REUVEN FRANK TO LEAVE NBC

Reuven Frank, an Emmy-winning documentary producer and twice president of NBC News, said Thursday that NBC has told him his contract won’t be renewed when it expires early next year, and he’ll leave NBC then.

Frank, 65, with NBC since 1950, retired from the company two years ago, but has produced three documentaries for NBC News under a contract with the news division and a production company he heads, the Formerly Corp.

NBC News president Larry Grossman told him this week that the contract wouldn’t be renewed when it expired on Feb 28. Grossman “also said that he would be very interested in any ideas I had for documentaries, but I’d have to do them free-lance,” Frank added.

Although he was paid through a corporation he formed, that was a fairly routine “accountant’s device” used to ease the tax bite, he said, and “as far as I was concerned, I was still working for them (NBC News).”

Frank, who hasn’t decided his future plans, was asked if he considered himself a casualty of the cost-cutting that all three networks have done because of what they call lean economic times.

“Well, there’s no question,” he said. “because Larry (Grossman) told me he has less money to spend, and that one way he’s adjusting to that is by not renewing my contract.”

In his 36 years with NBC News, Frank was considered a pioneer in political convention coverage. In addition to tours as NBC News chief in 1968-73 and 1982-84, he also was executive producer of news programs as diverse as “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” and the quirky “Weekend” series co-anchored by Lloyd Dobbyns and Linda Ellerbee.