and me under his wing, taught us how the capital worked, taught me politics from the ground up, taught me to understand why my candidate had no shot. The nomination, followed by the election debacle, proved him (as we always argued) only half right. It was one of the few times he wasn’t 100 percent right, which he hated.
Meals with Johnny were legendary. Best food. Best wine. Best talk. Hours long. Good that my wife and I could walk home. Driving after Dine Chez Apple was, as Johnny would say, “not on.”
After I abandoned politics and my candidate and started producing political coverage for another network, we stayed in touch across the years -- bumped into each other on campaign buses; in convention cities; in airports; and, of course, in restaurants. If you wanted to know what was going on, you had to find Johnny.
Great man. Great Reporter. Great writer. Great raconteur. Not much left to say other than if you care about reporting and writing, read R.W. Apple. And if you want to know where the best restaurants are anywhere on this planet, read him too. You’ll leave whatever page he wrote with a smile and know more.
I promise.
Read Jeff's obituary for Gordon Manning on TVWeek.com
Read more from Jeff Gralnick
EMAIL THIS
TRACKBACKS
Trackbacks are links to weblogs that reference this post. Like comments, trackbacks do not appear until approved by us. The trackback URL for this post is: http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451b0aa69e200d8356a959969e2
'Early Nightly' is up
SEND A COMMENT
PLEASE READ: All comments must be approved before appearing in the thread; time and space constraints prevent all comments from appearing. We will only approve comments that are directly related to this post, use appropriate language and are not attacking the comments of others.