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Connecting
December 03, 2020
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Colleagues,
Good Thursday morning on this the 3rd day of December 2020,
Correctives – despite best efforts, they can happen to the best of us. (And, sigh, Ye Olde Connecting Editor demonstrates that almost weekly...)
What’s a Corrective? According to AP policy, “A corrective corrects a mistake from a previous cycle. The AP asks papers or broadcasters that used the erroneous information to use the corrective, too.”
Our colleague Dave Zelio (Email) – AP’s Central regional sports editor based in Chicago – poses the following:
I was chatting with a colleague about something wrong on the wire we needed to fix and it led to a memory lane moment about AP correctives. (It also reminded me of an AP adage from some sage of yesteryear: There are AP staffers with correctives and there are AP staffers who will have correctives.) Some are incredibly painful and embarrassing, of course, and can’t be put in the rearview mirror quickly enough. Others are just quirky or funny or unusual, and it made me wonder if my Connecting colleagues have any they’d like to share. I’ll go first:
You may recall the Hemlock Society, the famous right-to-die group. Well, it changed its name some years ago and I was the AP guy who worked up a short story on it. I put in some background (this proved fatal, pun intended) but came up with a killer lead (also intended):
Hemlock Society, RIP.
The General Desk loved it and out it went, etc. The New York Times ran it — and then contacted AP for the fix below. I remember getting the call from my friend Marty Steinberg about it, I’m pretty sure. I can only assume some egghead reader called them up and it led to this very Times-ian fix:
July 28, 2003
A report by The Associated Press in the National Briefing column on Tuesday about a decision by the Hemlock Society, a right-to-die group, to change its name to End-of-Life Choices misstated the year Socrates is believed to have killed himself with hemlock. It is 399 B.C., not 329 B.C.
I wish I could say it was a typo; I don’t think it was, I just think the research I did relied on the wrong source. I’ve never forgotten the ironic mix: One of my favorite personal leads tinged by a truly historical mistake.
Got a story to share about your involvement with a Corrective? Please share.
Have a great day – be safe, stay healthy.
Paul
Memories of Rockefeller Plaza tree-lighting
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More than 50,000 lights on the 75-foot-tall Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree are illuminated at the annual Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree lighting ceremony, Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2020, in New York. The ceremony is a mask-mandated, time-limited, socially distanced event due to the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle) |
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Hank Ackerman (Email) - I took this from the 7th Floor all those many years ago on a snowy late afternoon.
The Christmas Tree photo came in December 2003, a day or so after the annual lighting of the tree. Christmas was quite a celebration time, almost magical, as Bruce, Susan, Hal, and Janice so well described (in Wednesday's Connecting). It was one that gathered most of the 50 Rock staff as well as others from around the building for fests on each of the south-facing offices and floors that overlooked the tree.
I occupied at the time one of those offices in Membership on the east-facing side of 50 Rock as did Wick Temple and Rick Spratling...but even craning my neck and camera angle from our end of the building, I could not capture the entire tree. So, I walked down the hall to the president's office...It was quiet, but Eva Tatarczyk, Lou Boccardi's assistant, was there, and allowed that a good angle was from the windows in the office. Then the whole scene presented itself --snow, ice, skaters, tree, lights, Rockefeller Plaza and passers-by.
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Dave Tomlin (Email) - Loved the tree lighting memories from 50 Rock that Bruce Richardson collected. I always used to say the plaza was so densely packed with sightseers you could slug somebody on 51st St and somebody on 48th St would fall down.
Terry Anderson’s captivity
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The pins in the photo are part of the Corporate Archives artifacts collection.
Robert Kimball (Email) - I've enjoyed reading about Terry Anderson in Connecting this week but I came away with a question - where was mention of Peggy Say, Terry's sister, who helped carry the torch to get her brother freed? Unless I missed it, she appeared only in a cutline from the joyous photo with Lou Boccardi in Germany after Terry's release.
As a sports writer on the Broadcast Wire, I saw Peggy more than once at AP Radio, which was a couple of blocks from the WX bureau on K Street. I was told she was there for interviews. We broadcast types were well aware of her ties to the AP and the publicized work she was doing on Terry's behalf.
Connecting shares the following, from December 2015:
Peggy Say, who advocated for release of Terry Anderson, dies
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AP Photo, 1991
Erik Schelzig
Associated Press
ASHVILLE, Tenn. - Peggy Say, who spent nearly seven years on a tireless quest for the release of her brother, journalist Terry Anderson, and fellow hostages from kidnappers in Lebanon, died Wednesday. She was 74.
Anderson, the chief Middle East correspondent for The Associated Press when he was abducted from the streets of Beirut in 1985 in the midst of the country's civil war, said his sister died Wednesday after a long illness. She had been living in Cookeville, about 70 miles east of Nashville.
A self-described housewife, Say quickly became her brother's most prominent public champion, keeping his fate and that of the other hostages in Lebanon in the public eye as the years went by.
Abandoning Afghanistan
By Mort Rosenblum (Email)
TUCSON — “With satellite dishes snipped from tin cans, Afghans can sit back in the Middle Ages and keep tabs on the 21st century,” I wrote from Kabul in an Associated Press dispatch two months after 9/11. “Their bad luck is that this optical miracle works only one way.”
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A teacher named Shahla Paryan had made the point as she poured me tea in her book-lined parlor. “I’m afraid the world just doesn’t understand us,” she said. “It is wrong to believe we are the same as those horrible people who brought terrorism to America. It is very wrong.”
Nineteen years and only Allah knows how many lives later — perhaps 500,000 — that still stands. And now Donald Trump has chosen to cut and run, leaving Joe Biden with an ungodly mess in a collapsed state of hapless victims ruled by violent factions that see America as a bitter enemy.
Trump is leaving behind only 2,500 troops, easy targets for a Taliban that America only ended up strengthening after its longest conflict in its history. With tragic irony, that is nearly the same number of men and women, U.S. armed forces volunteers, who died in vain since 2001.
Shahla was a university graduate who taught young girls to read, as much a part of Afghanistan as the more familiar women in body-bag burqas that evoke most Westerners’ stereotypes. She saw Osama bin Laden as a plague that was no more welcome than locusts or cholera.
She was grateful to Americans for the hope of badly needed change, but she feared they would abandon Afghanistan as they did after the Soviets were driven out in 1989. “This is our great opportunity,” she said. “We cannot miss it.”
During those first heady days, reporters moved freely. An old man in the main market fitted me with a Chitrali pakol, that ubiquitous flat-topped cap, to the amusement of bystanders. In small shops, I scrounged up the makings of an Italian pasta feast for the AP bureau.
I was assigned to do big-picture stories, part of a team directed by Kathy Gannon, whose solid reporting over the years earned her almost total access to press-shy Afghan leaders of all factions. But, as is so often the case, the story was in small-picture vignettes.
Newspapers in Art
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Paul Albright (Email) - This newspaper EXTRA is conveying some absorbing “War News from Mexico” as illustrated in a painting by Richard Caton Woodville. While we don’t know exactly what the news is, the 1848 date of the painting coincided with U.S. troops entering Mexico City and the takeover of California and other portions of the western U.S. from Mexico at the climax of the Mexican-American War. As depicted by Woodville, an intergenerational group of men are gathered on the front porch of a rural hotel and post office where the “penny press” newspapers likely were distributed. The man holding the newspaper is shocked at what he is reading, another is jubilant, and others inquisitive or uncertain. In contrast to the men on the porch, we also see a woman and two slaves marginalized or subdued in the painting. The name of the hotel – “American” – is not fully displayed, perhaps reflecting a divided nation. Does that reverberate in 2020?
A native of Baltimore, Woodville moved to Germany in 1825 to study art and produced this American scene while in Europe. He died from a morphine overdose at the age of 30 without ever returning to the U.S. More information, including a video, on Woodville’s painting is available here.
Connecting mailbox
Loyal to her Royal
Cliff Schiappa (Email) - I just received a most delightful two-page typewritten letter from Connecting correspondent Sister Donalda in response to a Thanksgiving greeting card I mailed to her. Readers of the Nov. 17th issue may recall 90-something year-old Sr. Donalda had to self-isolate in her room at Clare House in Dubuque, Iowa, where she lives with other nuns, and therefore would not have access to the computer she uses to read Connecting.
She began her letter to me with: "Do you mean to tell me Paul Stevens' Connecting goes all the way out to Palm Springs in California? He does have a wide readership, for sure." She continued with the sobering news that despite Clare House being under quarantine since March 8th, the recent isolation had to begin following the death of four Sister residents with a handful more testing positive.
As a self-described extrovert, Sr. Donalda quoted Blaine Pascal (1623-1662): "All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room, alone." But she is "settling in to the groove, but raring to go when it is lifted." She went on to say she is thinking of those in history who have had far more terrible experiences of isolation, while also praying for those in prison today and others who are alone.
Sister Donalda misses her daily Connecting and all the wonderful stories of reporters doing their work at AP and around the industry. She also included a poem, and other uplifting thoughts for the holiday season.
Not fearful of computers, after all, she used one in her work as a bookkeeper/accountant and to read Connecting, but she remains loyal to her Royal (manual, not electric). She closed with typewriter artwork of a tulip, similar in style to the teletype art that was created annually in bureaus around the world at holiday season.
(Want to send a note to our colleague, Sister Donalda Kehoe? Her address: Clare House, 3340 Windsor Avenue, Dubuque, IA 52001-1300.
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‘Today 26.2, Tomorrow 50’
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Jaime Aron (Email) - On Nov. 1, I celebrated the final day of my 49th year by running a virtual marathon. I dubbed it "Today 26.2, Tomorrow 50." Over the holiday weekend, I wrote about it, and figured I'd share the link with you and our Connecting colleagues.
Click here to view, and it begins:
Minutes after screaming “I did it!” and charging across the finish line of my first marathon, exuberance gave way to exhaustion. Then confusion: Where was I supposed to meet my wife and sons?
Aimlessly wandering the grounds of the Minnesota State Capitol, I watched a fellow finisher reunite with his family. He handed them his medal; they handed him a fresh shirt. He laughed and pulled it on. The back read:
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Canada at Night, and Wind Turbines
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Hank Ackerman (Email) - Here's a shot from Grosse Pointe (Mich.) across Lake St. Clair showing glow on clouds from the regional city Chatham-Kent in Ontario along with the red tower lights of some 50 wind turbines along the lake's eastern shore taken several weeks ago. About 6% of Canada's energy came from wind by 2019 with plans for wind to generate some 20% by 2025.
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Meghan Hoyer to lead new data journalism department as data director
By WashPostPR
Announcement from Executive Editor Marty Baron and Managing Editors Cameron Barr, Tracy Grant, Krissah Thompson and Kat Downs Mulder:
We are delighted to announce that Meghan Hoyer, the data editor of the Associated Press, will join The Washington Post in the new year to establish and lead a new department dedicated to data journalism.
As our data director, Meghan will lead data projects and act as a consulting editor on data-driven stories, graphics and visualizations across the newsroom. Seven data journalists will report to her and remain embedded in their current departments — Graphics, Investigative, Metro and National. This new data journalism department will allow The Post to vet sourcing and analysis with added rigor and consistency and provide journalists in every department with a hub of expertise on data.
Meghan is a dynamic and accomplished editor who has helped lead the AP’s award-winning data journalism since 2015. Last year she was part of a team that received the AP Chairman’s Prize for their success in improving the distribution of datasets to member newsrooms and bureaus. The team’s work was part of two Pulitzer-finalist packages in 2019 — the AP’s coverage of family separation and a collaboration with Reveal on modern-day redlining. This year she has overseen the AP’s use of coronavirus data, which has yielded ground-breaking stories on racial disparities among those afflicted by covid-19.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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Connecting wishes Happy Birthday |
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Stories of interest
Joseph diGenova resigns from Gridiron Club after saying fired cybersecurity official should be shot (Washington Post)
By Elahe Izadi
Joseph diGenova, the Trump campaign lawyer who had been a fixture in Washington legal circles for decades, resigned under pressure Tuesday from the elite Gridiron Club after an uproar over his comments suggesting a former government official should be executed.
DiGenova later said he was joking when he made the comments about Christopher Krebs, the federal cybersecurity official who was fired by President Trump after asserting that the 2020 election was secure and free of widespread voter fraud. “Anybody who thinks the election went well, like that idiot Krebs . . . ." diGenova said on the conservative “Howie Carr Show” on Monday. “He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot.”
Still, the White House denounced the statement, Krebs said he would consider legal action — and the 135-year-old Gridiron Club asked diGenova to step down.
“We were dismayed by his comments and we felt that they were, on top of everything else, just antithetical to what the club is about,” said club president Craig Gilbert, the Washington bureau chief for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “It’s a social club — we’re all about fellowship and good will.”
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Trump, in Video From White House, Delivers a 46-Minute Diatribe on the ‘Rigged’ Election (New York Times)
By Michael D. Shear
WASHINGTON — President Trump on Wednesday released a 46-minute videotaped speech that denounced a “rigged” election and was filled with lies the day after his own attorney general joined election officials across the country in attesting to his defeat.
Mr. Trump recorded what he said “may be the most important speech I’ve ever made” in the Diplomatic Room of the White House and delivered it behind a lectern bearing the presidential seal. He then posted a two-minute version on Twitter, with a link to the full version on his Facebook page.
The president once again refused to concede defeat in his bid for re-election almost a month after Election Day, repeating a long list of false assertions about voter fraud and accusing Democrats of a conspiracy to steal the presidency.
Twitter quickly labeled the post “disputed.” Facebook added a note that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., who received almost 81 million votes and 306 electoral votes, is the projected winner of the election.
The video, which a White House official said was recorded last week, was the in-person embodiment of Mr. Trump’s staccato tweets over the past three weeks: one falsehood after another about voting irregularities in swing states, attacks on state officials and signature verifications, and false accusations against Democrats.
The president’s rambling assertions in the video were drastically undercut on Tuesday, when Attorney General William P. Barr told The Associated Press that despite inquiries by the Justice Department and the F.B.I., “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Read more here. Shared by Lou Boccardi, who noted the 6th graf credit to the AP.
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Today in History - Dec. 3, 2020 |
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Today is Thursday, Dec. 3, the 338th day of 2020. There are 28 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Dec. 3, 1984, thousands of people died after a cloud of methyl isocyanate gas escaped from a pesticide plant operated by a Union Carbide subsidiary in Bhopal, India.
On this date:
In 1818, Illinois was admitted as the 21st state.
In 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected president of the United States by the Electoral College.
In 1833, Oberlin College in Ohio [–] the first truly coeducational school of higher learning in the United States [–] began holding classes.
In 1960, the Lerner and Loewe musical “Camelot,” starring Julie Andrews as Guenevere, Richard Burton as King Arthur and Robert Goulet as Lancelot, opened on Broadway.
In 1964, police arrested some 800 students at the University of California at Berkeley, one day after the students stormed the administration building and staged a massive sit-in.
In 1965, the Beatles’ sixth studio album, “Rubber Soul,” was released in the United Kingdom by Parlophone (it was released in the U.S. by Capitol Records three days later).
In 1967, a surgical team in Cape Town, South Africa, led by Dr. Christiaan Barnard (BAHR’-nard) performed the first human heart transplant on Louis Washkansky, who lived 18 days with the donor organ, which came from Denise Darvall, a 25-year-old bank clerk who had died in a traffic accident.
In 1979, 11 people were killed in a crush of fans at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum, where the British rock group The Who was performing.
In 1992, the Greek tanker Aegean Sea spilled more than 21 million gallons of crude oil when it ran aground off northwestern Spain.
In 1994, AIDS activist Elizabeth Glaser, who along with her two children were infected with HIV because of a blood transfusion, died in Santa Monica, California, at age 47.
In 2014, a Staten Island, New York, grand jury declined to indict police officer Daniel Pantaleo in the July 2014 chokehold death of Eric Garner, a Black man who’d been stopped on suspicion of selling loose, untaxed cigarettes. (Pantaleo would be fired from the police force in August 2019.) Herman Badillo (bah-DEE’-yoh), a Bronx politician who was the first person born in Puerto Rico to become a U.S. congressman, died at age 85.
In 2017, the second-largest U.S. drugstore chain, CVS, announced that it was buying Aetna, the third-largest health insurer, in order to push much deeper into customer care.
Ten years ago: During a surprise holiday-season visit to Afghanistan, President Barack Obama told cheering U.S. troops at Bagram Air Field they were succeeding in their mission to fight terrorism; however, foul weather prevented Obama from meeting with President Hamid Karzai in Kabul to address frayed relations. The Labor Department reported the U.S. unemployment rate had risen in November 2010 to 9.8 percent after three straight months at 9.6 percent.
Five years ago: Congress approved a 5-year, $305 billion bill to address the nation’s aging and congested transportation systems (the bill was approved on a 359-65 vote in the House, and an 83-16 vote in the Senate). Defense Secretary Ash Carter ordered the armed services to open all military jobs to women, removing the final barriers that had kept women from serving in combat, including the most dangerous and grueling commando posts. Former Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland was found dead in his tour bus in Bloomington, Minnesota; he was 48.
One year ago: A 300-page report prepared by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee found “serious misconduct” by President Donald Trump in his dealings with Ukraine; the report would serve as a foundation for debate over whether Trump should be impeached and removed from office. At the NATO summit in London, Trump branded Democrats as “unpatriotic” for moving ahead with the impeachment effort while he was overseas. After initially seeking to hold the 2020 G7 summit at a resort he owns in Florida, Trump announced that the annual gathering would be held at the Camp David retreat in Maryland. (It ended up being postponed by the coronavirus outbreak.)
Today’s Birthdays: Movie director Jean-Luc Godard is 90. Singer Jaye P. Morgan is 89. Actor Nicolas Coster is 87. Actor Mary Alice is 79. Rock singer Ozzy Osbourne is 72. Rock singer Mickey Thomas is 71. Country musician Paul Gregg (Restless Heart) is 66. Actor Steven Culp is 65. Actor Daryl Hannah is 60. Actor Julianne Moore is 60. Olympic gold medal figure skater Katarina Witt is 55. Actor Brendan Fraser is 52. Singer Montell Jordan is 52. Actor Royale Watkins is 51. Actor Bruno Campos is 47. Actor Holly Marie Combs is 47. Actor Liza Lapira is 45. Actor Lauren Roman is 45. Pop-rock singer Daniel Bedingfield is 41. Actor/comedian Tiffany Haddish is 41. Actor Anna Chlumsky (KLUHM’-skee) is 40. Actor Jenna Dewan is 40. Actor Brian Bonsall is 39. Actor Dascha Polanco is 38. Pop/rock singer-songwriter Andy Grammer is 37. Americana musician Michael Calabrese (Lake Street Dive) is 36. Actor Amanda Seyfried is 35. Actor Michael Angarano is 33. Actor Jake T. Austin is 26.
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Got a story or photos to share? |
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Got a story to share? A favorite memory of your AP days? Don't keep them to yourself. Share with your colleagues by sending to Ye Olde Connecting Editor. And don't forget to include photos!
Here are some suggestions:
- Second chapters - You finished a great career. Now tell us about your second (and third and fourth?) chapters of life.
- Spousal support - How your spouse helped in supporting your work during your AP career.
- My most unusual story - tell us about an unusual, off the wall story that you covered.
- "A silly mistake that you make"- a chance to 'fess up with a memorable mistake in your journalistic career.
- Multigenerational AP families - profiles of families whose service spanned two or more generations.
- Volunteering - benefit your colleagues by sharing volunteer stories - with ideas on such work they can do themselves.
- First job - How did you get your first job in journalism?
- Connecting "selfies" - a word and photo self-profile of you and your career, and what you are doing today. Both for new members and those who have been with us a while.
- Most unusual place a story assignment took you.
Paul Stevens
Editor, Connecting newsletter
paulstevens46@gmail.com
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