When the News Went Live: Dallas 1963

Book TV Reruns "When the News Went Live" Texas Book Festival’s Author Panel with Dan Rather from Texas House Chamber

Program Also Available on DVD

C-SPAN-2's Book TV will rebroadcast When the News Went Live's Texas Book Festival author panel, moderated in October 2005 by Dan Rather in the Chamber of the Texas House of Representatives.

This second Book TV appearance of Bob Huffaker, Bill Mercer, George Phenix and Wes Wise is also sold on DVD through C-SPAN. Their vivid and compelling book is approaching its third printing since it was released in autumn 2004.

Reviewers unanimously praise the book for its authority and readability.

CSPAN will announce broadcast rerun times for this program at
http://www.booktv.org/

The program is available on DVD here.

The authors' BookPeople Book TV program is also available here.

 

Literary Blogs We Recommend

These three blogs are worthy of an extended visit:

• Georganna Hancock posts some great  pointers for writers
• Many folks think John Kremer wrote the book on book publicity
• Penny C. Sansevieri ponders publishing and marketing

Are you a reader? Or a writer? Isn't everyone?

By George Phenix

After those of us in the  Matlock generation die off, who will read the traditional newspapers?

I have four grown children (grown children - my favorite oxymoron) and not a damn one of them subscribes to a newspaper that requires them to put on house shoes and pad out to the curb and pick it up. Electronic. That's how they get their news.

And ours was a newspaper family. We owned several community weeklies and my kids even worked there.

Unfortunately, my kids are not alone. Recently, George Will wrote: The percentages of adults who say they read a paper "yesterday" are ominous.

65 and older, 60 percent
50-64, 52 percent
30-49, 39 percent
18-29, 23 percent

He says Americans ages 8 to 18 spend an average of six hours and 21 minutes a day with media of all sorts but just 43 minutes with print media.

Bummer. My kids are missing a lot. The closing of our favorite restaurant, for example, didn't make the fragmented electronic outlets.

Readership is tanking. The Audit Bureau of Circulation reported a 1.9 percent drop in daily circulation, and a 2.5 percent decline on Sundays.

True -- almost.

All newspapers lie about circulation, intentionally or not. They never, never adjust for population growth. Yet, when they report falter advertising revenue numbers, they always "adjust for inflation." Why not "adjust for population growth." Why not? Because the decline would be steeper.

Most old media outlets are suffering from the new world competition. Only magazines show an increase in ad dollars. The New York Times reports: "Of the $141 billion spent on all forms of advertising in 2004...the newspaper share was down, the magazine share was flat, and the Internet was growing fast. Advertising Age predicted last week that the combined advertising revenue of Google and Yahoo this year would rival those of the big three television networks, marking what is called a watershed moment in the evolution of the Internet."

Incredible.

And then there are the blogs. Fully 56% of Americans haven't even heard of
blogs and only three percent read them daily, among the young they are
standard fare, with 44 % of online Americans aged 18-29 reading them often, says the Economist quoting a poll by CNN/USA Today/Gallup. Obviously, the younger people just aren't buying what the older people are selling. These days, everyone can become a reporter. But few electronic outlets have matched OhmyNews in South Korea. In just five years, OhmyNews has two million readers and over 33,000 citizen reporters backed up by only 50 permanent staff, according to the Economist.

Got video you think is newsworthy? Send it to Now Public and file your video story. Several tsunami stories were filed this way.

Podcasts? Try http://www.omn.org/ which is a site called Open Media Network, the future of public TV and radio. Don't like what you're getting on
commercial broadcast outlets? Start your own.

Sigh. Does anybody remember crystal radio sets?

Want Your Own Newspaper?

By George Phenix

If I were 20 years younger, I would launch an electronic newspaper under the noses of the downtown daily (the Austin American Statesman).  And I would whip their butts.

In Texas, it ain't bragging if it's true.  And I've already whipped the daily once before with a weekly newspaper (The Westlake Picayune).

This time, it might be even easier.  Only this time, it wouldn't be a newspaper -- it would be a blog.

Think about it.  Schools generate most of the news for community newspapers.

What the hell, every parent loves seeing a picture of their kid in the newspaper.  And with cell phones that take pictures, every soccer mom could post pictures of their kid on the community newspaper site.  Text to follow.

Ditto PTA meetings.  School board meetings.

No need for reporters as such.  Have the local participants post their stories themselves. Controversial?  No problem with "Pro" and "Con" columns.

And for the schools themselves, what a blessing this would be.  Post the calendar, homework assignments, parent conferences, field trips.  Tax rates, too.

Ask any old sports reporter and they'll tell you the toughest assignment they ever had was covering high school football.  No press box.   Poor lighting.  Cold.  Wet.  No problem.  All sports parents are fanatics.  They'll write the game stories and not whine about the conditions.  Eleven starters?  Eleven parents writing about their family's personal hero.  No problem because space is not a problem in the electronic world.

The community newspaper blog could be set up with more departments than the traditional daily ever thought of.  Stamp collectors could have their own section.  Genealogists, gerontologists, geologists (enough with the g-words,George)...special sections for special interests.  ALL special interests.

And the news would be posted 24/7.  A daily newspaper all day long!

Libel?  Well hell yes, libel is a problem.  But don't you have a cousin who is a lawyer?

Editors?  Admittedly, I haven't solved this one yet.  Even Rupert Murdoch has admonished editors to abandon their "God-like" relationship with their readers (amen), but some sort of filtration system is helpful.

Advertising?  Potentially, this is a bigger problem than libel.  Local merchants are slower to come  on board with ads in the new media.  Banners,streamers, pop-ups...they will be slow to convince.  But they will.

Well.  That's the outline.  Go flesh it out yourself.

The problem with many bloggers is that they don't think big enough.  Too many see themselves as Avenging Angels, independent Samurai, Lone Rangers.

Screw that.  Think big.  If you really want to rattle the Main Stream Media,start your own community newspaper/blog.  Just imagine if you create an entity which not only delivers the news but also gives the reader a seat at the table.  Exciting.

A word of caution.  In public opinion polls, journalists now rank below trial lawyers.  Bloggers must avoid God-like attitudes or they will suffer the same fate.   Ultimately. 

From hot type to hot heads...or as the news morphs

By George Phenix

It should come as no surprise that I'm a hot-type kinda guy. Heritage being what it is. I still remember the scars on the hands and wrists of the Linotype operators at the newspapers. As they would pound out a line of type, hot lead would splash from the well on the sides of their machines.

Those guys (interestingly, most were men. I wonder how they got men to take typing classes back in the early days?) anyway, those guys were experts at reading text upside-down and backwards as they literally hammered the rows of metal sentences into a rectangle the size of a newspaper page called a pig, for some reason that escapes me.

I learned how to read upside-down and backwards, too. Gave me a secret weapon back when I was a city hall reporter. I could read letters that weren't pointed my way.

Where am I headed with all this?

First, one more digression. I read somewhere that the day President Kennedy was assassinated, the Ft. Worth Star Telegram put out seven special editions and people were lined up outside the building anxiously waiting to buy each ssue as it came hot off the press.

My point (finally) is that the way people get their news has been morphing
all my life. Yours too?

Yep, the telegraph put the Pony Express out of business. And things have
been changing ever since.

In 1963, most people didn't believe it until they read it in their local
newspaper. (I know, I know...today, people don't believe their local
newspaper, their local TV...nuthin. And that's not all bad.)

But, when the president was murdered, the nation and the world hungered for more and more information. Was it the Communists? The Mob? Who would do such a thing? And who the hell was this shrimp Lee Harvey Oswald?

Television came into its own.

Today, we've morphed from gawd-awful talking heads on cable news to a nation mainlining news from the Internet. Info anarchy to some. Freedom for others.

Just this week I learned something from Boing Boing, with their nod to Chris Anderson's Long Tail blog. 

Here's Chris' stats on the meltdown of mainstream media:

• Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999
• Television: network TV's audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
• Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
• Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
• Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend
• Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole

And, as you might expect, there's growth on the other side of the ledger, as
Anderson writes:

Up:

• Movies: 2004 was another record year, both for theaters and DVDs
• Videogames: even in the last year of this generation of consoles,sales hit a new record
• Web: online ads will grow 30% this year, breaking $10 billion (5.4% ofall advertising)

Whatever the outcome, transitions are part of the fabric of this nation.
Nobody know the final outcome, but, lordy, it's fun keeping score.

Bless the Bloggers

By Bob Huffaker

So now vigilant blogs have uncovered the GOP source of the GOP Schiavo memo that GOP spinners tried to blame on the Vast Anti-GOP Conspiracy.

After their questioning CBS documents about the Texas Air National Guard's pampering the young Bush, it's good to see them on the case.

Keep being equal-opportunity iconoclasts, bloggers. You might save freedom of speech yet.

Confessions of a Conspirator

By Bob Huffaker

OK, I'm part of the JFK assassination cover-up.  I admit it.

 

Keeping the secret all these years hasn't been easy, what with those constant visits from the mob, Vladimir Putin, that diehard Fidel Castro, and LBJ's ghost.  So now the truth is out at last, and I feel marvelous just having gotten it off my chest.

 

Some bloggists are criticizing When the News Went Live: Dallas 1963 for ignoring the obvious horrible truth behind who really shot JFK. One fellow suggests that all four of us reporters somehow saved ourselves from certain death by keeping quiet for all these years about what we knew. He even hints darkly that each of us somehow advanced his career by joining the cover-up: Bill as famous play-by-play announcer, George as publisher of Texas Weekly, Wes as Dallas Mayor, and I as a Texas Monthly editor. That's one of the funniest things we ever heard, and it still has us laughing.

 

Most conspiracy criticism has come from decent folks who are properly skeptical of an establishment that has damn well earned all the skepticism it gets. Some of them report that they enjoyed reading the book even if they wish that we had dealt with the proliferation of conspiracy theories.

 

That would have been a different book. We dealt instead with things we know firsthand and those we have investigated.

The physical evidence of the murders of Kennedy, Tippit, and Oswald is incontrovertible, complete with complete and consistent witness accounts of Oswald's and Ruby's movements, ballistics, photographic and autopsy evidence.

Having covered these three murders four decades ago, I went back into Warren Commission testimony, police reports, FBI reports, and other reliable evidence for a year of research while writing the book.  Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, is a  consultant to assassination books, articles and documentaries.  His theory prompted the  House Select Committee to examine police audio in its 1970s investigations.  He is a wise skeptic who has had his own conspiracy theories and has devoted his whole professional life to studying the case.  He was kind enough to fact-check the book, and he helped us avoid mistakes that we might have made without his expertise. Gary convinced me of some facts, and I convinced him of some.

All the best research confirms that Oswald acted alone in the murder of JFK and Tippit, and that Ruby was too flaky and too wired to have kept secrets.  The controversy over the physical evidence is a shame, since it detracts from the real questions that remain, such as the documented cover-up by the FBI and Oswald's associations with people who might have influenced or encouraged him to kill JFK.

We all agree that Oswald and Ruby both acted alone and independently, but none of us would ever claim that others might not have influenced Oswald, especially given the FBI's concealing their knowledge of the assassin and the CIA's shadowy presence. On CBS-TV the morning after the assassination, my first question to Chief Jesse Curry confirmed FBI surveillance of the suspect.

But Ruby was a police and media groupie, and nobody in his right mind would have chosen him as a conspirator--and certainly not as a hit man. I talked to Ruby enough to know that much myself, and his roommate George Senator had no secrets either.  He was just a bartender who shared Ruby's apartment and might or might not have had a physical relationship with him--not that there's anything wrong with that.

But don't get me started.

 

I invite all conspiracy-minded folks to read When the News Went Live, give us your best shot, and let us know if you enjoyed the book.

This is an act of shameless self promotion; Or, the birth of a blog

We are four older guys who, when we were fourty years younger, happened to be thrown into the task of reporting the assassination of President Kennedy. Reporting it to our hometown Dallas, to the nation and to the world. It was a tough job. We were so busy that we didn't have time to mourn ourselves until days later.

Back then, news was different. Most people didn't believe it until they read it in the local newspaper. But when the President was murdered, people were hungry for more and more information. Television news came into the living room -- and stayed.

Television was young. Our station was only ten years old. Hell, we were young. I was twenty-four and was probably the newest reporter in Dallas. I'd been hired only six weeks before the assassination. My buddies were more experienced: Bob Huffaker, Bill Mercer and Wes Wise were already veteran broadcasters.

While we think of ourselves as media-savvy, this is our first go at a blog.
Take a look at our stuff. Buy the book. You tell us what you think about
whether there was a conspiracy -- and we'll tell you what we think.

-GeorgePhenix