Murrow Special: Wires and Lights, Everywhere You Look

Mark Effron

Today you can reach your audience on many more platforms but Murrow’s standards should always be at their base.


In 1958, when Edward R. Murrow delivered his “wires and lights in a box” speech, the Effrons lived in a two-bedroom garden apartment in New Haven, CT. In our living room, said “wires and lights in a box” occupied a central, almost revered, position.

Every evening, we gathered around it, sometimes just my mother, my brother and I, and sometimes my father, when he wasn’t off chasing down leads for his aluminum siding business. What flickered on the Effron family’s one TV screen was more-or-less a consensus.

We watched news, because my parents demanded it. And we watched sitcoms like Leave it to Beaver because they appealed at different levels to the four of us—my brother and I related to Wally and the Beav, while my parents to the all-knowing Ward and June. I have no way of knowing if the afternoon local paper that was delivered to our doorstep covered the Murrow speech.

But I’m confident that the local news on New Haven’s one television station didn’t even give it a mention. When Murrow decried primetime being devoted to escapism, he was talking about a world where three broadcast networks divvied up the in-home audience for entertainment.

Now, primetime is your time; anytime and anyplace you want it to be—on your television, your desktop and laptop, your phone, your PDA, your iPod. Across a chasm of 50 years, Murrow’s speech strikes me as more than just a clarion call for civic responsibility.

It’s also an anachronistic description of� a world that today has grown infinitely more complex and interesting. No longer does one device sit smack-dab in our living rooms, central to our lives, dictating what we see and when we see it. No longer do three networks and powerful if-it’s-in-print-it-must-be-true newspapers define the news universe.

Murrow, in his speech, commented on how viewers can listen to “both sides” of an issue “with reason and restraint.” Now, thanks to the Internet, we are exposed to many more than “both sides” of an issue.

Even the idea of a “news universe” sounds quaint, as it has mutated into many universes. We now live in a world where opinionated blogs, community sites like Facebook and often-contentious point-of-view destinations on politics (Huffington Post, Drudge Report) and entertainment (TMZ.com) often overwhelm the traditional news sites run by network and television stations.

So how to square the journalistic ethics that constitute our DNA with the technologically-diverse world that requires non-traditional approaches to engaging audiences?

In part, the contemporary news director has to wear many hats. For his or her main “brand,” the rules of fairness and striving for objectivity that defi ned Murrow’s journalism must be paramount.

As a news director, I would always say: “The news is the news is the news.” But, on the station’s website, objective coverage of news, weather and traffic is not enough; stations’ websites are becoming commodities in their own rights, a reason for users to visit only during periods of breaking news or big snowstorms and traffic jams. To engage audiences in a deeper fashion, television stations must turn their websites into full-service and richer user experiences with videos that engage and inform and entertain—and become profi table to boot.

To achieve success on those other platforms, we need a broader defi nition of journalistic standards and civic responsibility; otherwise we risk becoming one-trick-ponies, relics of the� 20th century where the only platforms were television and radio.

Let me give an example. As president and COO of TitanTV, I help oversee a company that provides technology, platforms and content to local television stations. As part of our content offerings, we created a channel devoted to the environment: TitanGreens.com. After a false start, where I imposed my traditional journalistic point of view on my creative and younger staff, I let them fly.

Now, the site has a real personality. The daily webisodes cover the oh-so-serious issue of global warming with sass and irreverence. We start from the assumption thatglobal warming is here, and we all have to do things to alleviate its impact. The fun comes in as we analyze what those things are, and how marketing, self-righteousness and positioning all come into play.

We use satire, short clips and jump cuts to make our points. The host is more than another pretty face; she helps develop and write the segments as well as a daily blog. She is a committed environmentalist. Yet, the small staff (three people, including our host) probably does more research and digging each day than many traditional TV news producers putting together a 5 p.m. newscast. Each story has multiple sources, and is carefully vetted.

If we quote a blog, we make sure it has some standing. We’re not just rewriting an AP wire, but are scouring dozens of sources daily for the information that we put into an entertaining and informative package. No one would mistake what we produce for NBC Nightly News; we’re more informal and we’re cognizant that we’re talking to people as they sit six inches from their computer.

We strive to be their knowledgeable and somewhat opinionated activist friend. What I tease out from this one example is a possible direction for all of us with journalism in our makeup who are striving for success in the digital world. You can be true to the core of what Murrow believed in: that we have an obligation to inform, to engage (after all, even the great Murrow hosted the fluffier Person to Person, in which celebrities gave him remote tours of their houses—a precursor to MTV Cribs), to use marvelous new media in marvelous new ways, without taking everything he said literally.

The spirit of Murrow demands that we bring heart and taste, curiosity and fairness to all that we do. But just as Murrow morphed as he went from a World War II radio correspondent to one of the earliest bona fi de stars of television, so we have to bring that same sense of adaptability and experimentation and wonder to whatever versions of “wires and lights in a box” lie in our future.

—Mark Effron is the president and COO of TitanTV Media and the former VP of daytime programming and breaking news at MSNBC. He previously served as VP of news for Post-Newsweek Stations, after having been a news director and station manager in that broadcasting group.

Originally published in the March 2008 issue of Communicator. All rights reserved.

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