Connecting - April 22, 2024

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April 22, 2024

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Colleagues,

Good Monday morning on this April 22, 2024,

It has been a sad past week for The Associated Press with the loss of our colleagues Terry Anderson, John Brewer and Paul Raeburn.

Terry, an AP correspondent who was held hostage for nearly seven years in Beirut, died Sunday of complications of heart surgery at the age of 76.

John, AP bureau chief in Seattle and Los Angeles and a New York executive who also worked for the New York Times Syndication Sales and the Peninsula Daily News in Port Angeles, Wash., died last Friday when he drowned while on a fishing trip in Montana. He also was 76.

Paul, a renowned science writer who was a science editor and chief science correspondent for the AP and the author of five books, died April 17 at the age of 73. He fought Parkinson's Disease. A memorial service will be held May 4 at Greenwich Village Funeral Home in New York.

Today’s Connecting brings you stories on each journalist, along with memories that their colleagues shared. If you would like to relate a favorite story of working with them, please send it along.

Our colleague Steve Loeper, former Los Angeles AP news editor, relates this tie between Anderson and Brewer, in regard to the above photo by Jeff Wilson:

“As chief of the AP’s Los Angeles bureau, John Brewer encouraged and was fully supportive of the lead taken by Jeff Wilson in 1985 in driving the bureau’s widely recognized Don’t Forget Terry Anderson campaign. Brewer had hired Wilson in 1985, the same year Anderson was taken captive. Anderson and Brewer both died this week at age 76.”

HAPPY PASSOVER to our Jewish colleagues, who observe Passover beginning at sundown today and ending on Tuesday, April 30.

Here’s to the week ahead. Be safe, stay healthy, live each day to your fullest.

Paul

Terry Anderson, AP reporter abducted in Lebanon and held captive for years, has died at 76

FILE - Former hostage Terry Anderson waves to the crowd as he rides in a parade in Lorain, Ohio, June 22, 1992. Anderson, the globe-trotting Associated Press correspondent who became one of America’s longest-held hostages after he was snatched from a street in war-torn Lebanon in 1985 and held for nearly seven years, died Sunday, April 21, 2024. He was 76. (AP Photo/Mark Duncan, File)

BY ANDREW MELDRUM AND CHRISTOPHER WEBER

NEW YORK (AP) — Terry Anderson, the globe-trotting Associated Press correspondent who became one of America’s longest-held hostages after he was snatched from a street in war-torn Lebanon in 1985 and held for nearly seven years, has died at 76.

Anderson, who chronicled his abduction and torturous imprisonment by Islamic militants in his best-selling 1993 memoir “Den of Lions,” died on Sunday at his home in Greenwood Lake, New York, said his daughter, Sulome Anderson.

Anderson died of complications from recent heart surgery, his daughter said.

“Terry was deeply committed to on-the-ground eyewitness reporting and demonstrated great bravery and resolve, both in his journalism and during his years held hostage. We are so appreciative of the sacrifices he and his family made as the result of his work,” said Julie Pace, senior vice president and executive editor of the AP.

“He never liked to be called a hero, but that’s what everyone persisted in calling him,” said Sulome Anderson. “I saw him a week ago and my partner asked him if he had anything on his bucket list, anything that he wanted to do. He said, ‘I’ve lived so much and I’ve done so much. I’m content.’”

After returning to the United States in 1991, Anderson led a peripatetic life, giving public speeches, teaching journalism at several prominent universities and, at various times, operating a blues bar, Cajun restaurant, horse ranch and gourmet restaurant.

He also struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder, won millions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets after a federal court concluded that country played a role in his capture, then lost most of it to bad investments. He filed for bankruptcy in 2009.

Upon retiring from the University of Florida in 2015, Anderson settled on a small horse farm in a quiet, rural section of northern Virginia he had discovered while camping with friends.

“I live in the country and it’s reasonably good weather and quiet out here and a nice place, so I’m doing all right,” he said with a chuckle during a 2018 interview with The Associated Press.

In 1985, Anderson became one of several Westerners abducted by members of the Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah during a time of war that had plunged Lebanon into chaos.

After his release, he returned to a hero’s welcome at AP’s New York headquarters.

Louis D. Boccardi, the president and chief executive officer of the AP at the time, recalled Sunday that Anderson’s plight was never far from his AP colleagues’ minds.

“The word ‘hero’ gets tossed around a lot but applying it to Terry Anderson just enhances it,” Boccardi said. “His six-and-a-half-year ordeal as a hostage of terrorists was as unimaginable as it was real — chains, being transported from hiding place to hiding place strapped to the chassis of a truck, given often inedible food, cut off from the world he reported on with such skill and caring.”

As the AP’s chief Middle East correspondent, Anderson had been reporting for several years on the rising violence gripping Lebanon as the country fought a war with Israel, while Iran funded militant groups trying to topple its government.

On March 16, 1985, a day off, he had taken a break to play tennis with former AP photographer Don Mell and was dropping Mell off at his home when gun-toting kidnappers dragged him from his car.

He was likely targeted, he said, because he was one of the few Westerners still in Lebanon and because his role as a journalist aroused suspicion among members of Hezbollah.

“Because in their terms, people who go around asking questions in awkward and dangerous places have to be spies,“ he told the Virginia newspaper The Review of Orange County in 2018.

What followed was nearly seven years of brutality during which he was beaten, chained to a wall, threatened with death, often had guns held to his head and was kept in solitary confinement for long periods of time.

Anderson was the longest held of several Western hostages Hezbollah abducted over the years, including Terry Waite, the former envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had arrived to try to negotiate Anderson’s release.

By Anderson’s and other hostages’ accounts, he was also their most hostile prisoner, constantly demanding better food and treatment, arguing religion and politics with his captors, and teaching other hostages sign language and where to hide messages so they could communicate privately.

He managed to retain a quick wit and biting sense of humor during his long ordeal. On his last day in Beirut he called the leader of his kidnappers into his room to tell him he’d just heard an erroneous radio report saying he’d been freed and was in Syria.

“I said, ‘Mahmound, listen to this, I’m not here. I’m gone, babes. I’m on my way to Damascus.’ And we both laughed,” he told Giovanna Dell’Orto, author of “AP Foreign Correspondents in Action: World War II to the Present.”

He learned later his release was delayed when a third party who his kidnappers planned to turn him over to left for a tryst with the party’s mistress and they had to find someone else.

Mell, who was in the car during the abduction, said Sunday that he and Anderson shared an uncommon bond.

“Our relationship was much broader and deeper, and more important and meaningful, than just that one incident,” Mell said.

Mell credited Anderson with launching his career in journalism, pushing for the young photographer to be hired by the AP full-time. After Anderson was released, their friendship deepened. They were each the best man at each other’s wedding and were in frequent contact.

Anderson’s humor often hid the PTSD he acknowledged suffering for years afterward.

“The AP got a couple of British experts in hostage decompression, clinical psychiatrists, to counsel my wife and myself and they were very useful,” he said in 2018. “But one of the problems I had was I did not recognize sufficiently the damage that had been done.

“So, when people ask me, you know, ‘Are you over it?’ Well, I don’t know. No, not really. It’s there. I don’t think about it much these days, it’s not central to my life. But it’s there,” he said.

Anderson said his faith as a Christian helped him let go of the anger. And something his wife later told him also helped him to move on: “If you keep the hatred you can’t have the joy.”

At the time of his abduction, Anderson was engaged to be married and his future wife was six months pregnant with their daughter, Sulome.

The couple married soon after his release but divorced a few years later, and although they remained on friendly terms Anderson and his daughter were estranged for years.

“I love my dad very much. My dad has always loved me. I just didn’t know that because he wasn’t able to show it to me,” Sulome Anderson told the AP in 2017.

Father and daughter reconciled after the publication of her critically acclaimed 2017 book, “The Hostage’s Daughter,” in which she told of traveling to Lebanon to confront and eventually forgive one of her father’s kidnappers.

“I think she did some extraordinary things, went on a very difficult personal journey, but also accomplished a pretty important piece of journalism doing it,” Anderson said. “She’s now a better journalist than I ever was.”

Terry Alan Anderson was born Oct. 27, 1947. He spent his early childhood years in the small Lake Erie town of Vermilion, Ohio, where his father was a police officer.

After graduating from high school, he turned down a scholarship to the University of Michigan in favor of enlisting in the Marines, where he rose to the rank of staff sergeant while seeing combat during the Vietnam War.

After returning home, he enrolled at Iowa State University where he graduated with a double major in journalism and political science and soon after went to work for the AP. He reported from Kentucky, Japan and South Africa before arriving in Lebanon in 1982, just as the country was descending into chaos.

“Actually, it was the most fascinating job I’ve ever had in my life,” he told The Review. “It was intense. War’s going on — it was very dangerous in Beirut. Vicious civil war, and I lasted about three years before I got kidnapped.”

Anderson was married and divorced three times. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by another daughter, Gabrielle Anderson, from his first marriage; a sister, Judy Anderson; and a brother, Jack Anderson.

“Though my father’s life was marked by extreme suffering during his time as a hostage in captivity, he found a quiet, comfortable peace in recent years. I know he would choose to be remembered not by his very worst experience, but through his humanitarian work with the Vietnam Children’s Fund, the Committee to Protect Journalists, homeless veterans and many other incredible causes,” Sulome Anderson said in a statement Sunday.

Memorial arrangements were pending, she said.

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Weber reported from Los Angeles. John Rogers, a retired Associated Press writer, contributed biographical material from Los Angeles.

Click here for link to this story.

Longtime AP journalist, newspaper publisher John Brewer dies at age 76

BY HOLLY RAMER

John Brewer, whose coast-to-coast journalism career spanned 50 years, including nearly two decades at The Associated Press, has died. He was 76.

Brewer and his longtime friend Randy Johnson were on their annual fly fishing trip in Montana on Friday when the boat Brewer was in hit a submerged log and flipped over, Johnson said. Two others were rescued, but Brewer drowned, he said.

“I’m still having trouble digesting it,” he said Saturday.

Brewer retired in 2015 after nearly 18 years as editor and publisher of the Peninsula Daily News in Port Angeles. Current publisher Eran Kennedy remembered him Saturday as “a true journalist and editor at heart” and “a person of unwavering integrity, driven by a passion for community and local journalism.”

“We are profoundly saddened by the unexpected loss of John Brewer. On behalf of the Peninsula Daily News family, I extend our heartfelt condolences to John’s loved ones,” Kennedy said in an email. “We will carry forward his torch, ensuring that his memory lives on.”

Born on Oct. 24, 1947, Brewer got his start in journalism writing for his high school newspaper, said his wife, Barbara Wise. His first paid job was with a weekly paper in his hometown of Upland, California. From 1969-1988, he was a reporter, bureau chief and executive for The Associated Press in Seattle, Los Angeles and New York.

As Seattle bureau chief, he oversaw coverage of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, which killed 57 people, blasted more than 1,300 feet (400 meters) off the top of the volcano and rained ash for miles around. In Los Angeles, he oversaw coverage of the 1984 Summer Olympics, and before that, had a pivotal interaction with a future star. Actor Mark Hamill, of “Star Wars” fame, worked for Brewer as a copy boy in the 1970s before informing him he was leaving because he had been cast in an episode of “The Partridge Family.”

“And so ended my AP career,” Hamill wrote on the social platform X, in 2022.

In 1985, Brewer hired Jeff Wilson as a reporter in Los Angeles. Wilson worked the overnight shift and didn’t expect to see his boss much, but Brewer frequently showed up, walking up behind him and declaring, “Good job, Tiger!”

“It was a warm, needed moment in the dead of night,” Wilson said in an email. When Wilson retired 11 years ago, Brewer sent him a Pacific Northwest salmon.

“More than a boss, I considered John a friend,” he said.

Brewer also spent 10 years as president, chief executive officer and editor-in-chief of The New York Times Syndication Sales Corp. In addition to handling trademark and merchandise licensing for the newspaper, he also enlisted high-profile columnists, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Martha Stewart and Jimmy Carter, for the Times’ syndicate, according to an autobiographical blog post he published in 2016.

In Port Angeles, Brewer was deeply involved in his community, holding positions with multiple civic organizations. Johnson, who remembered him pounding nails to help construct a new playground, said his friend was guided by the notion, “How can I do something to help this community?”

“He was just a really great person. Even when he retired, he didn’t miss a beat, because he cared,” he said. “He knew he could make a difference.”

Brewer and Wise married in September after 18 years, she said Saturday.

“He was the nicest, most generous man. He helped everybody he could,” she said.

Wise described her husband as something of a statesman in their small town, often sought after by budding politicians for advice because he knew everyone. In retirement, he spent hours a day on Facebook and online community groups spreading the word about community events, she said.

“He was the consummate news guy,” she said. “He just wanted his community to know what was going on because so many people had stopped taking the paper.”

Brewer also is survived by two sons. Funeral arrangements have not been set.

Click here for link to this story.

Paul Raeburn, former AP science editor and recognized author, dies at 73

Paul Raeburn, former science editor and chief science correspondent for The Associated Press and the author of five books, died April 17 at the age of 73.

Raeburn fought Parkinson's Disease, and his wife Elizabeth shared:

"Paul left a living will instructing that no measures be taken to interfere with nature taking its course. His kids and I made the difficult decision to let him go. He died Wednesday evening with two of his kids, his son-in-law, and me, by his side, holding his hands, playing his favorite music, telling him stories. He went peacefully and without pain, having never regained consciousness from the ER. We are, of course, devastated, but also relieved that he is no longer trapped in a body that had ceased to serve him."

She said services will be held May 4 at Greenwich Village Funeral Home in New York.

He was the author of more than 150 freelance articles for Discover, The Huffington Post, The New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, National Public Radio, and Psychology Today, among many others. He was a past president of the National Association of Science Writers (2001-02) and a recipient of its Science in Society Journalism Award. In addition, he was a media critic for the Knight Science Journalism Tracker from 2009 to 2012 and the chief media critic from 2012 to 2014.

Raeburn was the science editor and chief science correspondent at the Associated Press from 1981 to 1996, and a senior editor and writer at BusinessWeek for seven years after that. From 2008 to 2009, he was the creator, executive producer, and host of Innovations in Medicine and The Washington Health Report on XM satellite radio.

He earned a B.S. degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A native of Detroit, Raeburn lived and worked in New York City with his wife, writer Elizabeth DeVita and their sons Henry and Luke.

Memories of Terry Anderson

Lou Boccardi - - The word “hero” gets tossed around a lot but applying it to Terry Anderson enhances it.

His six-and-a half year ordeal as a hostage of terrorists was as unimaginable as it was real—chains, being transported from hiding place to hiding place strapped to the chassis of a truck, cut off from the world he reported on with such skill and caring.

Two quotes have stayed with me over the decades since he came back to us.

I will never forget his first words to me, in a pre-dawn chill at an Air Force base in Germany, as he walked down the steps of the airplane that had brought him home in 1991. As we embraced, with Larry Heinzerling standing next to me, he said, “I’m sorry, Boss.” (I had assigned Larry fulltime to the case.)

I knew in that instant, that whatever wounds he would have to deal with, the Terry Anderson we knew and prayed for was back.

The other quote dates from March, 1985 just before he was kidnapped.

I had been AP’s president for only a few months and convened a meeting of our Middle East bureau chiefs in Cairo. I took Terry aside and told him Terry there that I wanted him to come out, it was getting too dangerous for him as our chief in Lebanon.

Terry reassured me, “Don’t worry. They’ll never bother me. They know me and they know the AP.”

I thought of those words many times as we vainly searched the world for a key that would cut his chains.

A few days after his release and return home, I was walking with him on a street in Washington. His picture had just been on the cover of Time magazine. Passersby quickly recognized him, cheered and clapped.

I was privileged to be walking with a hero.

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In this photo from Dec. 4, 1991, Associated Press reporter Terry Anderson grins with his 6-year-old daughter Sulome, following his release after six years in captivity. (AP Photo/Santiago Lyon)

Santiago Lyon - I was one of the first people to see Terry Anderson after his liberation following his 7 years as a hostage. It was in Damascus, Syria, and I was part of an AP photo crew assigned to the story along with the late London-based staff photographer Dave Caulkin and freelancer Greg English. I had recently joined the AP from Reuters and this was my first major assignment.

We, along with other members of the media were gathered in a room at a Syrian ministry when Terry emerged. I recall his glasses were missing part of the frame on one side and that he looked somewhat dazed and bewildered. He answered a few questions and was then rushed into a car to make the drive to a US diplomatic facility prior to eventually traveling back to the US.

Later that day, or perhaps the next evening, outside a US diplomatic building (I can't recall if it was an embassy or consular building) I realized that his daughter Sulome was in the car with him and I ran at full speed, racing alongside his car as it sped off. I made a few frames through the window before the car disappeared into the night. One of those frames became one of the better-known images of him in freedom.

Many years later I met Terry when he toured AP HQ at 450 West Street. I briefly introduced myself as the author of that photo, which he recalled. RIP Terry Anderson, you were one of a kind.

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Beth Grace - RIP, Terry Anderson. How many of us wore these?

Scott Charton – Terry Anderson was one of my journalism heroes within the ranks of Associated Press colleagues. As AP's Missouri roving correspondent, I had the privilege of co-hosting Terry during a February 2002 visit to Columbia, where he lectured at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Terry is on the left and now-retired AP photographer Cliff Schiappa is at right.

Following his 2002 Missouri lecture, a long dinner and a few drinks (not me as designated chauffeur), I drove Terry back to his hotel. I noticed he checked to make sure the doors on my Jeep were locked on his side after he got in. He noticed that I noticed. Terry said matter-of-factly, "Old habit after being kidnapped from my car." Then he smiled. But it was a glimpse of the scars he carried. Terry and his family sacrificed much. I will not forget him and his courage. Godspeed.

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Robert Kimball – I was saddened by the death of Terry Anderson, the AP reporter kidnapped in Lebanon in the 1980s. But - in the AP story I read Sunday evening - there was no mention of Peggy Say, Terry’s sister. I know Peggy went public with her desire to get Terry and other hostages freed. I saw her after she taped interviews at AP Radio’s K Street studios down the street from the wire side bureau.

Peggy’s involvement was certainly a publicized part of what became a years-long story.

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Andy Lippman - I remember first going into the Los Angeles bureau and on the glass door leading in was a taped paper sign which read: "It has been xxx number of days since Terry Anderson was held hostage. Did you remember him today?"

That sign and the metal bracelets which were handed out to staffers was the work of staffer Jeff Wilson, who became sort of a keeper of the flame to constantly remind people about Anderson's captivity.

Not that anyone in the LA bureau didn't care, but Wilson really put Terry front and center every day for all of us.

I don't know who came up with the idea, but every year on the day he was taken into captivity, we held a little service and sometimes we'd have someone come in on speaker phone. I seem to recall Lou Boccardi joining us one year.

And every Christmas, the bureau would collect toys and send them off to Terry's daughter.

By the time, Terry was released, we had moved from the old office on Hill Street to a much nicer site on Figueroa St.

Jim Donna - bless his soul - called me and said, "Now Andy, I know how much the bureau is excited, but don't go overboard on the celebration."

Terry, finding out about what the bureau had done in remembering him, came to LA to personally thank everyone.

It was such a joyous day.

He was smiling, and everyone in the bureau either was smiling or crying tears of joy.

It was truly a wonderfully happy and memorable ending to what had been a collectively horrible experience for all of us.

Memories of John Brewer

Cecilia White - The tears flow, but not the ink … How do I write about the close friend of 40+ years to whom I owe so much? Since learning Friday of John Brewer’s tragic death, I have been struggling to collect my thoughts and memories of John, but it is quite overwhelming.

It began in the AP/LA bureau in the early 1980s, when John became bureau chief; I was the bureau secretary (as it was called in those days). We immediately hit it off and enjoyed several years working together until he was transferred to Newspaper Membership in New York. We stayed in touch though and a few years later, when he became president/editor-in-chief of the New York Times Syndicate/News Service, John hired me to edit the Syndicate’s coveted foreign copy, including The Economist. An amazing opportunity, which was pure John: unwavering generosity and deep loyalty.

We remained in close contact over four decades, including visits with him and his beloved wife, Ann, in New York and, more recently, several wonderful visits with John and his partner, Barbara, in his adopted hometown of Port Angeles, Washington. My sister Connie (who worked for years with John at the New York Times Syndicate/News Service) has so many warm memories of those fun visits with them. Generous, extraordinary hosts! Indeed, we were planning another reunion with John and Barbara this year. Alas ….

A sweet note about Barbara … When John’s wife Ann died in 2005, Barbara was one of the at-home nurses who cared for Ann in her final days. Her concern for an utterly devastated John eventually blossomed into a friendship, then some time later, a loving relationship. Our hearts ache now for our friend who brought so much healing and happiness to John’s life for nearly 20 years.

The town of Port Angeles is surely feeling John’s loss too. As publisher of the Peninsula Daily News for nearly 18 years, he became such an integral, active (!) part of the community. He loved Port Angeles and the area and made countless contributions to the town (mural restorations, fighting to save historic buildings, managing political campaigns – all successfully, of course!, etc.). And the love was reciprocal. You couldn’t go anywhere in town with John without feeling the warm regards for “Mayor” Brewer.

I apologize for this lengthy tribute but it is difficult to edit down 40+ years of wistful memories. So much history …. The bottom line: John Brewer was, quite simply, the “bestest” (his expression). We will miss you, dear JB. You left us too soon.

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Dennis Anderson - In 1985 when I went to work at AP Los Angeles, John had two suitcase-sized contraptions, one he carried into the office, and the other was in his car. One was a Compaq computer, a blue painted steel box with a carrying handle, and the other was a "mobile phone" of its day.

You could say he was an early adopter. His reasoning was simple, to increase his own productivity and to compress time and space. On the day we were at an AP summer picnic playing softball with the L.A. Times, a catastrophic air collision by a jetliner and a small plane over Orange County proved his reasoning correct. Instead of calling balls and strikes (which he was doing), he was calling Orange County journalists for live spots from the crash.

When someone does several unforced good turns of both personal and professional nature, you remember them. Early in my hire, John made sure I was enrolled in AP health insurance a couple of months early because my baby son was about to arrive to enormous hospital bills unless covered. On baby Garrett's arrival, John sent our little family a big pothos plant that continues to unfurl with fresh leaves. I am sad that the plant has outlived him, but it may well continue blooming after my own leave taking from this life.

Consummate newsman was an accurate description. Another memory of John is of someone willing to buck authority to back a staffer. The AP announced the only applicant that would be sponsored for "Journalist in Space" was, in the outfit's reasoning, our Aerospace Writer. Hard to say which way was better, but John sponsored my application anyway. My sense was he possessed a quality we shared, an ambition to do big things, to report history for the record. Challenger's destruction made the effort moot, but I appreciated his vote of confidence.

He was, by turns, a hard competitor in news, and a happy warrior, whose greeting to staffers was a cheerful, "How ya doin', Ace?" We were planning a visit in his Port Angeles adopted hometown where he edited and published for many years in his vigorous fashion. I am sad the visit didn't happen.

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Steve Loeper - I’m absolutely stunned to hear of John Brewer’s tragic death. He was so full of energy and life — deep into retirement, as Connecting readers well know — it doesn’t seem possible, and for someone who worked with John back in the day, well, I’m still processing the whole thing.

What processed immediately, however, was as his LA news ed in the 1980s, I can honestly say John was among the most inspiring and supportive of my AP bosses. Transferred from Seattle as our new COB, JB took charge of the bureau at a low point — low for me, too, personally and professionally — and turned things around through powerful motivation and extraordinary example. A driven journalist and effective leader, John achieved his exacting standards and high expectations through encouragement and recognition, not merely criticism, and I will always remember that. In fact, a gift item John once brought back from a Northwest trip continues on display in our home. As my AP years transitioned to retirement, I began thinking about an appropriate way or occasion to finally express all this to my old boss. Sadly – and very regrettably -- such opportunities have now passed. Yet thanks to Connecting, perhaps not entirely.

As other John Brewer colleagues might remember, he had this signature practice – at least during the less-bounded ‘80s -- of coming up from behind while you worked to offer a vigorous shoulder-clasp of support. In this image, the circumstances may have been more refined than a busy bureau, but the sentiment was just as sincere – and welcome – sudden as it might have been.

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Steve Graham - I had the pleasure of working with John, first when I was assigned to the Portland bureau as news editor and later in New York where we dealt with membership issues regarding the delivery of news and the financial markets report.

Washington and Oregon news coverage is closely aligned, especially since Portland is just across the Columbia River from Vancouver, Wash. and teamwork was never more important than in 1980 when Mount St. Helens erupted.

He was always a pleasure to work with.

Memories of Paul Raeburn

Lee Mitgang - My heart is breaking over the loss of my friend Paul Raeburn, who succeeded Al Blakeslee as AP's Science Editor in the 1980s and who over a long career became one of the nation's pre-eminent science writers. I knew for some time that Paul's health was declining due to Parkinson's. When he first shared the news of his illness with me in an email several years ago, he asked me for any pointers I might have about coping with chronic health challenges, since he had witnessed, and at times helped me with, some of mine. As his illness progressed and his communication with me became scarce, it was all the more treasured.

I'm sure there'll be many obits from colleagues and professional organizations that will celebrate in detail his professional accomplishments both during and post-AP: past president of the National Association of Science Writers, science editor at Business Week, a regular host of NPR's weekly feature "Science Friday," widely respected and published authority on the underappreciated science and art of fatherhood, to name a bare handful.

What I'd rather share here with my Connecting colleagues are some personal memories of Paul during our time at AP.

We often ate lunch together, usually in the AP cafeteria at 50 Rock. Unlike me, he invariably passed on the cuisine, opting invariably for healthier canned sardines brought from home. We were neighbors in Ridgewood, New Jersey back then, and our families were fairly close. So the talk was often about our daughter and his three children from his first marriage. But we'd also chat frequently about what was new or interesting in our respective beats, mine being education news.

I remember in particular one such lunch. We had both just returned from covering professional conferences in our fields and we discovered to our astonishment that we'd each heard nearly identical horror stories about the chronic and worsening neglect of the nation's storage facilities for plant germplasm – known as seed banks. The mission of these little-known repositories was to safely preserve the priceless and irreplaceable plant genetic materials that make possible the development and refinement of the crops that make up much of the world's diet.

From our very different sources, Paul and I both heard that these government-run repositories were in scandalous disrepair. We told all of this excitedly to then-Enterprise Editor Julie Dunlap and eventually sold her on the national importance of the story. It was, after all, a pretty far-out story idea, so it was a bold leap by Julie and our other editors to allow this unusual teaming of a pair of science and education writers to go after it. The eventual AP series, "Seeds of Conflict," got strong play and won Paul and me the National Science Writers Association's top honor, its "Science in Society" award, in 1989. You might say, then, that this story about a hidden seed crisis was itself a product of journalistic cross-pollination: the chance result of a lunch when a couple of beat reporters listened with genuine curiosity about each other's work.

This collaboration with Paul is among my most cherished AP memories. And for Paul, the series was the jumping off point for a more in-depth book on the subject: "The Last Harvest: The genetic gamble that threatens to destroy American agriculture," published in 1996.

Paul wasn't just a brilliant reporter. He was a lover and practitioner of the arts, a highly accomplished pianist and a pretty fair guitarist, too. Christmas at the Raeburns during those years was a neighborhood-wide tradition. Some years there had to be a hundred people crowded into his home, and the main attraction was always when Paul would sit down at the keyboard and play tirelessly into those holiday nights. I also recall that he produced numerous reviews of jazz recordings for the AP, earning him the nickname "Doc Jazz" from then-Arts and Entertainment Editor Dolores Barclay.

I feel privileged to have been able to call Paul my friend these many years. May his memory be a blessing to his wife Elizabeth and his children.

BEST OF THE WEEK — FIRST WINNER

AP hosts digital-first experience of total solar eclipse with livestream, blog and scenes from Mexico to Maine

In a large-scale, innovative and comprehensive work of journalism that required months of planning and precise execution, a core team from Health and Science conceived a digital-first experience of the total solar eclipse with a livestream, live blog and scenes along the path of totality from Mexico to Maine. Executing the plan successfully required coordination that extended across formats, countries and departments.

Coverage of the eclipse began in February with weekly all-formats storytelling by the Health and Science team, with contributions from Global Beats and U.S. News teams. Work also began to develop a livestream eclipse show, featuring Health and Science audience and social lead Kyle Viterbo; video journalists Mary Conlon and Laura Bargfeld; and aerospace writer Marcia Dunn, along with engineer Hugo Blanco.

In the control room, Global Beats video news editor Kathy Young, Entertainment video editor Brooke Lefferts and U.S. assignment manager Robert Bumsted worked with video operations manager Derek Danilko and broadcast engineer Rob Weisenfeld to produce the six-hour livestream show. They worked with video journalists who went live along the path, including Alexis Triboulard, Lekan Oyekanmi, Nick Ingram, Teresa Crawford, Patrick Orsagos and David Martin, while video curation editor Francisco Guzman kept real-time track of audience engagement.

The team also overcame hurdles to deliver a live Zoom interview about animals’ reactions to the eclipse thanks to testing, with Dallas reporter Jamie Stengle reporting from the Fort Worth Zoo.