ABC’s Diane Sawyer had just arrived home when she got the call that Steve Jobs had passed. It was just after 7:30pmET. She made a U-turn, jumped in a cab and went back to ABC News headquarters where she broadcast special editions of “World News” in the Western time zones. CBS’s Scott Pelley anchored a new half hour from London while NBC ran an update at the top of their West Coast edition. Brian Williams was already on a train headed for Washington, DC.
Sawyer tells TVNewser that she will remember Jobs as someone who “led a constant insurgency against the predictable, the ordinary, and the limits of the horizon.”
Meanwhile, ABC’s Bill Weir and “Nightline” EP Jeanmarie Condon were preparing a special edition of their show, the entirety of which was about Jobs. Weir wrote the show himself and the Apple devotee was making tweaks until the moment “Nightline” went on the air. “Last night was the fruit of a fascination sparked in 1987 when my fellow editors of the Pepperdine Graphic unboxed our first Macintosh,” Weir tells us. Years later, Weir would remember, “I got a new daughter and my first iPod on my best birthday ever.”
A couple years ago, Weir made a pitch to interview Jobs, but he knew he had to do it in an unconventional, creative, Jobsian way. “I decided that he was the one person I wanted to interview
more than any other, and sent him the pitch. Alas, his health was fading by then, and his Salinger-esque privacy had intensified. But I’m certain Americans will be studying Steve Jobs for centuries.” Here’s Weir’s pitch: