" Jim McKay, who was covering the Olympics that year for ABC, had taken on the job of reporting the events as Roone Arledge fed them into his earpiece.

Continuing as an analyst until 1979, Smith left the network as the Roone Arledge era was beginning at ABC News and full retirement age approached.

Wide World of Sports debuted April 29, 1961 and was the creation of Edgar J. Scherick through his company, Sports Programs, Inc. After selling his company to the American Broadcasting Company, Scherick hired a young Roone Arledge to produce the show.

Roone Pickney Arledge, Jr. ( July 8, 1931 – December 5, 2002 ) was an American sports and news broadcasting pioneer 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.

Arledge was born the son of a North Carolina lawyer, mother Gertrude, from Polk County NC, who moved to New York City in search of opportunity.

Arledge realized ABC was the organization he was looking to join.

The genius of Arledge in this memo was not that he offered another way to broadcast the game to the sports fan.

In addition, Arledge was intelligent enough to realize that the broadcasts needed to attract, and hold the attention of women viewers.

Arledge, his colleague Chuck Howard, and Jim McKay ( who left CBS for this opportunity ) made up the show on a week-by-week basis the first year it was broadcast.

Previous to that time, the only news experience Arledge had was providing ABC's coverage of the tragedies during the ' 72 Olympics in Munich.

ABC News president Roone Arledge felt the best way to compete against NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson was to update Americans on the latest news from Iran.

Only after Roone Arledge, the head of ABC Sports at that time, became the president of ABC News in 1977, at a time when this network's prime-time entertainment programs were achieving good ratings and drawing in advertising revenues and profits to the ABC corporation overall, was ABC able to invest the resources to make it a major source of news telecasting.

A disciple of Roone Arledge, he worked on Wide World of Sports, was the first hired producer of Monday Night Football, created " The Superstars ", and also produced and directed three Olympics broadcasts ( including the Munich Olympics ).

In 1978, a year after Roone Arledge became President of ABC News, the ABC Evening News was succeeded by ABC World News Tonight with a trio of anchors: Frank Reynolds, Peter Jennings and Max Robinson.

Created by ABC News executive Roone Arledge, the show was designed similarly to CBS's 60 Minutes but focuses more on human interest stories than international and political subjects.

" In his autobiography Roone: A Memoir, Roone Arledge recalled that probably the most embarrassing part of that initial program was the Claymation segments featuring caricatures representing then-President Jimmy Carter ( singing " Georgia on My Mind ") and Walter Cronkite ( closing the show intoning, " That's the way it was ").

In 1978, when Roone Arledge was looking to revamp ABC News ' nightly news broadcast into World News Tonight, he remembered Robinson from a 60 Minutes interview, and hired him to be a part of his new three-anchor format.

In 2007, The Walt Disney Company posthumously named Arledge a Disney Legend for his contributions to ABC News and ABC Sports ( now ESPN on ABC ), both ( along with the ABC Network ) now owned by Disney.

In October 1985, ABC's Roone Arledge refused to air a report done by Sylvia Chase, for 20 / 20 on the relationship between Marilyn Monroe and John and Robert Kennedy.

Created by Roone Arledge, the program featured Ted Koppel as its main anchor from March 1980 until his retirement from the program in November 2005.

Using the avante-garde magazine Playboy as his model, Arledge convinced his superiors at WRCA to let him film a pilot of a show he called " For Men Only.

Like his volume on Wycliffe, the work was accompanied by the publication of a selected group of documents, in this case illustrative of the history of Queen Anne's reign down to 1707.

That spring Welcome To Our City was selected for production by the 47 Workshop and it was staged in the middle of May.

The position of the new camp was admirably selected and well fortified, its easily defensible nature being one good reason why Howe did not attack it.

the mere fact that he was selected, though as a substitute, to act as interlocutor or moderator for it, or perhaps we should say with Buck as ' father of the act ', is in itself a difficult phase of his development to grasp.

In the first trial an inert substance was disseminated from a boat travelling some ten miles off shore under appropriately selected meteorological conditions.

With due consideration for the limits of precision in assessing, expected rate of change in ossification of girls age 2 years, and the known variations in rate of ossification of these children as described in our preceding paper in the Supplement, each arrow with a `` shaft length '' of four months or less was selected as indicating `` same schedule '' at Onset and Completion, for this particular epiphysis.

A unified set of regulations, applicable to all areas, was issued in 1929, and a complementary series of demographic inquiries in selected areas was instituted at the same time.

An attempted middle course might lead to devices like a 5000-word alphabetized dictionary from which every fiftieth word was selected.

At the central level the scrutin uninominal voting system was selected over some form of the scrutin de liste system, even though the latter had been recommended by Duverger and favored by all political parties.

The third list was selected by the research team on a random basis from the Thomas Register.

The control sample was selected by taking the bottom name of each of the two columns of names on each page of the alphabetical listing of manufacturers in the Thomas Register.

Each questionnaire was audited for obvious mistakes and for comments, and was identified by a serial number, by the source list from which the company name was selected, and by the geographical location of the company as determined by the postmark on the return envelope.

A formulaic element need not be held meaningless merely because it was selected with little conscious reflection.

Then there is a matchmaker, one Mikeen Flynn, a role for which Eddie Foy was happily selected.

Meanwhile, Douglas was selected as the candidate of the Northern Democrats, with Herschel Vespasian Johnson as the vice-presidential candidate.

This announcement followed a five-year standardization process in which fifteen competing designs were presented and evaluated, before the Rijndael cipher was selected as the most suitable ( see Advanced Encryption Standard process for more details ).

Paul Kolton was named as president of the exchange in 1971, making him the first person to be selected from within the exchange to serve as its leader, succeeding Ralph S. Saul, who announced his resignation in March 1971.

As was customary among the Lombards, Alboin took the crown after an election by the tribe's freemen, who traditionally selected the king from the dead sovereign's clan.

He was selected by the executors of Vieta to revise and edit Viete's manuscript works.

The epistates ( ἐπιστάτης ), an official selected by lot for a single day from among the currently presiding prytany, chaired that day's meeting of the boule and, if there was one, that day's meeting of the assembly ; he also held the keys to the treasury and the seal to the city, and welcomed foreign ambassadors.

The biographer Alexander Wheelock Thayer believes that Mozart's rivalry with Salieri could have originated with an incident in 1781 when Mozart applied to be the music teacher of Princess Elisabeth of Württemberg, and Salieri was selected instead because of his reputation as a singing teacher.