Lessons from My Reporting Days - Times Are Tough But Now We Have Cell Phones

(Thanks for Erik for jarring loose a little piece of my memory with his post about Shirley Chisholm.)

I got to meet a lot of famous people when I was a kid reporter thanks to the lecture series at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, LA. That's the town where they filmed Steel Magnolias, and it was about an hour-and-a-half from Alexandria, where the newspaper where I worked was based.

Sometimes I forget how fortunate I was as a kid reporter. Job paid bubkus, but I got exposed to great people, David McCullough, Robert Ballard and Wendy Wasserstein to name a few.

I also got to interview Shirley Chisholm. It was kind of exciting when I drew the assignment because we'd studied her in school as the first black woman elected to Congress. This was a long time ago, not long after she'd wrapped up her her Congressional service. In her lecture she spoke of that election and of her efforts to get a meaningful committee assignment when she took office.

In the mini-press conference afterwards, I asked if she had thoughts about something or other the Reagan administration was doing at the time, an almost naive query since I was wet behind the ears. She gave me a knowing smile, an "Have-I-got-any-thoughts-about-that!" smile, and discussed the policies of the day for a while.

Filing a story on the road was a little bit of an adventure in those days. Only the government had the internet. We had some Radio Shack computers with acoustic couplers that I may have mentioned here at time or two. In a hurry, it was easier to write long hand and file from a pay phone.

After the press conference, the photographer and I pulled into a McDonald's on the portion of Louisiana's Highway 1 that briefly becomes the main drag in Natchitoches or did in those days. We didn't have Interstate Highway 49 then either.

Through whatever voodoo of publishing we could manage back then, somehow it was possible to write the story, file it by phone to get it edited and the layout started and then drive like a Meatloaf album back to the paper to process the film. We didn't have digital cameras either.

While Lee, the photographer, drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, I scribbled on a yellow legal pad, referring to my reporter's note pad, relying on my memory and generally struggling to put together about 11 column inches in slightly more than 11 minutes. How easy we have it writing now. Word, keyboards. Child's play.

While I worked, some guys pulled up in a pickup truck. I kept scribbling. Lee, finding what they were up to more interesting that watching me produce brilliant event coverage, started staring out the window.

"Oh wow, they've got a rattlesnake out there," he said.

I didn't look up, couldn't, but he gave me a play-by-play of these kids who had a rattlesnake the size of the Buick in the bed of an old Ford pickup. The snake was dead, but that didn't stop everyone from gawking at it.

Eventually I finished my story and went to the pay telephone. Cell phones? I mentioned this was the '80s, right? Cell phones were science fiction.

The phone was outside the McDonald's.

So I called up the paper, and they put someone on the phone to type what I read. In some circles they call that catching. We never had a term for it other than getting stuck on the bleepin' phone with some jackass in the field.

I started reading, on a pay phone, outside a McDonald's on what was then one of the major North-South highways in the state, while a parking lot of teen agers took turns scaring each other with a dead rattlesnake.

"Former Congressman Shirley Chisholm discussed...."

Zurrrrrrrrhhhhhmmmmmuummmmmmmm.

"Watch out they can still bite after they're dead."

"She expressed deep dismay with..."

Whurrrrmmmummmm.

"It moved. Did you see it move?"

Whonk, whonk.

Screech

"In other remarks, the Congresswoman..."

"Get it away, get it away!"

Man I hate to see newspapers die.

Lessons From My Reporting Days - Editors Never Make Mistakes

Once, back when I was a reporter, when Reagan was president, the editors came into a meeting, with a spool of paper. We had long continuous feed rolls that fed into dot matrix printers in those days.

The city editor rolled the spool out along our conference table so that it stretched its full length.

"These are all the mistakes that have been made in the last two weeks," he said.

And by errors, he meant things that were actually wrong i.e. words spelled wrong, but he also meant deviations from AP style.

Sacred Texts
Moses was given the Ten Commandments in one hand and the Associated Press Stylebook in the other, or so it seemed.

The book is like one of many style guides that tells how to do things for the sake of consistency so that everybody isn't doing their own thing as far as a.m. vs am and the like. It would be print anarchy without the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, The Chicago Manual of Style or... ah ah ah AHHHH AHHH ah ah The Associated Press Style Book. (One-nine are spelled out. After 10 you go to digits. STAB are the street names you can abbreviate. St., Ave., Blvd. and so on.)

The spool wouldn't have been nearly so long without AP style errors. AP style was sacrosanct. Except when it wasn't.

"This is a case where our style supersedes AP style," the editors would say, usually when you called them on a point like whether or not to capitalize Antichrist. Did I mention I covered religion? Antichrist came up a time or two.

My first real life lesson in how editors are never wrong came long before that, however. I got in this pie fight, you see.

On the Pie Front Lines
Candidates for city judge and people in the media were pitted against each other on the Fourth of July in a pie eating contest the first year I was a reporter.

Everyone sat at a set of tables, and there were a bunch of pies with really thick cream toppings. I'm sure there was a time limit, but that became irrelevant because there were radio guys there.

The world was a more interesting place when you had local radio guys.

I got hit in the head with a banana cream.

From one direction.

Then I got hit from the other, and I wasn't the only one getting hit. There was pie to left of me, pie to the right of me...the air in front of me was thick with pie.

I gave as good as I got, coconut on a morning news guy, Boston cream on a candidate. When it was over everyone was wearing pie, and I did a half a league, half a league back to the newsroom to write of my adventure. A poet warrior!

They ran the story with a picture of me throwing pie on the front page. On the jump they ran a picture of a couple of candidates. The cutline--we journalist types called them cutlines, you probably thought they were captions--identified candidates.

One was the winner, the only guy who kept eating when everybody else was in battle. The other guy was just sitting there, but the cutline said he participated in the pie fight.

His supporters started calling around noon.

"He did NOT THROW ONE SLICE OF PIE! I was there! He is being falsely accused."

I didn't read the freakin' paper in the morning before work, so I had to find it and see what it said. I didn't remember giving any specifics about who threw what.

"Hmm," I thought, when I found a copy. "Wonder who wrote that?"

It was an editor of course, in an effort to polish my sparkling prose.

"I didn't write that," I told the city editor.

"Let me check on it," he said.

He talked to the editor who'd rewritten the line and came back.

"He said it was in the body of the story."

Now, in the story I noted that the guy who won was the only one who kept eating. I knew that because he won. They gave him a ribbon or something.

I didn't know who else was fighting because I was getting hit in the head with pie from about, let me see, one, two, three...there was that one guy from TV...five..NINE directions.

But because the editor had extrapolated from "ONLY CANDIDATE A KEPT EATING" that everyone else was fighting, it was my fault he changed my cutline and made it wrong.

The Moral of the Story
I didn't get in any real trouble. The falsely accused candidate laughed when we called him about it. It was after all A FREAKIN' PIE FIGHT. Sure it wasted food, but that meringue would've melted long before those pies could have been shipped to anyone hungry.

I walked away from the situation chastised and much wiser.

Think about it when you watch the news or read the paper. Reporters and editors are just humans.