Roone Arledge
Roone Arledge was born in Queens, New York, United States on July 8th, 1931 and is the Entrepreneur. At the age of 71, Roone Arledge biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
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Roone Pinckney Arledge Jr. (July 8, 1931 – December 5, 2002) was an American sports and news broadcasting executive who was president of ABC Sports from 1968 until 1986 and ABC News from 1977 until 1998, and a key part of the company's rise to competition with the two other main television networks, NBC and CBS, in the 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s.
He created many programs still airing today, such as Monday Night Football, ABC World News Tonight, Primetime, Nightline and 20/20.
John Heard portrayed him in the 2002 TNT movie Monday Night Mayhem
Early life
Arledge was born in Forest Hills, Queens, New York City, the son of Gertrude (Stritmater) and Roone Pinckney Arledge, an attorney. Arledge grew up in Merrick and attended Wellington C. Mepham High School on Long Island where he wrestled and played baseball. Although Arledge was not a stand out wrestler, Mepham was the most premier wrestling school in the country at the time.
Upon graduation, he decided that sportswriting was what he wanted to do in life, and applied to Columbia University. There, he discovered that Columbia's journalism program was a graduate program, not an undergraduate one. Even so, Arledge liked what he saw and enrolled in a liberal-arts program. He also served as President of the Omega Chapter of the fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta. His classmates included Max Frankel, who would eventually win a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for his work as editorial page editor of the New York Times; Larry Grossman, who became president of the Public Broadcasting Service in 1976 and later went on to head NBC News; and Richard Wald, another president of NBC News that Arledge would later persuade to come over to ABC News as a senior vice-president. He was the only one of the four who did not work at the Columbia Daily Spectator, the daily student newspaper of Columbia University.
After receiving a bachelor's degree in 1952, Arledge enrolled in graduate studies at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. Restless with graduate studies, he went looking for a job where he could use his college degree and obtained an entry-level job at the DuMont Television Network. Military service intervened, and after Arledge's discharge, he learned the network had folded and he had no job to return to.
Personal life
Arledge was married three times. He wed Gigi Shaw in 1994. He is survived by her and his four children from his first marriage, Roone, Elizabeth, Susan Weston and Patricia Looney. His previous spouses were Joan Heise and Ann Fowler.
Career
He made calls at DuMont, paid off with a stage manager's work at NBC's New York City station, WRCA (later WNBC). Shari Lewis' one of his duties was to help create a children's puppet show. In 1958, the program received a New York City Emmy Award.
Despite this success, Arledge wanted to tinker with programming ideas. Arledge, who used Playboy as his model, persuaded his WRCA bossed him to film a pilot of a show he called For Men Only. Though his superiors adored the pilot, they told him that WRCA could not find a place in the program's schedule. Pat Hernon, the WRCA weatherman who produced the pilot episode of For Men Only, began revealing the kinescope to people around New York City who might be interested in the service. Edgar J. Scherick, a former account executive at the advertising company Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, was one of them, and as far as Hernon knew, she was doing something at ABC.
Scherick bought Sports Programs, Inc. after leaving CBS when the network refused to make him the head of sports programming, selecting instead Bill MacPhail, a former baseball public relations agent, when the network did not. Scherick and ABC programming chief Tom Moore pulled off numerous programming contracts involving the most popular American sporting events well before ABC Sports even became a formal division of the network.
Although Scherick was not interested in "For Men Only," he recognized Arledge's talent. Arledge knew ABC was the group he was interested in joining. He would not have to prove genuine authority as the network matured. So, he joined Scherick as an assistant producer.
Arledge wrote a remarkable memo filled with youthful enthusiasm and television presentation ideas that sports broadcasters have devoted to since, several months before ABC started broadcasting NCAA college football games. Previously, network sporting broadcasting had consisted of simple set-ups and mainly focused on the game itself. Arledge's original point in this memo was not that he had invented another way to reach the sports fan. Arledge knew that television would bring the sports fan to the game. In addition,, Arledge understood that the broadcasts must attract and hold the attention of female viewers. With ABC's first NCAA college football broadcast from Birmingham, Alabama, he brought his vision into reality. Alabama defeated the Georgia Bulldogs 21–6. ABC began airing games in the fledgling American Football League in the same year as the previous broadcasters used the same cutting techniques. Sports broadcasting hasn't been the same since.
Scherick, despite the high production values he brought to NCAA college football, wanted low-budget (as in inexpensive broadcasting rights) sports programming that could attract and maintain an audience. The Amateur Athletic Union had an idea of a track and field event sponsored by the Amateur Athletic Union. Scherick figured Americans knew games, even though Americans were not particularly fans of track and field events.
Scherick called Arledge into his office in January 1961 and asked him to attend the annual AAU board of governors meeting. Scherick asked if the time was right, could he cancel a deal to air AAU events on ABC? It seemed to be a complicated challenge, but Scherick later said, "Roone was a gentile and I wasn't." Arledge came back with a deal for ABC to broadcast all AAU events for $50,000 a year.
Scherick and Arledge have broken down their NCAA college football sponsor list. "Advertise on our new sports show coming up in April, or forget about purchasing commercials on NCAA college football this fall," they said in a few words. Both advertisers were keen enough sponsors to promote, but they had to do so on the last day of a deadline set by ABC programming.
Scherick's plans were exactly matched by Wide World of Sports. Scherick was able to undercut NBC and CBS's strengths in broadcasting live sporting events by exploiting jet transportation's quickness and videotape's flexibility. ABC was able to safely film events on videotape for later broadcasting in an age where mobile communications were nowhere near as widespread as they are today.
The first year, Arledge, his buddy Chuck Howard, and Jim McKay (who left CBS for this opportunity) hosted the show on a week-by-week basis. Arledge had a genius for the dramatic storyline that unfolded in the course of a game or an event. McKay's sincere curiosity and reporter's frankness gave the show an emotional appeal that attracted viewers who might not otherwise watch a sporting event.
However, Arledge's point of view, Wide World of Sports enabled him to demonstrate both administrator and producer. Even though Scherick resigned as president of ABC Sports until 1968, Arledge did not obtain a formal title until 1968, when he assumed vice president for programming at ABC in 1964.
Although ABC insiders of the time prefer legendary sports broadcaster Jim McKay to produce all ten ABC Olympic broadcasts, produced the primetime Monday Night Football, and coined ABC's most coveted "Thrill of victory, agony of defeat" tagline, Arledge traces the authorship to legendary sports broadcaster Jim McKay. He presided as producer over the 1975 flop, Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, which director Don Mischer criticized for Arledge's inexperience with the variety show style and indifference to the task required.
Arledge was elected president of ABC News during a period when blunders, such as Barbara Walters' disastrous pairing with Harry Reasoner at the CNN's evening news desk, were portrayed. Walters were tempted away from NBC's Today Show for $1,000 this year. Arledge's only news experience at that time was in Munich covering the 1972 Olympics. Other than that, he had no prior exposure in news. 20/20, Arledge's first major creation for ABC, debuted in June 1978. The first iteration of this scheme fared poorly, with Hugh Downs dismissed as the new anchor beginning the second week of the program, with Barbara Walters, the above-mentioned, joining Downs the following year and eventually becoming Downs' co-anchor by 1981.
Arledge redesigned the network's evening newscast shortly after, incorporating several of the network's splashy graphics he had produced at Wide World of Sports and created World News Tonight. The program was unique not only because it was anchored by three newsmen, but also because each of them was based in separate cities. Frank Reynolds, who was based in Washington, was based in Washington, with Max Robinson based out of Chicago, and Peter Jennings from London. In 1979 and 1985, the service was extended to Sundays. Reynolds died of bone cancer in 1983, and Robinson and Robinson left the network, and ABC appointed Jennings as the sole anchor of World News Tonight on September 5, 1983. Jennings anchored the show until May 5, 2005, when he revealed that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer and that Jennings would die on August 7, 2005. The Iranian Hostage Crisis was imposed on Iran's US Embassy in 1979, prompting the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Frank Reynolds also started anchoring a series of special reports titled America Held Hostage on November 4, 1979. Ted Koppel, then the network's diplomatic correspondent to the US State Department, took over as anchor several nights later. The special reports led to the creation of Nightline, which premiered on March 24, 1980. Koppel anchored the show with Chris Bury and served as its managing editor. After his resignation in November 2005, Koppel held the position until his retirement. Arledge took David Brinkley from ABC to ABC in 1981 and created the Sunday-morning affairs service for Brinkley. In 1996, Brinkley announced that they would be no longer active in the program. Primetime Live, the last major news service developed during Arledge's tenure at ABC News, was launched in 1989. Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer were the program's first anchors. Arledge resigned as president of ABC Sports in 1986. World News Tonight's World News Tonight began a ten-year reign of the network news rankings in the same year. Arledge left ABC News in 1998 as a journalist. Arledge died on December 5, 2002, in New York City, New York, at the age of 71, as a result of a battle against prostate cancer. In Southampton Cemetery, he was buried. In 2003, Roone: A Memoir, his autobiography, was published posthumously.
