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Connecting
Sept. 25, 2023
Click here for sound of the Teletype
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Colleagues,
Good Monday morning on this Sept. 25, 2023,
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, began at sundown Sunday night and ends at nightfall tonight. Connecting shares this wish with our Jewish readers: “May you be inscribed in the Book of Life for a happy and healthy new year."
We’re saddened to report that we lost two of our colleagues over the weekend: George Hanna died Friday night, according to a Facebook post from his grandson, and Russ Percival died Sunday, according to his cousin, our colleague Jenelle Stamper. We will bring you more on their lives when more information is available.
The Associated Press was well-represented Friday night in St. Louis when five journalists were inducted into the Missouri Press Association Newspaper Hall of Fame – one of them, Jane See White, who worked for The Associated Press during the late1970s/early 80s. Our colleague Peter Arnett narrated a video honoring the career of White; they worked together in New York on investigative projects.
Ebony Reed, former AP assistant bureau chief for New England and former director of Business Development (U.S. Markets), spoke about her fiancé Terez Paylor, a journalist nationally known as a sports writer, on his posthumous induction into the Missouri Hall. Ebony has raised more than $200,000 for scholarships in his honor.
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ABOVE: Family of Jane See White at her Hall of Fame induction, from left, brother R. Mitchell White III, daughter Laura Mitchell White and sister Laura White Erdel. Jane died in January 2023 at the age of 72.
RIGHT: Ebony Reed with Dr. Donald Suggs, Hall of Fame inductee who was publisher and editor of the St. Louis American.
Others there with AP ties: Kia Breaux, a 2022 Hall of Famer and AP regional director based in Kansas City, and her husband Rod Richardson, former assistant chief in Dallas, and her AP colleague, Vance Koretos, an AP account director based in Chicago; Scott Charton, former Jefferson City and Columbia correspondent; Connie Farrow, former Springfield correspondent and St. Louis newswoman; Paul Stevens, a 2006 Hall of Famer and retired AP regional vice president and bureau chief; and Fred Sweets, former AP Washington photojournalist.
AFGHANISTAN IN A NEW LIGHT - In the years after the 2001 U.S. invasion and the ouster of the Taliban regime, Associated Press photographer Rodrigo Abd spent months on assignment in Afghanistan and learned how to use a traditional Afghan “box camera,” a handmade camera and darkroom in one. Abd returned this year with an idea: to employ the nearly disappeared Afghan art form to document how life has changed in peacetime, for better and worse, two years after U.S. troops left and the Taliban returned to power. Click here for more, and read today’s lead article.
Here's to a great week ahead – be safe, stay healthy, live each day to your fullest.
Paul
From an old-style Afghan camera, a new view of life under the Taliban emerges
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The Moradi family sits for a portrait on a small boat in Band-i-Mir lake, one of the tourist attractions in the Bamiyan Valley region in Afghanistan, Saturday, June 17, 2023. The family traveled a long way from Helmand to spend a few days for their summer vacation. During their first stint in power from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban banned photography of humans and animals as contrary to the teachings of Islam. Many box cameras were smashed, though some were quietly tolerated, Afghan photographers say. But it was the advent of the digital age that sounded the device’s death knell. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
BY ELENA BECATOROS
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The odd device draws curious onlookers everywhere. From the outside, it resembles little more than a large black box on a tripod. Inside lies its magic: a hand-made wooden camera and darkroom in one.
As a small crowd gathers around the box camera, images of beauty and of hardship ripple to life from its dark interior: a family enjoying an outing in a swan boat on a lake; child laborers toiling in brick factories; women erased by all-covering veils; armed young men with fire in their eyes.
Sitting for a portrait in a war-scarred Afghan village, a Taliban fighter remarks: “Life is much more joyful now.” For a young woman in the Afghan capital, forced out of education because of her gender, the opposite is true: “My life is like a prisoner, like a bird in a cage.”
The instrument used to record these moments is a kamra-e-faoree, or instant camera. They were a common sight on Afghan city streets in the last century — a fast and easy way to make portraits, especially for identity documents. Simple, cheap and portable, they endured amid half a century of dramatic changes in this country — from a monarchy to a communist takeover, from foreign invasions to insurgencies — until 21st-century digital technology rendered them obsolete.
Read more here. Shared by Mark Mittelstadt.
Capitol rioter who attacked AP photographer and police officers is sentenced to 5 years in prison
BY MICHAEL KUNZELMAN
WASHINGTON (AP) — A man who attacked an Associated Press photographer and threw a flagpole and smoke grenade at police officers guarding the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was sentenced on Friday to five years in prison.
Rodney Milstreed, 56, of Finksburg, Maryland, “prepared himself for battle” on Jan. 6 by injecting steroids and arming himself with a four-foot wooden club disguised as a flagpole, prosecutors said.
“He began taking steroids in the weeks leading up to January 6, so that he would be ‘jacked’ and ready because, he said, someone needed to ‘hang for treason’ and the battle might come down to hand-to-hand combat,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing.
A prosecutor showed U.S. District Judge James Boasberg videos of Milstreed’s attacks outside the Capitol. Milstreed told the judge that it was painful to watch his violent acts and hear his combative language that day.
Read more here. Shared by Richard Chady.
An AP or UPI wire machine?
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Tim Marsh – In this photo from January 1951, Maynard F. Hicks, director of the College News Bureau and assistant professor of Journalism at Washington State University, is sitting at a desk and typing on what appears to be a wire machine.
Can the wire machine be identified as that of AP/Associated Press? Or, is the machine that of UP/United Press. (United Press and International News Service merged in 1958 and became UPS/United Press International.)
Any sharp-eyed readers care to opine?
(Photo credit: Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, Washington.: https://libraries.wsu.edu/masc)
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Paul Albright - This photo tinkles a bell in my memory. In the 1960s and into the 1970s (at least), many UPI printers lacked a percentage character (%) whereas the AP printers did have the % sign. Whenever a % sign was part of a UPI article or a tabulation, the printer would print a dollar sign ($) instead of %. This caused anxiety – and a lot of phone calls about printer “malfunctions” -- among UPI broadcast and newspaper clients, especially on election nights when they ripped the UPI wire copy showing that Candidate A had 51$ of the vote while Candidate B had 49$.
His choice of music career a wise decision
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Dan Sewell - Eighteen years ago, this young man from Hamilton, Ohio, near my hometown, and I were both in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
I was covering it, he was working construction. He had always dabbled in music, and he fell in love with New Orleans’ music scene over the long months of rebuilding.
He decided to take a gamble and give up a high-paying construction job to launch a band.
David Shaw has been lead singer for The Revivalists since then. While they tour around the country, he returns to Hamilton every year to headline a Riverside music fest.
Saw them for the first time Saturday night. He made the right decision.
At gravesite of general he once wrote about
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Robert Reid - At the grave last Friday of Japanese World War II General Tomoyuki Yamashita in Tokyo. I wrote a lot about him when I was AP bureau chief in Manila.
Giants and fire in Spain
Peter Arnett - My family and I are visiting Spain for a few weeks, and below are a couple of pictures from this weekend in Sitges.
|  | These 15-foot-tall representations of 13th Century King James 11 of Aragon and Barcelona and his Queen are marched through the squares and streets of Sitges, Spain, this past weekend, during the annual Santa Tecla festival held in this pleasing coastal city just south of Barcelona. King James founded the festival in 1321 with the claim he had found a skeletal relic of Saint Tecla, a second century female follower of the apostle Paul who at the time was preaching the benefits of celibacy. Accordingly, Techla is said to have renounced her fiancée and suffered many privations protecting her virginity in the years traveling with Paul that followed. The festival parades also feature elaborate papier-mâché representations of demons, dwarfs and giants. |  | |
Advancing down Avenue Port Alegre and waving "fire sticks" loaded with exploding fireworks, marchers dressed as medieval soldiers challenge spectators to approach through the flying sparks in this traditional face-off during the popular Santa Tecla festival held in Sitges, Spain, this past weekend. Picture by Peter Arnett.
Connecting sky shot – Sri Lanka
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Jim Reindl - Full rainbow over the Indian Ocean off Colombo, Sri Lanka. Sunday morning.
BEST OF THE WEEK — FIRST WINNER
AP’s team reporting alerts the world to Libya’s disastrous floods
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Years of reporting on Libya from afar and a local freelancer’s willingness to travel treacherous roads allowed AP’s team to alert the world about a disaster of massive proportions, after heavy floods burst two dams above the city of Derna, washing away and killing thousands.
It took nearly 24 hours for news to emerge from Libya of the deadly floods. But with the country divided between rival governments with spotty records for accuracy, it was tricky to grasp the extent of the devastation.
When one of the governments reported more than 2,000 dead and counting, Libya video producer Adel Omran was the first to alert the team, after which Cairo reporter Samy Magdy called contacts in the health care and aid community, who confirmed that toll and said it was likely to rise.
Misrata-based freelance photographer Yousef Murad drove hours to the scene, sending an initial dispatch showing mass burials for the rising number of bodies. On the ground, Murad faced difficult conditions and lack of basic amenities as the stench of death overtook the city. His subsequent stories documented the immense recovery effort and the stories of survivors.
Libya, wracked by years of civil war and political strife, is no stranger to death, but the scenes of multistory apartment buildings wiped out by the force of the waters shook Libyans to their core.
Read more here.
BEST OF THE WEEK — SECOND WINNER
AP gets exclusive images of Kim Jong Un’s train at border between Russia and North Korea
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For the hours that went by while the world was guessing whether, when and how North Korean leader Kim Jong Un would travel to Russia, AP had exclusive images of Kim’s signature green train at the border between North Korea and Russia, offering strong indication his travels to Russia would be imminent.
It was a long shot to begin with, given the secrecy surrounding Kim’s travel plans. Reporter Dake Kang and photographer Han Guan Ng spent two days staking out a location in China where the sole bridge connecting North Korea and Russia is visible.
By around 8:00 Greenwich Mean Time, Sept. 11, South Korean media began reporting Kim’s train had “departed” for North Korea. Kim’s location, however, was unclear. As conflicting reports over when and whether Kim had departed, the AP crew had already seen Kim’s train approaching the bridge and reversing course back to the station. Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul kept the team informed of developments amid conflicting reports and updated the text story with what the crew saw.
The train never crossed the bridge that day, but the first AP pictures moved at 12:00 GMT. AP’s images offered the first visual indication that Kim would be traveling by train and that he was possibly already at the Russian border.
Read more here.
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Connecting wishes Happy Birthday | |
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Stories of interest
How Kodak Could Have Ruled the Photography World (Fstoppers)
By Alex Cooke
It is hard to believe nowadays, but a few decades ago, Kodak was so dominant in the photography industry that the company's name was synonymous with the image itself — the "Kodak moment." So, why is the company a shell of its former self today? This neat video takes a look at some of the major milestones in the company's history and why, despite being at the forefront of the industry at one point, they are almost totally irrelevant today.
Coming to you from snappiness, this great video takes a look at the history of Kodak and how it slowly became irrelevant in the photo industry. It is incredible to think that Kodak was the company that invented the digital camera, but it was that invention where they arguably first took a major misstep. In 1975, when that first digital camera was made, film ruled the world, and Kodak was hesitant to cut into their lucrative film business. And so, the company essentially tabled the digital camera, leaving other companies time to catch up and surpass Kodak's accomplishments. By the time the company realized the need to get competitive on the digital side of things, it was essentially too late. Check out the video above for the full rundown.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
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Michael Freedman, radio executive and university official, dies at 71 (Washington Post)
By Matt Schudel
Michael Freedman, a broadcast journalist who, as a top executive at the CBS radio network, produced some of Walter Cronkite’s final broadcasts and later was a university administrator and lecturer, died Sept. 18 at his home in Alexandria, Va. He was 71.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his son Danny Freedman said.
Mr. Freedman was drawn to radio from childhood, listening to baseball broadcasts of his hometown Detroit Tigers. “People have deep-seated reasons for going into radio,” he told the Detroit Jewish Weekly. “It’s dramatic and intense. You live for it.”
After beginning his career as a sportscaster, anchor and news director in Michigan, Mr. Freedman came to Washington in 1986 to lead the broadcast division of United Press International.
Later, after stint as a Capitol Hill press secretary and as public affairs director at George Washington University, he returned to radio in 1998 as general manager of CBS radio network news in New York.
Read more here. Shared by Robert Kimball.
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Opinion Even $500 million isn’t enough to save local journalism (Washington Post)
By the Editorial Board
Books, op-eds, think pieces and conferences — many, many conferences: The plight of local journalism in the United States has received its share of attention. At a 2022 summit on this topic, an industry veteran said that there’s “probably more people trying to help the newspaper business than in the newspaper business.”
A large pile of cash is now sidling up to all the chatter. In an initiative announced this month, 22 donor organizations, including the Knight Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, are teaming up to provide more than $500 million to boost local news over five years — an undertaking called Press Forward.
Journalists and publishers on the local scene in markets across the country have worked nonstop to bring their neighbors important stories and experiment with ways of paying for the service. The injection of more than a half-billion dollars is sure to help the quest for a durable and replicable business model.
Read more here. Shared by Dennis Conrad, Len Iwanski, Richard Chady.
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Today in History – Sept. 25, 2023 | |
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Today is Monday, Sept. 25, the 268th day of 2022. There are 97 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On Sept. 25, 1957, nine Black students who’d been forced to withdraw from Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, because of unruly white crowds were escorted to class by members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division.
On this date:
In 1513, Spanish explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and sighted the Pacific Ocean.
In 1789, the first United States Congress adopted 12 amendments to the Constitution and sent them to the states for ratification. (Ten of the amendments became the Bill of Rights.)
In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson collapsed after a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, during a national speaking tour in support of the Treaty of Versailles.
In 1956, the first trans-Atlantic telephone cable officially went into service with a three-way ceremonial call between New York, Ottawa and London.
In 1964, the sitcom “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.,” starring Jim Nabors, premiered on CBS.
In 1978, 144 people were killed when a Pacific Southwest Airlines Boeing 727 and a private plane collided over San Diego.
In 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor was sworn in as the first female justice on the Supreme Court.
In 1992, NASA’s Mars Observer blasted off on a $980 million mission to the red planet (the probe disappeared just before entering Martian orbit in August 1993).
In 1994, Russian President Boris Yeltsin began a five-day swing through the United States, hoping to encourage American investment in his country’s struggling economy.
In 2012, President Barack Obama, speaking to the U.N. General Assembly, pledged U.S. support for Syrians trying to oust President Bashar Assad, calling him “a dictator who massacres his own people.”
In 2013, skipper Jimmy Spithill and Oracle Team USA won the America’s Cup with one of the greatest comebacks in sports history, speeding past Dean Barker and Emirates Team New Zealand in the winner-take-all Race 19 on San Francisco Bay.
In 2016, golf legend Arnold Palmer died at age 87.
In 2017, former congressman Anthony Weiner was sentenced to 21 months behind bars for illicit online contact with a 15-year-old girl.
In 2018, Bill Cosby was sentenced to three-to-10 years in prison for drugging and molesting a woman at his suburban Philadelphia home. (After serving nearly three years, Cosby went free in June 2021 after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned his conviction.)
In 2020, the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lay in state at the U.S. Capitol, making history as the first woman so honored in the United States.
Today’s Birthdays: Polka bandleader Jimmy Sturr is 82. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates is 80. Actor Josh Taylor is 80. Actor Robert Walden is 80. Actor-producer Michael Douglas is 79. Model Cheryl Tiegs is 76. Actor Mimi Kennedy is 75. Movie director Pedro Almodovar is 74. Actor-director Anson Williams is 74. Actor Mark Hamill is 72. Basketball Hall of Famer Bob McAdoo is 72. Actor Colin Friels is 71. Actor Michael Madsen is 65. Actor Heather Locklear is 62. Actor Aida Turturro is 61. Actor Tate Donovan is 60. TV personality Keely Shaye Smith is 60. Actor Maria Doyle Kennedy is 59. Basketball Hall of Famer Scottie Pippen is 58. Actor Jason Flemyng is 57. Actor Will Smith is 55. Actor Hal Sparks is 54. Actor Catherine Zeta-Jones is 54. Rock musician Mike Luce (Drowning Pool) is 52. Actor Bridgette Wilson-Sampras is 50. Actor Clea DuVall is 46. Actor Robbie Jones is 46. Actor Joel David Moore is 46. Actor Chris Owen is 43. Rapper T. I. is 43. Actor Van Hansis is 42. Actor Lee Norris is 42. Actor/rapper Donald Glover is 40. Actor Zach Woods is 39. Actor Jordan Gavaris is 34. Olympic silver medal figure skater Mao Asada is 33. Actor Emmy Clarke is 32.
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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
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