Reporter
Texas Monthly Reporter
(Page 3 of 3)
Next to feel the sting was News Director Travis Linn. Linn was an excellent television journalist. He was in line to become president of the Radio and Television News Directors Association and was a pleasant fellow to work for. This was his problem, according to the bosses. Linn needed a pinch of Vince-Lombardi-like discipline added to his managerial technique. Management felt the news product was too loose. Assignments were made without serious regard to individual newsmen and women's talents. So today Travis Linn is assistant to the chancellor of the Dallas County Community College District.
Shapiro finally found the man to take charge, to calm the waters and get WFAA moving again. Marty Haag was given a mandate: do what you will but make us number one.
Haag was born in a journalist's town, Columbia, Missouri; he earned journalism degrees at the University of Missouri and Columbia, and then knocked around newspapers and television stations in San Angelo, Dallas, Fort Worth, New York, and Los Angeles before becoming assistant news director at CBS's most successful station, WCBS in New York. While at Columbia, he had the good sense to marry a beautiful blonde Dallas girl named Betty Lynn Wall who was also working on her master's in journalism. Ms. Haag is now working towards her doctorate at SMU.
Haag arrived last August and almost immediately fired a gaggle of employees. Then he went to work gathering a new staff. He hired KRLD's Bob Sirkin after seeing a particularly strong story on video tape. From Tulsa came Mike Miller. From WSB in Atlanta came Bruce Halford whose specialty became politics. Also from WSB, Haag got Carl Twentier to be his executive producer. Raben Matthews came from Walter Cronkite's CBS news, and from Oklahoma City he hired Dave Goldberg as his chief cameraman.
So far, not a quiver from Shapiro, Ward Huey, or any other brass at the station. Most felt that the general brouhaha around the station signaled that staffers were excited for a change, and that perhaps the vipers were being struck from the bosom.
"When I arrived, the film techniques used at WFAA were not as sophisticated as they should have been. It reminded me of film shot five years ago, 30-second clips with the anchorman's voice over the silent film. Our film packages today are more complicated. Without getting too technical that means two strands of film with the reporter's voice on one and the film on the other," said Haag.
"Also, the station was too preoccupied with television news stories that were considered news five years ago. Seven-Eleven robberies, auto wrecks, shoot-outs. I really don't think that most of the million-plus people in this Metroplex area are that interested in tabloid-style journalism."
Despite the influx of new faces, there has been only a slight increase in news people. Haag now commands a staff of 14 reporters, six or seven writers, and four film editors. He has tried to reassign staffers according to ability rather than dramatically increase the numbers.
Haag kept the same anchormen during this transitional period. Murphy Martin, once an $80,000-a-year aide to Ross Perot during the POW-MIA era, has loosened up and actually sounds human rather than one of the Chosen.
After engineering these deeds, Haag turned to reportorial techniques. He assigned reporters to cover specific "beats" as newspapers do. He got into consumer news: managing money, defective products, shoddy ad techniques. Haag claims that no big advertiser with the station or the News has tried to kill a story but acknowledges that it probably happened before he arrived.
Most important, he wanted to begin originating stories. "So many times television stations pretend they are advancing a story when really they are asking themselves, 'How can we take this story off page one of the morning newspaper and make pictures for it?'
"I don't want to do this. I want to talk about stories with a hard news edge that no one has done. For instance, after that terrible fire in Sao Paulo, Brazil, I had Bob Sirkin look into the city's fire codes for skyscrapers. Well, there isn't too much there and almost no instructions for fire drills. Also, many of these buildings use heat-seeking elevators. You can send one up by just putting a cigarette lighter next to the button. How would you like that if you were inside and the upper ten stories were on fire?"
Rumor had it around town that Haag ran into executive censorship over an eight-minute film story on the town's prostitutes. The word at one of the other stations was that it was unbalanced, that the clip portrayed Dallas' streetwalkers as being all black and that WFAA heavies squelched it for fear that it might upset the black community, already hot over an erroneous banner headline and story in The Dallas Times Herald.
Haag replies: "That just isn't true. What we were concerned about was the balance because it was easy to film the black prostitutes on South Ervay, but hard to document the white call girl operation. We had this very visible part of the story but, of course, that's only half of it. The other half is the white call girl operation of North Dallas and all we had there was film of a vice squad officer cruising the area and talking with our reporter Mike Miller about how the operation worked.
"But there was no attempt by management to stifle a thing. One of the black girls we interviewed gave us the names of four or five clubs where white streetwalkers hang out, so we went there and followed it up with pictures."
The future holds hard work for WFAA-TV and Marty Haag. The latest ARB ratings showed the station still at number three at both six and ten p.m. Nielsen showed them second in each time slot.
"The feeling upstairs," says Haag, "is that they want this station to dominate the market like WSB does in Atlanta. That would be extremely hard to do in a large, heterogeneous area like Dallas-Fort Worth, but I think we can be number one. No doubt about it."
LORD & TAYLOR COMES TO DALLAS
Good news for the sartorial feather preeners, the exaltes of fashion in Dallas. On April 8, the 148-year-old (15 years older than Dallas) prestigious clothing store, Lord & Taylor opens the doors to its 125,000 square-foot showcase in North Park Shopping Center.
It is the first of two Texas stores, the other to open in October in Houston's Galleria II. Unique in many ways, the store will snip not the traditional ribbon, but a rope of roses. Lord & Taylor executives Harry Murray, president, and William Lippincott, chairman of the board, are flying in from New York City for the occasion.
No ridiculous chin music about gimmicks, fads, show biz or cheap thrills is coming from Dallas manager John Bumstead. "Since 1826 Lord & Taylor has stood for simplicity, elegance, and understatement. It is probably slightly more conservative than most Texas stores. We will vary our lines somewhat because of the Texas climate, but essentially it will be the same as our New York line."
Bumstead worked in Dallas at Titche's before joining Lord & Taylor to manage its store in Garden City, Long Island. "I am very glad to be back here in Texas for more than the obvious reasons. The energy crisis and the weather back East are impossible. I did learn a lot about the retail business in New York, but Texans are so nice and I do love Dallas. My kids went to Hillcrest High School and I feel very lucky to return here for Lord & Taylor's Texas debut.
"Our store is different than any other similar enterprise. The buyers have almost total control over our lines rather than the advertisers as is normally the case. In 1972, our buyers made 83 trips to Europe and 19 trips to the Far East to keep up with the seemingly constant changing collections."
Not only do they know their cheviot from seersucker, they are no tyros in merchandising. Besides being the first retailer to move onto Fifth Avenue (in 1903), perhaps the world's most famous shopping boulevard, Lord & Taylor was the first to open a college shop; first to serve a quick lunch to shoppers; first to use signed art in advertising; and first to commission undergraduate design students to create clothing which was actually manufactured and sold by the store.
"Our customer is who counts at Lord & Taylor," continued Bumstead. "We are flying down from New York our lady directs gift wrapping to teach our Texas employees the Lord Taylor gift wrapping method. They are the last to touch purchased item and it must absolutely correct before leaves the store."
Some now-famous designers had nothing but a rumor to stantiate their existence before being introduced to the American public by Lord & Taylor. Here are some of the names: Emilio Pucci, Donald Brooks, Ferragamo, Rudi Gernreich, Anne Fogarty, Dorothy Cox, Walter Albini.
Most major Dallas merchants get a look around at a cocktail preview on Thursday, April 4. Then there is a grand show on Sunday, April 21. The Wadley Institute of Molecular Medicine will benefit from a $50-a-plate, invitation-only fashion show with original script, music, and cast of 30 entitled "A Retrospective Presentation of Fashion Through the Years." All done by Lord & Taylor for charity.
MANKIEWICZ MAKES IT PERFECTLY CLEAR
"I don't think I will direct another national campaign. If I do I might be thought of as a | professional." So says Frank Mankiewicz, who, with Lawrence O'Brien, is considered the professional political campaign tactician.
Mankiewicz was in town recently tub thumping Perfectly Clear, his new book which traces Richard M. Nixon's political career from his first election to Congress from California in 1946 through Watergate.
Perfectly Clear's thesis is that, with the possible exception of the presidential race in 1968, Nixon has never won a free election. In his California campaigns he began assembling the team all America is by now familiar with—Chotiner, Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Ziegler, Chapin, Kalmbach—and they "made California a political laboratory—as the Germans had made Spain—for the testing of methods and techniques. The blitzkrieg would I come later."
Perfectly Clear stands up under charges of partisanship and sour grapes. It is well documented, easy to read, and provides a valuable overview to the present horrors of tape erasings, tax evasions, and illegal political contributions.
Here is a sample of Mankie-witticisms and observations from a recent interview:
". . . the momentum for impeachment cannot be stopped. There isn't anybody in the U.S. that has ever been for impeachment who has changed his mind and is now against it. All switches are the other way.
"... I went to U.C.L.A. with John Ehrlichman and we got along fine. He was chairman of the Inter Fraternity Council and I was editor of the student daily. We were on opposite sides of the fence on most issues but he had a sense of humor in those days, something he has lost along the way. Like John Connally, he married the homecoming queen.
"... Before the Watergate Committee, Haldeman was sweet and gentle as a lamb. Ehrlichman, the more humane of the two, was damn the torpedos, tough as hell.
". . . What may have sealed Nixon's doom was the Harris Poll showing Gerald Ford could beat Ted Kennedy. The GOP leaders are now thinking he is expendable and they don't need the guy anymore. Of course, some Democrats now are thinking let's keep him in there.
". . . The members of the Washington press corps should all wear a
sign that reads: 'Warning! Thin reed.' They remind me of the Washington
Generals, the traveling basketball team whose job is to lose to the
Harlem Globetrotters and make them (the Globetrotters) look good. Their
job is to lose gracefully to the President."
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