MMMM #152 HUGE Storms Detected!! By UPI!

BIG story this week...lightning storms on Saturn!
     Actually, the big story was the fact that I read about it on a UPI page. I didn't know UPI even existed anymore!
     During my early decades in Alabama, there was a rather fierce battle between UPI (United Press International) and AP (Associated Press), at least in Alabama. Not so much for subscribers, but to see who would break stories first. The radio stations that subscribed to UPI seemed out of the mainstream. Most of the broadcasters were AP
    UPI is still operating...with a HQ in D.C....but the company's web site has not a single reference to radio or TV on its front page, instead marketing the old "wire" service to corporations and boasting about how many hits its website gets.

     To be honest, my own memories of UPI are probably slanted because I was heavily involved in the AP Broadcaster's Association for a lot of those early years (twice as President)...and outstanding reporters like Bob Lowry (The Huntsville Times) and Alvin Benn (The Montgomery Advertiser)...who were both excellent UPI reporters...will no doubt point to the 1960's, when it appears UPI dominated Alabama Civil Rights coverage. Here's a page Lowry has online with UPI images. And Benn wrote about his UPI experiences in Reporter, a book published several years ago.

     And there's this classic photo of Bob sitting in Yellow Mama, Alabama's now second string electric chair. How many reporters managed to get that photo?

    Finally, writing this MMMM about wire services and not mentioning Hoyt Harwell, retired veteran AP bureau Chief, would be a sin of omission.

     I learned a lot from Hoyt in those days, including to always question anyone who tells me something is "the first"  of anything to happen. Really? First? Are you sure? Usually it isn't.

[Note: this was a tough week to decide the topic(s) on MMMM. There was the huge merger of three Montgomery TV stations (including the one I work for, WAKA!), the entire Casey Anthony murder verdict in Florida,  the 20th anniversary of the L'Express jet in Birmingham, which happened in the middle of the local station's 6:00pm news, the shutdown of the British tabloid, News of The World over the phone hacking scandal, and then from Dana Beyerle late in the week, the story that APT is closing the Montgomery Production Center at the same time it is keeping open a bureau in Washington D.C. that was opened in the middle of the Great Recession. In the end I blogged about two of those five during the week and went with the UPI piece today.] 

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog.]