(Wednesday, April 19, 1995)
EDITOR GOT THE NEWS TO MILKMEN AND OTHER READERS
By Paul Harral
This is a story about a man you did not know but who had a great influence on you and the way you received your news.
We called him Steve. I know his given name, and it's no surprise that he didn't want people to call him by it. Perhaps when he's been long dead, some who know will reveal it. But I doubt it.
Said the obituary carried by the Reuters news service (and written by Dave Nagy, who is ex-United Press International):
"Shed a tear for the Kansas City Milkman. H.L. Stevenson is dead.
"Don't know the name? Stevenson was an editor-in-chief of United Press International in the 1960s and 1970s, when that agency went toe-to-toe with bigger, richer rivals worldwide on hustle, grit and telephone change.
"The UPI credo was to make news copy clear and vivid with plenty of quotes and color - write it for the `Kansas City Milkman,' the quip went - and, for a couple of generations of reporters and editors, that credo was personified by the man known to everyone down to the copy aide as `Steve.' "
Stevenson died a couple of weeks ago not far from where he lived in Rye, N.Y. He was 65. That means that he was 38 when I first met him. I would have been 24, pretty directly out of college and working in the Dallas bureau of UPI. We met at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston during coverage of the Apollo moon missions.
There was a day before the pervasive presence of television when most of the state, national and international news was collected and distributed by wire services.
The Associated Press is, of course, a wire service. UPI was formed from the merger of two other American wire services - United Press and International News.
The significance of UPI has declined in recent years, but into the 1970s, it was a force in journalism, especially in its report from outside the United States and from Washington.
And in that copy, Steve and other editors hammered home a couple of simple points: Write complicated stories simply so that people can understand them - the Kansas City milkman, perhaps.
Keep the writing bright and tight and interesting and colorful, and pack it with quotes from the people who lived it and saw it. Put the reader there with them, but do it in simple, direct ways.
Even during UPI's heyday, AP was always more dominant in newspapers. But UPI also was a service for broadcasters, so that much of the news you remember hearing on radio was from, as some put it, "the wires of United Press International."
And through it all - at least during the decade I spent at UPI - Steve was the inspirational leader.
"Although an accomplished reporter in his own right, he made his mark mainly by motivating others: usually with enthusiasm, sometimes with a figurative kick in the pants, always by refusing to accept excuses from reporters who were outnumbered by those from their bitter rival, the Associated Press," Nagy's obit said.
Wire services identified their bureaus by two-letter designations, and the designation for New York City, where UPI was headquartered, was NX. We knew other staff members from around the world by their initials and city codes.
It was a big deal in the middle of a major breaking news story to get a message from NX, where you could bet that Stevenson was watching the wire and judging the performance.
He'd step in if he thought things were going badly, but mostly he managed by encouragement. So most of the messages I ever received over the respected cablese signer of "HLSX" were positive: "Great job. Pour it on." The negative stuff he saved for telephone calls. And there were more than a few of those.
But mostly he let you do it - and he encouraged your direct supervisors to let you do it - even if you were a 25-year-old bureau manager in Denver, Colo., handling the biggest story of your life. The time for criticism was later, after the story was over. We had more pressing things to do now.
You made mistakes, but you learned from them. You gloried in your successes. And through it all, you were convinced that HLS was a heck of a journalist. And you were right.
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Harral is vice president and editorial director for the Star-Telegram. His e-mail address is harralstar-telegram.com. You may telephone him at (817) 390-7836 or write him at P.O. Box 1870, Fort Worth, TX 76101.
(Copyright Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Posted by permission.)