By John Durante
After Walter Cronkite’s death, Don Hewitt’s recent passing drops the curtain on the seminal line of storytellers in American electronic journalism. One of the last of the Murrow Boys, Hewitt was at the birth of television news and during most of his professional life, was a dominant force within it.
Most students of television (and many regular folks) know that he invented 60 Minutes and in so doing, created a completely new style of news storytelling. But few know that Hewitt’s mammoth contribution comes from a line of journalists schooled by Edward R. Murrow.
For those who don’t recall, Murrow was to World War II radio storytelling what Tiger Woods is to professional golf. Widely loved on both sides of the pond from his reports in London and in the European theater of war, Murrow returned stateside after the Allied victory in 1945 and continued crafting news stories on radio and then its new spawn, television. All the while (first in Britain and then later in New York), Murrow helped develop an expansive team of journalist storytellers, including Sevareid, Hottelet, Collingwood, Smith, Edwards, Cronkite, Schorr, Marvin Kalb and as a producer who rose to work with and lead them, Hewitt.
It was Hewitt, who without peer, transferred the tightly written, analytical style of “Murrow” radio journalism into a more modern “tell me a story with pictures approach” that dominated TV news late into the 20th century. Like good storytellers everywhere, context was everything to Hewitt and those who taught him. But like virtually no one else before him, Hewitt created context through pictures, video editing and the juxtaposition of so many “he said/she said” storyline elements. He also invented one of the most famous camera techniques in all of journalism.
The so-called “60 Minutes shot” was a close up on a story protagonist (usually in interview form) that was so “tight”, so intimate, that viewers could see beads of sweat build on a person’s face. It was a visual tour de force—and when married with all the other story telling techniques of the Murrow school, it often created groundbreaking journalism and riveting television, but above all else, great storytelling.
For his entire professional life Hewitt lived by a four-word adage when referring to his audiences: “Tell them a story” was his mantra. His practice of this was genuine, influential in shaping future styles of storytelling and one of the most important ideas passed onto him by the titans of American broadcast journalism.
John Durante is senior marketing associate for WordWrite Communications.
