The Port Authority in New York released Sept. 11, 2001 transcripts yesterday, and today the New York Times wrote about a man who helped at least 50, maybe more, people escape from the World Trade Center before he died.
I first heard about this man nearly four months ago, when I happened to dial a number 3,000 miles away. I was looking for more sources, so I, a little reporter from a little paper, decided to see if I could reach an attorney who was involved in one of the most extensively-covered events in modern history. I reached her, and she added significantly to my article.
At the time, the attorney told me that someone should write a book about this man. We only spoke about him briefly, but his story stuck with me. Today, the New York Times told his story. My instincts were right, as were the attorney's; it's a story worth telling.
There are so many more stories, of so many different people. And they're all waiting to be told.
A man who has now spent half a dozen years as one of the main reporters in my former community recently received the "Lake Shastina Citizen of the Year" award. It's taken him that long to go from being a 'very sucky' reporter to a 'semi-sucky' reporter, to put it in laymen's terms. I certainly hope that, after six years in the business, my writing and reporting skills will have progressed further than his.
I know I'm a bit biased against him because, as a church pastor, he tried to cover some things up. That's not gossip, either; my family was involved in it. His wife (though she was in on it all, too) and daughters are very nice people, and I have a feeling he means well, but when someone can ignore ethics the way he did, it makes me wonder what journalistic ethics he also ignores.
If they're not careful, those who work in public relations can lose touch with reality and begin using words that most human beings do not use on a regular basis. I should know; I majored in public relations and worked in the industry for almost two years. My boss tended to use the word "segue" a lot.
Anyway, since I'm a reporter, I get press releases written by public relations people. I knew I was in trouble when I got one with the title, "Thunderstorms Inundate Lot P at Cal Expo." (Cal Expo is where the state fair is being held.)
I made it past the first paragraph to this sentence: "A multi-agency response to bring incident stabilization and mitigation to the affected area is currently in process."
The latest gripe from this journalist: A reporter from the other local paper stole from my article that was published a day earlier. It's just barely vague enough that I doubt he'd get in any trouble for it, but it's still stealing. He was not in court to hear the testimony I talked about in my article that was printed yesterday, but that testimony somehow appeared in his story today.
One argument is that maybe he looked at the court transcript. That's not reasonable, since he didn't mention other interesting things that would have appeared on the page before or after the testimony in question. Another argument is that people told him about it. That's all fine and dandy, but it would still need to be attributed to someone.
I'm not surprised by this, because the reporter showed up an hour late -- as I was in my car, heading back to work. He showed up an hour late yesterday, too, took a very long lunch and missed at least half of the five-hour hearing. What he was doing, I have no idea. I do know, though, that he wrote no other stories that day. I bet he makes more money than I do, too.
An anonymous person spent 23 cents to send me a postcard questioning a headline in yesterday's paper. I didn't even SEE the headline until I got the postcard, because I'd been too busy to read the paper. Did I write that headline? Nope. Did I write a different suggested headline? Yep.
Can I post the postcard on a bulletin board? Nope. Instead, someone in charge said, "They sent this to the reporter?" That someone apparently doesn't realize that very few people outside of the journalism world have a clue that reporters don't write headlines.
And the person who wrote the headline gets mad when I sometimes ask, long after I'm off work, what the headline is so that I can make sure it's accurate. How on earth can an innocent reporter win in such a situation?
The helicopter story is no longer embargoed, but I don't currently have time to tell more about how I saw a homicide and marijuana plants and lots of other interesting things. (Yes, there's a photo of me in the helicopter, pointing at the homicide scene.)
My weekend was yet more evidence of the "Layla has an interesting life, even when she's not in reporter mode" theme. On Saturday, I went and did all sorts of stuff and had tons of fun. Sights ranged from ocean waves to a metal skeleton holding a gun to a security guard watching a guy shoot at bad guys. (The latter was a game, and I believe those were the only gun incidents of the day. No, there was one more, but it was also a game.)
Sunday seemed to get off to an uneventful start, as I went into anal-retentive geek mode and pieced together 13 photos to make the panorama of all panoramas. For the first time, I saw a reason to get a new processor and more RAM: My computer would have choked if I tried to work with one 117MB Photoshop file, so I split it in three for a while.
But now I'll get to the stuff that just doesn't happen to normal people in a two-hour time span. First, I learned that the older man doing laundry with me was an ex-felon who spent six years in state prison. He even went so far as to TELL ME what he was accused of doing to his step-kids, and what he actually did. Then I had a telephone call from someone who's interviewing soldiers and head honchos as they return from Iraq. His office is 150 feet from the Big Boss (I think it's Brigadier General) of the 91st Division.
I guess my whole family is just prone to experiencing weird and/or cool things. My friends regularly comment on how non-boring my life is, but my sister is certainly competing for her share, too. She wasn't far from the World Trade Center two years ago, and she not only saw the smoke but suffered allergies for months. Yesterday, she became one of 50 million people whose power went out on the East Coast.
My sister called me from New York City yesterday evening when I was at work (I'd just been on another adventure with detectives, but that tale will be told at another time). She was going nuts because her power had been out for six hours by that point. I could hear people having street parties in the background, and she said that she was able to get some candles, though flashlights and batteries had sold out.
As I was typing this, my sister called. It's now been 20 hours, and she still has no power. She could use her cell phone yesterday, but the battery has now gone dead and she has no way of charging it, so she called me from a pay phone with a calling card. She wanted news, she said. Any news. She didn't know if she could or should go to work, she has no idea when her power will be back on and she wasn't even sure what time it was. The best I could tell her is that some places have power, others do not and that the subway won't be running by rush-hour. The mayor has recommended that most people stay home and avoid the city. My sister managed a laugh at that; she lives in the city.
There are few things more frustrating than knowing where 20-something undercover agents are staked out, and not being able to do anything about it or find out more.
Being embedded with the military must be quite the experience, but I think I'd prefer to be embedded with undercover agents.
A word of advice: If you're a 16-year-old out joy-riding with your friends, it's not always a good idea to speed just because you're outside city limits. You never know when a police sergeant in an unmarked car will just happen to be behind you. He might just have a radio, and he might decide to follow you and note when you run stop signs.
Needless to say, my police scanner sometimes amuses me. I do feel a bit sorry for the kid, because the police ran his license plate and contacted the registered owner of the car. That person just happened to be the kid's dad, who then called his son's cell phone and told him to stop.
The sergeant may have received a Medal of Valor for his role in shooting a suspect (the man now has to use a colostomy bag because of this officer's shot), but I still think a parent who was called by police would be the one I'd most hate to reckon with.
UPDATE, two hours later: The story just got better, because the kid's dad is a sheriff's detective. The kid said he didn't stop because he didn't know who was following him and was scared. However, he had a cell phone and his dad's in law enforcement. If it were you, wouldn't you call your dad? Ah, kids these days.
It's Monday. I'm tired. My weekend was too short. I have no use for attorneys who don't give me enough so that I can see their side; rhetoric doesn't do anything for me, and I think readers see through that, too. I also have no use for fence-riding members of the State Assembly who seem to think I'm oh-so-excited just because they return my calls. I do not like writing about the place where I work, and I do not like talking to attorneys who repeatedly remind me of that fact.
This will sound horrible, but I want some sort of crime to happen, just so that I can get away from my desk and away from the groundwater contamination mess that reporters will still be covering long after I'm gone.
I have the perfect solution: A major crime involving one or more of the attorneys in the contamination lawsuits. Maybe one can murder another one (in this city, of course). I'll stop before I begin naming names.
It's a good feeling to scoop the competition, especially when nothing about a story regarding a massage parlor being sued for $100,000 runs in other publications.
It's an even better feeling to scoop the competition twice in one day. Sometimes another publication does get something about the story, but sometimes they only have one or two quotes from the prosecutor (and certainly nothing like an "I'm going to have to rethink my abilities as an attorney" quote) after a murder trial verdict -- and nothing from both families.
Am I a bit proud? Yes. Did I work hard for those scoops? Definitely. Am I too proud? Who knows.
This story about a fire in Northern California near where I grew up naturally got my attention. I know the area the article refers to, and I'm familiar with forest fires in the region.
But the funny part is at the end of the second paragraph, where a source named Brian Harris is mentioned. Who is he? You'd think he'd be a forest service employee or some sort of fire department spokesman. Nope, he's apparently just "of the Klamath National Forest." I've got this mental image of someone who lives in a tent in the forest and just happens to get quoted by a random Associated Press reporter who actually hikes up into the mountains. Does that mean that, if someone quoted me, I'd simply be "Layla Bohm of an apartment"?
Hero stories
The Port Authority in New York released Sept. 11, 2001 transcripts yesterday, and today the New York Times wrote about a man who helped at least 50, maybe more, people escape from the World Trade Center before he died.I first heard about this man nearly four months ago, when I happened to dial a number 3,000 miles away. I was looking for more sources, so I, a little reporter from a little paper, decided to see if I could reach an attorney who was involved in one of the most extensively-covered events in modern history. I reached her, and she added significantly to my article.
At the time, the attorney told me that someone should write a book about this man. We only spoke about him briefly, but his story stuck with me. Today, the New York Times told his story. My instincts were right, as were the attorney's; it's a story worth telling.
There are so many more stories, of so many different people. And they're all waiting to be told.
Posted by Layla at 10:57 PM, August 29, 2003. Comments (0)