A few years ago, I wrote a blog post “Chasing the Stories” about my time as a newspaper reporter (read it here) and I received great feedback and blog traffic so I followed it up with this blog a few days later. My newspaper experience wasn’t long but it was memorable.
In the last blog, I got a name wrong. I said Mike but our sports writer’s name was Ray. He was a good guy and wasn’t in the office every day – I think he bounced around covering other areas. Recently I thought of him as Beck’s “Loser” came on the radio, a song Ray sang quite often. “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?” Ray was also pretty amused that a “good Christian boy” managed to finish his Snoop Dogg song one day, “…with my mind on my money and my money on my mind.” Don’t ask me how I knew it.
Ray was a nice guy and almost looked like if the Burt Reynolds from the original “Longest Yard” and “Deliverance” had aged naturally with his own hair. He came to work with a stack of snapshots one day of a camping trip he’d taken with some buddies. I saw a few but he was hesitant for the rest and refused to hand them over, fearing somehow I’d be forever tainted. If it was indeed, as I suspected, naked old people, he was right. Thank God for small favors.
I scooped the Atlanta Journal once and that was a good feeling. The mayor’s office had put out a press release saying something like the city looking into a public access television station. We ran a front page story picking up on one part of the release playing up the idea of the city doing its own show. Debbie said the AJC reporter called her up and cussed her out over it: “Why the &&@##%;(* did you not tell me this?” Debbie told him it was in the release if he would have actually read it. As someone who didn’t get many chances to break news, it felt good, especially since the guy rarely acknowledged me socially.
I’ll never forget sitting for morning coffee at Harry’s Farmer Market with gentleman from Ethiopia who was training to compete in the Olympic track and field competition. He was a nice guy and I was impressed that he had a picture of him and Bill Clinton (and there was no hot young babe anywhere in sight). A few years ago, I picked up the AJC and saw his name again. He’d been arrested on suspicion of murdering his cousin, who came to this country and backed out of an arranged marriage.
Contacts were key back then and still are. It pays to be able to have a few people you can call on to be the voice of the reader and not be afraid to attach their names to their opinions. It’s even better if they’re upset. 🙂 As much as we read about “sources say,” I’ve never been able to get away with that. If someone won’t speak up, it doesn’t get printed. So I had a favorite new councilman who wasn’t afraid to talk. He had a nice way about him and never refused to comment. The mayor would always be available as well, mostly on the record.
I came into the job running fast to catch up and when I left, I was determined to not put the next person in the same boat. I made index cards of contacts (we worked mostly on paper) and personal tidbits on the back sides. I think I’ve been blessed enough to always want my workplace to succeed after I’m gone, even though it’s human nature to want to be missed.
My replacement called me a few weeks after I’d gone and thanked me for the effort put into the files and cards. We shared some laughs and a connection, even though we’d never meet. Like Debbie at the Alpharetta City Hall told me once, “journalists are the best group of people in the world.” Even the one that cussed you out, Debbie?:-)
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