John R. Allen, Post editor who specialized in layout, Washington Star Sports Stringer, dies at 69

John R. Allen in Barcelona in 2012. (Photo by Christine Colby)

John R. Allen, a Washington Post editor who in 34 years with the newspaper helped design the layout of stories on Page One as well as pages in the Metro, Style and Sports sections, died May 31 in Manhattan. He was 69.

His wife, Jo Rector Allen, said he was stricken with symptoms consistent with a pulmonary embolism or a heart attack. An autopsy is being performed to determine the cause. An Arlington resident, he was on vacation when he died at a hotel.

Mr. Allen joined The Post in 1969 as a copy editor, and he retired in 2003 as deputy news editor. His career spanned an era of change in the technology of producing a daily newspaper, the evolution of hot type to cold type and the use of computers to produce a printed paper.


Ed Thiede, a Post news projects editor, wrote in an announcement that Mr. Allen “helped guide the newspaper from the days of paste-up and black-and-white images through the launch of electronic pagination and color photography and into the days when the Metro section was zoned three ways every day.”

John Robert Allen was born in Omaha on Nov. 27, 1945. He grew up in Arlington, where he graduated from Yorktown High School and was a high school sports stringer for the former Washington Star newspaper. He attended Duke University.

Sam Zelman, pioneer of local TV news who helped start CNN, dies at 100

Sam Zelman created “The Big News,”
a 45-minute local broadcast at L.A.'s KNXT (now KCBS-TV)
that inspired the shift to longer newscasts. (handout,)

LOS ANGELES — Local TV newscasts in the 1950s often consisted of five minutes of news, five minutes of sports and another five minutes of weather.
Broadcast journalist Sam Zelman blew up that formula.

In 1961 he created “The Big News” at KNXT-TV (now KCBS-TV) that presented 45 minutes of local news, sports and weather, kicked off by the regal-looking Jerry Dunphy intoning: “From the desert to the sea to all of Southern California, a good evening.”
Local news was never the same, and Zelman, late in his career, went on to help create another breakthrough in TV news that naysayers said would never work — CNN.
Zelman, 100, died Friday at his home in Tucson, Arizona. The cause was respiratory failure, said his wife, Sally Davenport.
Many in broadcasting thought KNXT was crazy to program a 45-minute local news block. “People said, ‘How ever are you going to fill it?’” Pete Noyes, the first city editor of “The Big News,” said in a 2011 Los Angeles Times interview.
But newspapers, covering a variety of topics, were what Zelman wanted to emulate. “I like the subject to change often,” he told a group of students in Tucson in a 2013 video-recorded class session. “With a newspaper, I can move from one story to another.”
He hired a somewhat hard-bitten group of reporters and editors, many of whom came from newspapers and news services. They brought with them the stereotypical hard-news lifestyle of the era.
“There were bottles of booze in the desks of several writers and producers,” Noyes wrote in his “The Real Los Angeles Confidential” memoir. “The smell of burning trash cans resulted from discarded cigarettes that were still lit.”
But Zelman wanted to give audiences what couldn’t be conveyed in a 15-minute newscast. “He would say, ‘You’ve got to give them stories they will remember. You’ve got to rely on the intelligence of the audience,’” Noyes said in an interview last week.
To front the broadcast, he wanted strong on-air personalities. In addition to Dunphy, who became a Los Angeles institution in four decades of anchoring, the “The Big News” had Maury Green for investigative reports, Ralph Story for on-air essays, former actor and umpire Gil Stratton for sports and funnyman Bill Keene on weather. All predeceased Zelman.
The show had a slow start in ratings, but eventually walloped the competition and was widely emulated across the country.
“He turned TV news into real journalism,” University of Southern California journalism professor Joe Saltzman said.
Zelman was born Oct. 6, 1914, in Washington. As a boy, he had a paper route delivering the Washington Star, earning $6 a month.

Full story: Frederick News Post - Sam Zelman
Attribution: Associated Press - DAVID COLKER

Donald Neff, foreign correspondent and author, dies at 84

Donald Neff, a journalist and author who covered international news from Vietnam to Israel for Time and wrote acclaimed books about political and military strife in the Middle East, died May 10 at a nursing center in York, Pennsylvania. He was 84.

The cause was coronary heart disease and diabetes, said his companion, Janet McMahon, managing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

After joining Time in 1965, Neff spent nearly two years as a Saigon correspondent and later was bureau chief in Houston (where he covered the Apollo moon landing), Los Angeles, Jerusalem and New York before leaving the magazine in 1979.

He was one of the first journalists to report on the Jonestown massacre in 1978 when more than 900 members of a religious commune in Guyana died of mass cyanide poisoning.

The next year, he chronicled the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. Soon afterward, Neff settled in Washington and worked briefly as an editor for the old Washington Star newspaper before embarking as a career as an author and freelance writer.

His books included a trilogy about the Arab-Israeli conflicts of 1956, 1967 and 1973: “Warriors at Suez: Eisenhower Takes America into the Middle East” (1981), “Warriors for Jerusalem: The Six Days That Changed the Middle East” (1984) and “Warriors Against Israel” (1988).

Reviewers praised the volumes for combining narrative thrust with compelling insights on Middle East tensions.

Writing about “Warriors Against Israel” in a Washington Post review, Archibald B. Roosevelt, a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and former high-level CIA official with expertise in the Middle East, called the book “not only a well-documented and authoritative account, but a riveting exposé of how Henry Kissinger nudged the United States from its position as umpire in the contest to one of strong alliance with Israel.”

Roosevelt said that he “was impressed by the originality of Neff’s presentation and surprised by his devastating conclusions, assembled from facts previously known to most of us only piecemeal. It is not only a good read, but essential background for serious students of developments in the Middle East today.”

Donald Lloyd Neff was born Oct. 15, 1930, in York, Pennsylvania. He served in the Army from 1940 to 1950 and briefly attended college before beginning his journalism career in 1954 in his home town. He then spent many years in Los Angeles for the old Mirror-News newspaper and United Press International. He joined the Los Angeles Times in 1960, where he was a Tokyo correspondent before moving to Vietnam for Time.

Attribution: Adam Bernstein, The Washington Post