REUVEN FRANK. Born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 7 December 1920. Educated at Harbord Collegiate Institute in Toronto, Canada; University College of the University of Toronto, 1937-40; City College of New York, B.S. in social science, 1942; Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, M.S., 1947. Married Bernice Kaplow, 1946, children: Peter Solomon and James Aaron. Served in the United States Army, 1943-46. Worked as a reporter, rewrite man, and night city editor, Newark Evening News, 1947-50; news writer, NBC News, 1950; news editor and chief writer, Camel News Caravan, 1951-54; supervised experiments in half-hour news forums such as Background, Outlook, and Chet Huntley Reporting, 1954 to early 1960s; executive vice-president of NBC News, 1967-68; president, 1968-72; senior executive producer and various other positions, 1972-82. Member of National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Writers Guild of America. Recipient: Sigma Delta Chi television newswriting award, 1955; Emmy Awards, 1958-64; Yale University Poynter Fellow, 1970.

TELEVISION SERIES (selection)

1954-55 Background (managing editor)
1956-70 The Huntley-Brinkley Report (producer)
1958-63 Chet Huntley Reporting (producer)
1956-58 Outlook (producer)
1960      Time Present...Edwin Newman Reporting              (producer)
1974-79 Weekend (producer)
1982-83 NBC News Overnight

TELEVISION SPECIALS (producer)

1953 Meeting at the Summit
1955 The First Step Into Space
1956 Antarctica: The Third World
1958 Kaleidoscope ("The S-Bahn Stops at Freedom") 1958 Kaleidoscope ("The American Stranger")
1959 Kaleidoscope ("Our Man in the Mediterranean") 1959 Kaleidoscope ("The Big Ear")
1959 Back to School
1959 Too Late For Reason
1960 World Wide '60 ("Freedom is Sweet and Bitter") 1960 World Wide '60 ("The Requiem For Mary Jo") 1960 World Wide '60 ("Where is Abel, Your Brother?") 1961 Our Man in Hong Kong
1961 Berlin: Where the West Begins
1961 The Great Plane Robbery
1962 Our Man in Vienna
1962 The Land
1962 Clear and Present Danger
1962 The Tunnel
1962 After Two Years: A Conversation with the         President
1963 The Trouble with Water...Is People
1963 A Country Called Europe
1965 The Big Ear
1966 Daughters of Orange
1973 If That's a Gnome, This Must Be Zurich

PUBLICATIONS

"Dialogue: Reuven Frank and Don Hewitt." Television Quarterly (New York), November 1962.

Out of Thin Air: The Brief Wonderful Life of Network News. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

"Let's Put on a Convention." Media Studies Journal (New York), Winter 1995.

In a career that parallels the rise and ebb of network television journalism, Reuven Frank helped shape the character of NBC News through his work as a writer and producer, a documentary and newsmagazine pioneer, news division president, and especially through his innovative coverage of national party conventions. In 1956, Reuven Frank teamed Chet Huntley with David Brinkley to co-anchor the political conventions, a move that catapulted the two correspondents and NBC News to national fame.

Beginning with his first job at NBC in 1950, Reuven Frank realized he had an affinity for the process of film editing and an appreciation for the visual power of television, which became the signature of his career in TV news. The process of shaping film clips into coherent stories left an indelible impression on Frank. Competitor CBS News had built its strong reputation in radio, which emphasized words. Camel News Caravan, NBC's original fifteen-minute evening news program, on which Frank served as a writer, evolved from the newsreel tradition. An early partisan of television, Reuven Frank sought to exploit the medium's advantage over newspapers and radio to enable the audience to see things happen. "Pictures are the point of television reporting," he wrote.

This visual sense is clearly evident in the coverage of political conventions. Frank developed a method for orienting a team of four floor reporters--all but lost in a sea of convention delegates--toward live cameras. He established a communication center that simultaneously controlled news gathering, reporting, and distribution. The filter center, linked to the entire crew, advised the decision level when a report was ready for air. On cue from the decision level, the technical team would air the report. This tiered system of communication control became the industry standard.

The Huntley-Brinkley Report premiered in October 1956, with Reuven Frank as producer and lasted until Huntley's retirement in 1970, when the report was renamed The NBC Nightly News. Frank was the program's executive producer in 1963 when the report was expanded from fifteen to thirty minutes. In a memo to his staff Frank outlined NBC News policies for gathering, packaging, and presenting news reports. The guiding principle for developing NBC newscasts was based on Frank's belief that, "The highest power of television journalism is not in the transmission of information but in the transmission of experience."

The early years of television provided Frank with opportunities to develop his ideas and to experiment with half-hour weekly series. In 1954 he introduced Background, which featured "history in the making" through specially shot films, expert commentary, and the newly designed process of electronic film editing. The documentary-style series went through several iterations, including Outlook, Chet Huntley Reporting, Time Present...Chet Huntley Reporting, and Frank McGee Reports.

A fierce advocate of free speech, Reuven Frank staunchly defended television's right and obligation to deliver unsettling news. He supported rival CBS in controversies over the documentaries Harvest of Shame (1960) and The Selling of the Pentagon (1971). He championed network coverage of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Frank also produced the acclaimed NBC documentary, The Tunnel, which depicts the escape of fifty-nine East Germans beneath the newly constructed Berlin Wall in 1962. NBC aired the program over objections by the U.S. State Department, which delayed the broadcast because it came on the heels of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Tunnel is the only documentary ever to win an Emmy Award as Program of the Year.

The Tunnel, as did other programs, exemplified one of Reuven Frank's lasting contributions to the content of NBC News reports, his attention to narrative structure and visual images. In the 1963 operations memo to his staff, Frank wrote, "Every news story should, without sacrifice of probity or responsibility, display the attributes of fiction, of drama. It should have structure and conflict, problem and denouement, rising and falling action, a beginning, a middle, and an end. These are not only the essentials of drama; they are the essentials of narrative. We are in the business of narrative because we are in the business of communication."

Other of Frank's innovative series include Weekend and NBC Overnight. Weekend was a 90-minute late night, youth-oriented newsmagazine introduced in 1974 that alternated with rock concerts and the experimental series Saturday Night Live. Weekend evolved from First Tuesday (later called Chronolog), NBC's answer to 60 Minutes. Later, in response to competition from the innovative all-news-network CNN's late-night news feeds, Frank developed Overnight, a program hosted by Lloyd Dobyns and Linda Ellerbee, produced on a shoestring budget in a newsroom carved out of studio space. Overnight was a literate magazine show that affected a wry, thoughtful, and highly visual presentation of the news.

The title of Reuven Frank's memoir, Out of Thin Air, The Brief Wonderful Life of Network News, reflects his sense and appreciation of fortuitous timing. Frank credits former NBC president Robert Kintner for elevating the status of NBC News: "Those early years with Kintner emphasized news programs as never before, or since, on any network. There was money for reporters; there was money for documentaries; there was money for special programs. In his seven years as president, Kintner placed his stamp upon NBC as no one else in my four decades."

Reuven Frank left his own mark as well on one of American television's premier news reporting services. After advancing through several roles and contributing to the development of a worldwide TV news network, Frank became president of NBC News in the tumultuous year of 1968. He held that position through the coverage of watershed events in the history of TV news, until 1973 when he returned to producing special projects for NBC News. In 1982, Frank was asked again to head the News Division, which he did until 1984. Robert E. Mulholland, then president of NBC, said of Frank's contributions, "Reuven wrote the book on how television covers the political process in America, has trained more top broadcast journalists than anyone alive, and simply embodies the very best professional traditions of NBC News."

-Tom Mascaro