Connecting - March 25, 2024

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March 25, 2024

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Colleagues,

Good Monday morning on this March 25, 2024,

Patricia Lantis, known to many of us for her excellence and responsiveness as director of AP Wide World Photos, has died at the age of 75.

We bring you a story on the death last week of our Connecting colleague. If you have a favorite memory to share of working with her, please send it along.

GENE HERRICK IN HOSPICE CARE: Our longtime colleague Gene Herrick, an AP photographer who covered the Korean War and the Civil Rights Movement, has been moved to hospice care at a nursing home in Virginia. If you would like to mail him a note, here is the address: Heritage Hall, 120 Old Virginia Ave., Rich Creek, Va. 24147.

Here's to a great week - be safe, stay healthy, live each day to your fullest.

Paul

Patricia Lantis, former director of Wide World Photos, dies at 75

Patricia Lantis, right, celebrating Hal Buell’s 85^th birthday with his longtime partner Claudia DiMartino in April 2016. Claudia died Oct. 21, 2023, and Hal died Jan. 29, 2024.

Steve Hart - Patricia Lantis, former director of AP Wide World Photos, passed away last week according to her former business partner Uri Davidov. She was 75. She had been suffering from severe chronic Lyme disease for quite some time.

The last time I communicated with her was the day we learned of Hal Buell’s death. I texted her and she knew, saying “We lost a good man, didn’t we?”

Patricia started at the AP as an administrative assistant in AP Newsfeatures in 1979. She became a saleswoman in Wide World in 1980. She was promoted to deputy director in 1983 while the late Jim Donna was director. When Jim was tapped by Lou Boccardi as assistant to the president, Patricia was promoted to director, a role she held until leaving the AP, in the late 1990s. Lou said “she was a star in Wide World and her appointment to replace Jim was an easy choice for me to make,” and that he “never saw Patricia without a smile on her face.”

After the AP, she went to work at Time/Life photos where she met her future business partner Uri Davidov. In 2002, the two left Time to start their own photo agency, Landov Media. Landov was quite successful for 15 years. They decided to shut down the service in 2017, when Patricia retired. She is survived by her husband Mark.

There are no arrangements at this time.

The first time I really engaged with Patricia was when I was a supervisor on the photo desk at 50 Rock. One Saturday morning, a colleague (Pat Conroy) who was on the AP (photo) TV desk came to me saying we had a problem in that we had promised a color photo of some news event from the week to Saturday Night Live. In those days, SNL relied on us for photos for Weekend Update. Normally we supplied those on Friday. This picture didn’t make it, and the only way to get it to them was to print on a very high-end printer. The only one we had at the time was in Wide World’s office which was locked up for the weekend. Pat and I somehow found our way in; fired up the printer and got the print to SNL.

A few days later while on the desk, Patricia called me. Understating the moment, she wasn’t too happy with us and, ahem, admonished me for not getting permission, etc. I adored her from that moment on and we became fast friends.

I was lucky enough to work with her on a couple of projects when I was in Corp Comm, and then later when she had me as a consultant for a couple of projects with Landov.

More thoughts on Gannett, McClatchy decision to drop AP services

Shawn Marsh - Word that Gannett and McClatchy have decided to end their relationships with The Associated Press brought to mind one of my last acts as a radio news director before I was hired months later as AP broadcast editor in New Jersey.

The owner had told me to either drop the AP or eliminate a staff position. I can't remember what our assessment was in those days, but given we were located in a solid medium market it equaled the salary of a fulltime anchor/reporter.

Without hesitation, I cut the position. I felt AP was as essential to our newscasts as typewriters, telephones, fax machines and tape recorders. The Daybook connected us with sources. We could keep tabs on what was happening around the state and in the New York metro area. AP brought the nation and world to our audience, written (mostly) in broadcast-friendly fashion.

But if I was back at my old broadcast group and the question was posed to me today, I would cut AP from the budget.

When I started at AP in 1993, there were 34 employees in New Jersey (including technicians) spread among five bureaus. The first AP story I wrote was about flooding caused by a storm that drenched the state. We filled the wire with a variety of breaking news and enterprise that was used by newspaper and broadcast customers in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and the world. And there was cooperation between print and broadcast members fostered by a COB who sat a few seats away.

I would always tell our smallest stations that they didn't have one person on staff because, with AP, they had 1,000 based around the state, nation and world.

Today, there are three staffers in New Jersey! Some days there are no New Jersey stories on the state wire and AI is writing broadcast without flair or local flavor. Trying to determine what stories to pursue had become a daily moving target dictated by managers from outside the state and by metrics which are easily manipulated.

AP often trails the competition when news alerts pop up on my phone.

The last story I wrote for AP (from my home office in New Jersey) was the sentencing in federal court in Washington of an Ohio man convicted in the Jan. 6 attack. When I cleaned out my desk, there were cobwebs in the control bureau and I shudder to think what nightmare was stewing in the refrigerator.

My radio staff would have to work harder scanning social media and the internet. But I'd try to ease that by fostering cooperation with several newspapers and TV stations.

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Campbell Gardett - So I was reading an AP story about the water crisis in Johannesburg, one more emergency that seems important to me, and a piece of news I hadn’t seen elsewhere. And suddenly up on the screen pops a newly aggressive appeal for donation to Mother AP. So yes, sure, with the recent defections in mind, I sent in my pittance. But if AP has been standing in the shadow of the gallows for a while, it feels like the service has now been asked to please go up the steps.

I don’t know the numbers, but can AP’s legacy business model possibly survive in today’s information environment? In the years following the advent of the telegraph, a cooperative of newspapers and then broadcast entities was surely inevitable. But what is inevitable now? Individual subscription?

Better minds than mine are certainly at work on the matter. For my part, I still feel that AP’s real value proposition is adherence to some very old-fashioned notions of impartial treatment and factuality. I would even advocate a retreat from terms like “lies” and “false claims,” which are conclusionary. Maybe it takes more words to say that Person X has made Claim Y, and that the courts have found the claim false.

But I think and hope that in the future what people will want to pay for is not just speed, which is everywhere, nor availability, which is everywhere, but respect for the facts and for the reader’s own competence. For me, those would be at the top not only of Mother AP’s mission, but of her business model as well.

A harrowing moment captured by Malcolm Browne for the world to see

Contact sheet showing the series of photographs made on June 11, 1963, by AP Saigon Bureau Chief, Malcolm Browne, of the self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc. AP Photo Library, New York.

Valerie Komor – Although Malcolm Browne (1931-2012) spent most of his career at The New York Times as a foreign correspondent, his name still attaches to one harrowing image made while he was AP Saigon bureau chief (1961-65). On the morning of June 11, 1963, the Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, sat down in the middle of Saigon’s Phan Dinh Phung Square, doused himself in gasoline, and lit a match to his garments. As he died, horrified crowds gathered around him.

Self-immolation of “awakened beings” is an ancient tradition in Buddhism, and only rarely resorted to. But in the summer and fall of 1963, the Buddhist Crisis erupted, as monks responded to the repression of pro-Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem, who was driving monks from their pagodas and into prison. Browne, who had developed longstanding relationships with the monks in Hue, referred to the Buddhist protests as his “personal beat.”

More than a decade after Browne’s death, and just weeks after the passing of his wife, Le Lieu Browne, the University of New Mexico Press has published “The Ultimate Protest: Malcolm W. Browne, Thich Quang Duc, and the News Photograph That Stunned the World” by biographer, historian and former journalist, Ray E. Boomhower, senior editor at the Indiana Historical Society.

Boomhower began his research during the height of the pandemic, when the corporate archives was providing reference services solely on a remote basis. Most useful to Boomhower were the Foreign Bureau Correspondence, Saigon Bureau Records, Malcolm Browne Papers, and oral history interviews with Browne. Le Lieu Browne also offered access to personal papers in her possession.

“Ultimate Protest” covers much more ground than its subtitle suggests. It is a history of AP’s legendary Saigon bureau and operations during the early years of the war. Browne arrived on November 7, 1961, joining Vietnamese colleague Ha Van Tran and later welcoming Peter Arnett, Horst Faas, and many other young reporters and photographers, ready take on the biggest story of the era.

From the start, Browne had an insatiable desire to explain and interpret what his eyes and ears were telling him. His stories about U.S. troop build-up angered U.S. officials, who meant to keep hidden from the American people the increasing involvement of the United States in Vietnam. Boomhower’s book is a timely and welcome tribute to the original “unquiet American,” an American who cleaved to the highest ideals of transparency and objectivity, no matter where those ideals might lead him.

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Joe Young – Last Tuesday, our Bloomington Press Club (which I joined some years ago after the demise of the Indianapolis Press Club) had Ray E. Boomhower as guest speaker. I attended my with daughter Susan Brewster (IU alumnae with a AB and MA in Journalism). Ray and I are fellow Ernie Pyle School of Journalism grads as well.

Over the years I have worked with Ray, who is senior editor of the Indiana History Society’s popular magazine “Traces” along with other History Center positions. Ray is also the author of several books.

His talk was excellent and very interesting. I learned a lot about Malcolm W. Browne’s work for AP running the Saigon bureau in Vietnam. He was not only a prize-winning journalist (Pulitizer) who always carried a camera, but also a prize-winning photojournalist (World Press Photo of Year 1963).

Also mentioned in Saigon was AP’s Peter Arnett, colleague who worked with Browne.

New-member profile – Brian King

Brian King - I started with the AP in Albany in June 1968 right after graduation from Georgetown University. Drafted into the U.S. Army in May 1969, most of my service was at Fort Carson, Colo. After discharge, I returned to Albany in May 1971; transferred to Washington in May 1973 and worked there through the end of 1979.

In Albany, I was night editor and state editor. Other than Attica and Cornell, I wrote the most widely used obituary for Virginia of “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus” fame, having been the last to interview her. In Washington, I soon became part of the so-called regional staff, assigned to a handful of Midwest congressional delegations, so mostly covered agriculture policy and food stamps, filled in for Don Kendall, and scored the first interview (1977) by a U.S. news service with Fidel Castro in 16 years.

Rather than return to the Capitol from the desk, I left the AP in January 1980 to edit the work of Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland’s project analyzing the structure of agriculture, a project finished just as Ronald Reagan’s inauguration took those jobs away. Six years as public affairs director of a small, struggling agricultural nonprofit followed, organizing policy conferences and peddling all kinds of National Agriculture Day merchandise. After leadership changes there made it less than rewarding, I freelanced for a bit and then became public affairs director of the Appalachian Trail Conference (now Conservancy), which leads the maintenance of the A.T. and manages the 250,000 acres of public lands associated with it. The scope of duties as #2 was broad, from spokesman to fund-raising to publications and sales and “other,” until years of growth and reorganizations spun some responsibilities off to new departments.

I spent the last 17 of 35 years as publisher and gatekeeper of a century of trail archives. Yet another set of new leaders decided by mid-2022 to give away the archives, shrink envied sales to a souvenir stand, and abolish that senior position (“No one buys books anymore”), with 143 editions of 20 books, 35 calendars, and 30 consumer and trade catalogues on the shelves.

Since then, alongside a little contract work for it, I’ve been spending time (a) culling 50 years of paper and other acquired mysteries from 43 years living in my newly renovated 1840 slave quarters, (b) trying to rehabilitate the wildflower yards covered with excavated rural West Virginia clay, (c) exploring my 4 acres of woods, and (d) working on a second edition of my The Appalachian Trail: Celebrating America’s Hiking Trail, which has sold more than 31,000 copies since 2012. I do subscribe to “The Morning Wire.”

AP, Texas Tribune to share select news content in new collaboration

AP news release, March 22

The Associated Press and The Texas Tribune today announced a content sharing agreement, in which both organizations will benefit from each other’s journalism.

The Texas Tribune will receive access to AP’s Texas news and its comprehensive immigration coverage from across the United States and beyond. The AP will now distribute the Tribune’s reporting on Texas to its members and customers, complementing the news organization’s existing coverage of the state.

“This agreement is a great example of how two mission driven news organizations can work together to bolster their news report and better serve their audiences,” said AP’s U.S. News Director Josh Hoffner. “It’s an exciting step toward strengthening the news ecosystem in a state that produces huge amounts of news every day.”

“The Texas Tribune is thrilled to be part of this new agreement with The Associated Press, which will give our nonprofit newsroom access to The AP’s agenda-setting coverage of immigration policy and Texas state issues, while The AP will help our free, nonpartisan, public-service journalism reach an even wider audience,” said Texas Tribune Editor in Chief Sewell Chan. “We already use The AP’s authoritative elections data; this agreement takes our collaboration to a new level. The AP is the backbone of the news ecosystem in America — and across much of the world. I’m deeply excited by The AP’s interest in working with state and local nonprofit newsrooms, which are a bright spot in a rapidly changing news industry.”

Click here for link to this story.

AP wins two awards

New York Times, Reuters Are Top Winners in Overseas Press Club Awards

OPC of America news release

NEW YORK, March 20, 2024 — Coverage of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine dominated the competition in the 85th Annual Overseas Press Club Awards. The New York Times and Reuters were the big winners, with each news organization claiming four awards. Two of the Times’ awards were for coverage of the Israel-Hamas war and two were for work in Ukraine and Russia. In addition to its coverage of Gaza, Reuters won for reporting on violence in Sudan, drug trafficking in Mexico, and the global risk of new human viruses spread from bat populations.

The awards will be presented at the annual OPC awards dinner in New York on April 25, with David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, receiving the club’s President’s Award for his inspired contribution to international journalism over three decades.

“We are thrilled to be able to honor so much remarkable and courageous work this year,” said OPC President Scott Kraft. “The quality of the journalism our judges reviewed was especially strong and competitive – a reminder that international reporting remains not only vital but essential.”

“We also are extremely proud to introduce a new award that recognizes continuing coverage of a global conflict. A special congratulations to our first winner in that category – a team from Reuters for its powerful work on the civil war in Sudan.”

Six of the OPC’s 22 awards recognize coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, including video reports and breaking news delivered under intense Israeli bombardment. Five honor frontline reporting on the war in Ukraine, the aftermath of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s civilian population, and consequences of the war inside Russia.

The New Yorker won three awards: the Ed Cunningham Award for a story about women from Dubai’s ruling family fleeing oppression, the Flora Lewis Award for a series of essays written from Gaza, and the Roy Rowan Award for an investigation into China’s illegal operation of its fishing and seafood industries.

The Associated Press won two awards – the Kim Wall Award for a multimedia piece about migrants’ deadly sea voyages as they drift across the Atlantic from Africa, and the Peter Jennings Award, shared with FRONTLINE (PBS), for the film 20 Days in Mariupol, which also won an Academy Award.

Read more here. Shared by Sibby Christensen.

AP Book Review: ‘Newshawks in Berlin’ illustrates tough choices news organizations face in wartime

BY ANDREW DEMILLO

The Associated Press

Journalism is often referred to as the first draft of history, especially when covering war and international conflicts.

“Newshawks in Berlin: The Associated Press and Nazi Germany” explores the challenges the world’s largest news organization faced in trying to balance journalistic ethics with ability to cover World War II within the confines of a dictatorship. The book is a fair but blunt assessment of AP’s work during that time.

The book is written by two veteran AP journalists — Randy Herschaft and the late Larry Heinzerling — along with Columbia Journalism School professor emerita Ann Cooper.

It follows up on a 2017 in-depth review Herschaft and Heinzerling authored for the AP looking at the news organization’s operations in Nazi Germany. That review was prompted by an academic paper a year earlier that asserted the AP ceded influence to Nazi propagandists over the production of its German photo service.

“Newshawks,” however, goes beyond looking at the photos operations that were the focus of the 2017 review. It richly mines AP’s vast archives and other sources to provide a fascinating inside account of a journalistic era that’s completely different from now but poses many of the same questions.

Read more here. Click here to order online from Columbia University Press. Enter Code: CUP20 for 20% discount.

Connecting wishes Happy Birthday

Josh Hoffner

Joe Macenka

Stories of interest

NBC’s Chuck Todd lays into his network for hiring former RNC chief Ronna McDaniel as an analyst (AP)

BY DAVID BAUDER

NEW YORK (AP) — Former NBC News “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd criticized his network Sunday for hiring former Republican National Committee head Ronna McDaniel as a paid contributor, saying on the air that many NBC journalists are uncomfortable with the decision.

Todd spoke on “Meet the Press” after his successor as moderator, Kristen Welker, interviewed McDaniel about her role in the 2020 election aftermath.

“Our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation because I don’t know what to believe,” Todd said. “I don’t have any idea whether any answer she gave to you was because she didn’t want to mess up her contract” with NBC, he said.

McDaniel “has credibility issues that she has to deal with: Is she speaking for herself or is she speaking on behalf of who is paying for her?”

Todd said many NBC journalists are uncomfortable with the hiring because some of their professional dealings with the RNC during McDaniel’s tenure “have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.”

Read more here.

Today in History - March 25, 2024

Today is Monday, March 25, the 85th day of 2024. There are 281 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On March 25, 1931, in the so-called “Scottsboro Boys” case, nine young Black men were taken off a train in Alabama, accused of raping two white women; after years of convictions, death sentences and imprisonment, the nine were eventually vindicated.

On this date:

In 1634, English colonists sent by Lord Baltimore arrived in present-day Maryland.

In 1894, Jacob S. Coxey began leading an “army” of unemployed from Massillon (MA’-sih-luhn), Ohio, to Washington D.C., to demand help from the federal government.

In 1911, 146 people, mostly young female immigrants, were killed when fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in New York.

In 1915, the U.S. Navy lost its first commissioned submarine as the USS F-4 sank off Hawaii, claiming the lives of all 21 crew members.

In 1947, a coal-dust explosion inside the Centralia Coal Co. Mine No. 5 in Washington County, Illinois, claimed 111 lives; 31 men survived.

In 1954, RCA announced it had begun producing color television sets at its plant in Bloomington, Indiana.

In 1960, Ray Charles recorded “Georgia on My Mind” as part of his “The Genius Hits the Road” album in New York.

In 1965, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led 25,000 people to the Alabama state capitol in Montgomery after a five-day march from Selma to protest the denial of voting rights to Blacks. Later that day, civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit homemaker, was shot and killed by Ku Klux Klansmen.

In 1987, the Supreme Court, in Johnson v. Transportation Agency, ruled 6-3 that an employer could promote a woman over an arguably more-qualified man to help get women into higher-ranking jobs.

In 1990, 87 people, most of them Honduran and Dominican immigrants, were killed when fire raced through an illegal social club in New York City. (An arsonist set the fire after being thrown out of the club following an argument with his girlfriend; Julio Gonzalez died in prison in 2016.)

In 1996, an 81-day standoff by the anti-government Freemen began at a ranch near Jordan, Montana.

In 2017, stars and fans gathered for a public memorial to honor the late mother-daughter film stars Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher.

In 2018, Linda Brown, who as a young girl in Kansas became embroiled in a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case that challenged segregation in public schools, died at the age of 75.

In 2022, Taylor Hawkins, drummer for the Foo Fighters, died at age 50 in a hotel in Bogotá, Colombia during the band’s South American tour.

In 2023, powerful tornadoes tore through parts of the Deep South, killing 26 people in Mississippi and obliterating dozens of buildings.

Today’s Birthdays: Film critic Gene Shalit is 98. Former astronaut James Lovell is 96. Feminist activist and author Gloria Steinem is 90. Singer Anita Bryant is 84. Actor Paul Michael Glaser is 81. Singer Sir Elton John is 77. Actor Bonnie Bedelia is 76. Actor-comedian Mary Gross is 71. Actor James McDaniel is 66. Movie producer Amy Pascal is 66. Rock musician Steve Norman (Spandau Ballet) is 64. Actor Brenda Strong is 64. Actor Fred Goss is 63. Actor-writer-director John Stockwell is 63. Actor Marcia Cross is 62. Author Kate DiCamillo is 60. Actor Lisa Gay Hamilton is 60. Actor Sarah Jessica Parker is 59. Baseball Hall of Famer Tom Glavine is 58. TV personality Ben Mankiewicz is 57. Olympic bronze medal figure skater Debi Thomas is 57. Actor Laz Alonso is 53. Singer Melanie Blatt (All Saints) is 49. Actor Domenick Lombardozzi is 48. Actor Lee Pace is 45. Actor Sean Faris is 42. Comedian-actor Alex Moffat (TV: “Saturday Night Live”) is 42. Former auto racer Danica Patrick is 42. Actor-singer Katharine McPhee is 40. Comedian-actor Chris Redd (TV: “Saturday Night Live”) is 39. Singer Jason Castro is 37. Rapper Big Sean is 36. Rap DJ-producer Ryan Lewis is 36. Actor Matthew Beard is 35. Actor-singer Aly (AKA Alyson) Michalka (mish-AL’-kah) is 35. Actor Kiowa Gordon is 34. Actor Seychelle Gabriel is 33.

Got a story or photos to share?

Connecting is a daily newsletter published Monday through Friday that reaches more than 1,800 retired and former Associated Press employees, present-day employees, and news industry and journalism school colleagues. It began in 2013. Past issues can be found by clicking Connecting Archive in the masthead. Its author, Paul Stevens, retired from the AP in 2009 after a 36-year career as a newsman in Albany and St. Louis, correspondent in Wichita, chief of bureau in Albuquerque, Indianapolis and Kansas City, and Central Region vice president based in Kansas City.

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:

- 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.

- 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?

- Most unusual place a story assignment took you.

Paul Stevens

Editor, Connecting newsletter

paulstevens46@gmail.com