ACKERMAN, CARL WILLIAM 1890-1970

Dean of columbia graduate school of journalism

Freedom of the Press

One of the first systematic instructors of journalism in the United States, Carl William Ackerman was moved by the belief that if the press does not police itself, it will be policed from outside. There-fore, he saw a great need for journalistic education to enhance potential journalists' understanding of press etiquette and standards. Influenced by his days as a war correspondent, he perceived that an unsystematic presentation of the news leads democracies to horrible wars.

Early Work

Ackerman's work as a journalist began in 1915 when, during World War I, he was a correspondent for the United Press. In 1917 he became a special writer for The New York Tribune, reporting on France, Spain, Switzerland, and Mexico. In 1917 he also began writing for the Saturday Evening Post By 1919 he was in Siberia with the Allied forces as a correspondent for The New York Times. He became director for the Foreign News Service for the Philadelphia Ledger in 1919 when he returned to the United States. From 1921 to 1931 he worked in public relations, first as president of his own company and then as assistant to the president of General Motors.

Academic Work

Ackerman was appointed dean of Columbia University's School of Journalism, from which he had graduated eighteen years earlier, in 1931. It was turned into a graduate school within a year after his arrival. In October 1943 the graduate school of journalism in Chung-ching, affiliated with the Central Political Institute of China, was organized by Ackerman, who assisted in procuring two anonymous financial gifts.

Ideas on the Press

Both in his work as a teacher and as a journalist, Ackerman's major concern was maintaining the freedom of the press. In his many speeches and articles dealing with the subject he frequently under-scored what he expressed in 1936, that he was "dedicated to the study of the daily newspaper and government. We need scientific studies of the press, by the press, and for the press, which will contribute to the progress of journalism as the great educational foundations have advanced medicine." He also made many statements against censorship, as in his open letter to Otto Dietrich, Nazi press chief in Germany: "No nation has ever been able to create confidence in its money by government decree. The same conditions apply to the printed and the spoken word as a medium of exchange between nations. Good news, meaning truthful information, always has and always will drive bad news, meaning false information, out of circulation."

The Fight against Censorship

Although various government agencies, including those in the United States, attempted to silence the press during World War II under the guise of preserving national security, Ackerman saw this sort of activity as censorship. He spoke often about how traditional democracy relied upon freedom of speech, firmly supporting the Bill of Rights. He also felt that American journalists must challenge any attempts by the government to regulate salaries or working hours of newspaper employees.

Other Activities

During the war Ackerman visited Trinidad, Buenos Aires, Uruguay, and Brazil, promoting freedom of the press and pointing out that adequate supplies were not being delivered to these countries. To promote freedom of the press during the war Ackerman, along with a committee appointed by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, visited England, the Nether-lands, Norway, Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Palestine, and the Philippines. During this world tour he discovered that the bulk of the populace knew little of the war activities; thus Ackerman and the rest of the committee proposed a postwar world conference on freedom of the press. His continued work in such endeavors contributed much to the cultural understanding between nations.

Source:

Richard Terrill Baker, A History of the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954).

Will Ackerman

Songwriter, guitarist, record company executive

For the Record…

Selected discography

Sources

Will Ackerman planned to be a guitar-playing construction worker. Windham Hill Records, his iconoclastic record production company, was to be merely a lark; a hobby. He liked to play soft jazz in the evenings, and when his friends started asking him to record the music so they could hear it often, Windham Hill was started as a way to get them off his back. But before long, Ackerman discovered that his melodic tunes appealed to a Yuppie market that was weaned on the Beatles, the Moody Blues, and Donovan. It was a market that was being ignored by the major record labels. In fact, that market turned out to be so large that by 1986 Windham Hill, Ackerman’s lark, had grossed more than $24 million.

To reach such a height seemed impossible back in 1975, when Ackerman was building houses in Palo Alto, California. His friends were starting to become bothersome, always coming over in the evening with tape recorders, recording his music so they could play it at home. The music itself was hard to define: soft rock, soft jazz, folk. He played alone—no accompaniment—on his steel guitar. After a while Ackerman thought he had finally come upon a solution to the problem. He asked his friends to chip in $5 each so he could cut a record and make a copy for each of them. Sixty friends kicked in the money. That was the beginning of Windham Hill, named after a Vermont inn where Ackerman spent several summers when he was a child.

Ackerman was born in Germany in 1949 and brought to the United States as a youth by his adoptive parents, a Stanford University English professor and his wife. Ackerman was raised in New England and California. He was a below-average student at Northfield-Mount Herman School, where he did particularly poorly in mathematics. And his college grades at Stanford University were not much better. He even managed to fail a course in his native language, German. In the summers he landed a minimum wage job as a carpenter. With only one English course to go before graduation (ironically, one taught by his father), Ackerman dropped out of college and concentrated on his two loves, building small music studios for independent record labels and playing his guitar. Even after his friends urged him to record some of his music, and he found that there was a nice cottage industry for his work, Ackerman could not decide between carpentry and music.

He cut 500 copies of his first album, The Search for the Turtle’s Navel.His friends each got a copy, and the rest were distributed to a bookstore run by Anne Robinson, who would later become his wife. “Will and I did not get into this business to make money,” Robinson told Republic magazine. “We believed that somewhere there

For the Record…

Full name, G. William Ackerman; born November 1949, in Eslingen, West Germany; brought to United States as a child by adoptive parents, Robert W. Ackerman (a professor at Stanford University) and Mary Jackson; married Anne Robinson (president and chief executive officer of Windham Hill Records), 1977 (divorced, 1982). Education: Attended Stanford University, 1967–72.

Founder and carpenter, Windham Hill Builders, beginning 1972; founder and chairman, Windham Hill Records, Stanford, Calif., 1975—. Guitarist; composer of music for films Spirit of the Wind and Radiance.

Addresses: Residence —Northern California; and Windham County, Vt. Office— Windham Hill Records, P.O. Box 9388, Stanford, CA 94305.

were people who would have the same feelings for music that we did.” Ackerman agreed in Esquire: “We had no intention of being commercial. Solo guitar was hardly tearing up the charts. And we weren’t doing it for the money. Annie was running a bookstore and I was framing houses. We did our records purely out of a desire to make something well.”

For the next four years Ackerman and Robinson worked their regular jobs during the day and nurtured Windham Hill Records by night. A desk in the corner of their house was their office; their garage became the warehouse, overflowing with records and jackets and shipping crates. “We did not advertise,” Robinson told Republic. “We didn’t have the money to advertise. We built up a very loyal following by having a mailing list, and we knew everybody on the mailing list because we wrote to them and talked to them on the telephone.” Money was so tight that when orders came in Ackerman and Robinson glued the photos on the record jackets themselves. A friend squeezed ten records from them and sent them to radio stations. Robinson thought that was waste, but those records were to become the springboard that catapulted Windham Hill to success. In 1977 Ackerman cut another album, It Takes a Year.His records were being played on radio stations, and more importantly, people were asking stations about the music. By 1978 Ackerman was getting airplay in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Colorado. By their fourth year it became clear to Ackerman and Robinson that they would have to quit their jobs and concentrate on the new record label.

Although critics and fans alike have a difficult time classifying the music, one thing is clear: Ackerman developed a sound that appealed to a large record-buying audience that had outgrown the current rock scene but found itself with no place else to turn. “They [record companies] ceased to pay attention to the age group which was, historically, a tremendous record-buying group, and, secondarily, a group for which music was almost a religious entity,” Ackerman told Republic. “Music was a terribly important part of life to my generation and suddenly nothing was being made for us.”

By 1980 Windham Hill had gotten too large for Ackerman and Robinson to handle alone. They signed a distribution deal with Pickwick, an independent company unaffiliated with any record label, that allowed Ackerman to retain full control of his music and records. That same year Ackerman signed George Winston, a Montana-born delivery man who had been dogging him with suggestions for artists for Windham Hill. Although Ackerman didn’t like Winston’s suggestions, he liked Winston. Winston has since recorded Autumn, one of Windham Hill’s most successful albums. By 1982, Winston’s Winter into Spring had climbed to the seventh spot on the jazz charts, the company had grossed $5 million, and Windham Hill had signed its first band, Shadowfax.

While other record companies promoted their artists, Windham Hill customers were coming into record stores to buy the Windham Hill label. It didn’t seem to matter who the artist was. Followers had come to expect and trust that Windham Hill would provide a certain sound they knew they would enjoy. Whatever the allure, it wasn’t enough to keep Pickwick afloat; the independent record company went out of business in 1983. But by then, Windham Hill had caught the attention of the nation’s largest record companies. It took nine months to finalize a new contract, but Ackerman eventually signed with A&M Records, a company founded by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. Under their new agreement, Windham Hill could manufacture whatever records it wanted, and A&M received no company stock. Windham Hill could charge whatever it wanted for its records and could launch whatever new labels it wanted. It could also retain the Ma & Pa bookstores, holistic medicine, herbal tea, and health food stores that helped finance the fledgling record company. In effect, Ackerman got a distribution deal with no strings attached.

Since then Windham Hill has branched out. Open Air Records is to lyrics what Windham Hill is to instrumentals. And another offshoot, Magenta Records, specializes in jazz. The company produces only about a dozen albums a year. Yet customers come in asking not for the albums by artist but for the latest Windham Hill recording. By 1985 sales exceeded $20 million, and Winston’s Autumn has gone platinum, selling over one million copies. “What Windham Hill has done is amazing,” Stephen Traiman, vice-president and executive director of the Recording Industry Association of America, told the Wall Street Journal. “You have got to remember that jazz albums are only 4 percent of the retail market.” Added Kurt Loder, senior editor of Rolling Stone magazine, “There’s nothing else like Windham Hill. Their popularity is due to a reaction against loud music.” Indeed, they are so popular that the company spends less than half of 1 percent of its net revenue on promotion, compared to about 20 percent spent by other record companies.

Ackerman still looks more the part of a California construction worker than a record executive. And despite the laid-back nature of his music, his life seems to have acquired some of the frenetic trappings of West Coast success. He tools around in a Mercedes, his blood pressure has risen to 190 over 120, and he and Anne Robinson have since divorced. (They remain friends, and she still runs the office.) He scuba dives, backpacks, plays hockey, enjoys wine tastings, and is a fervent fan of the San Francisco 49ers.

He has built himself a retreat on 79 acres in Windham County, Vermont. And he attributes Windham Hill’s success and his own to an axiom that seems to mark the Sixties generation: Do your own thing. “We’ve gotten here because we’ve never compromised,” Ackerman told Republic magazine. “We’ve done exactly what we wanted. If it didn’t fly, it wouldn’t have mattered. We would have gone on being a hobby company. I would have been pounding nails and making a good living and there would have been good wine on the table. We became what we are because we are different, we are unique, and we care about what we’re doing. Why would we ever compromise?”

Selected discography

LPs; Released by Windham Hill

The Search for the Turtle’s Navel, 1976.

It Takes a Year, 1977.

Childhood and Memory.

Passage. Past Light.

Conferring with the Moon: Pieces for Guitar, 1986. (With Philip Aaberg, Michael Manring, and others) Imaginary Roads, 1989.

Sources

Chatanooga Times, September 12, 1986.

down beat, October 1979.

Esquire, April 1984; December 1984.

Gentlemen’s Quarterly, April 1984.

Honolulu Advertizer, April 1, 1987.

Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1985.

New York City Tribune, September 4, 1986.

New York Times, May 4, 1986.

Oakland Tribune, June 1986.

Republic, May 1985.

Rolling Stone, March 17, 1983; December 18, 1986.

Time, March 1, 1985.

Variety, February 8, 1984.

Wall Street Journal, December 13, 1983.

—Stephen Advokat