C.B. HAYDEN MEMORIAL REMARKS
News Division Annual Awards Banquet
June 9, 2003, News York City
By: Mike Duffy
V.P.
News Operations, ABC News
Good Evening.
My name is Mike Duffy. Thank you for having my wife, Ann, and me as your
guests this evening.
I want to talk
a little about C.B. Hayden. We never knew him as anything but C.B.
Like the man, the name was short, efficient and to the point, and a
little different!
Some Facts:
C.B. Hayden
began working at ABC News as a researcher in 1980.
He became
Manager of the News Research Center in 1995 and in 1999 we promoted him to
Director.
He died on
March 6, 2001.
I was his boss
as well as his friend, and I saw him from a boss’ perspective.
I saw how C.B.
loved his work with its challenges and successes. He thrived under the
pressure of show deadlines and blew off steam with his friends outside of work
telling wickedly funny stories about the crazy people at ABC News.
They say he was a great mimic. I’m happy I never saw his Mike Duffy imitation.
I know that he
loved his music, his New York baseball, and the dim sum and barbecue luncheons
he would throw for the News Research Center over the holidays.
I could see
how he loved his staff and that he was fiercely proud of them and the work they
did.
Never failed
to share credit with his people:
·
Candace
designed that web page
·
Nancy
found that article you wanted
·
Lynn
worked her tail off to get that done
·
Suzanne
found another way to look for that
I saw from the
start that C. B. was a “Follow Me” type of leader, not an armchair
general; he never asked his staff to do work he wasn’t ready and able to
tackle himself.
C.B. did
all kinds of research for so many people all the time; AND he kept track of
their interests and followed up on his own.
He knew I
liked military history: every week or so newsletters, articles, a book
proof would arrive.
C.B. was
fascinated by New Technologies. He tracked them and always looked for ways to
put them to work at ABC News.
Medical
research for Tim Johnson and the Boston Bureau: he whipped up a web site to
provide them constant and easy access.
Health of the
Pope and Religious matters for correspondent Bill Blakemore
Generated
follow-up items of interest for virtually anyone who had ever asked him for
information about anything.
C. B. led
the Transformation of the News Research Center from a retail research
operation to a wholesale approach. He took us from the era of Xeroxed
clippings to the Age of E-mail and the Internet.
It sounds
obvious and seems natural to us now that this should be so, but at the time, it
was a revolution at ABC News.
He created the
Research Center Intranet Site to provide a focal point for researchers in News
where they could share information and search more effectively on their own.
He led the
acquisition of new resources to allow more & better research by show staff
with training and guidance from his Information Specialists.
He created the
huge Inaugural Database that will become our greatest research tool for
Presidential Inaugurations for years if not decades to come; finally they
won’t have to research the same requests from Special Events for Inaugural
Factoids every four years.
He created new
databases like Fame Base, which indexes some of the not-so mainstream
publications, to search out the really good stuff on celebrities that other
databases routinely missed.
The fact is
that C.B. Hayden had a Vision of the News Research Center of the future in which
his talented staff and the powerful new resources they created and assembled
would lead to correspondents and producers pulling out just the information they
needed quickly and easily on their own.
Whenever any
of us had a speech to give and needed a quotation or a pithy reference to dress
up our paltry remarks, we would turn to C. B. for just the right thing to say.
It’s a
nuisance not to have C. B. here to help us get things right tonight.
But C. B.
himself was quoted in a 2000 book on research and researchers called Super
Searchers in the News, by Paula J. Hane. I can just hear him saying this to
her.
“It’s
just my personal nature to be very curious about everything. And, to be
honest, I don’t have a very long attention span. In news research,
everything changes every day, every minute. You never know, when you pick
up the phone, what you're going to be faced with. So, the
constant turn over of different types of requests is appealing to me.
“I really
like to get positive feedback from our users. In broadcast news, and
certainly within our organization, you very rarely get a lot of lavish praise;
it’s just not in the nature of the business. Everybody’s busy, and you
don’t get positive feedback from people, but when you do, you know we’ve
really done a good job. We always assume that we’ve done a good job if
we don't hear something negative. When somebody takes the time
out of a very busy day to say that you or someone on your staff did a really
good job that turned around the way they were looking at a story, or had some
tremendous positive impact on the story, that is very gratifying.”
So we remember
CB Hayden tonight on the occasion of this meeting of News people, library
people, special people; And we want to honor him by approaching our
own lives as he lived his life. With dedication to his work and his staff, and
to those he loved.
And always
with Kindness and Decency, with Humor and with Respect for
others.