Category: Newspapering

Calm Down, Pat

During the 42 years I worked as a newspaperman I made a couple of wrong turns into editing, once for eight months, once for 18 months. I thought it was time to try to start working my way up the management ladder. I had done all right at reporting so they pretty much had to give me a shot.

I didn’t like editing and, truth be told, I wasn’t all that good at it.

As a reporter it got to the point where I rarely had to work with anybody I didn’t respect, who couldn’t carry their end of the stick. As an editor it wasn’t that way, I had to make do with the reporters I was given — some of whom were excellent, some of whom were, I’m being generous, pretty average.

There wasn’t anything I could do about that. It was frustrating. I couldn’t fire them or discipline them. And I didn’t have the temperament for holding someone’s hand, coaxing good work out of them or, at least, better work.

This is what one reporter said I needed.
A reporter told me I needed less of one and more of the other.

Maybe I was a little too intense.

I got into a dispute in The News & Observer parking lot one afternoon with another N&O employee who had parked in my spot twice.

“You better calm down,” he told me, “before you have a coronary.”

A reporter who worked for me, at least in theory, told me the same thing, but more gently. He said I ought to get a dog and quit drinking coffee.

Coming Friday: A Language He Understood

 

My Source Was Self-Insured

I had talked to the woman several times, and thanked her, but I had never met her.

I won’t say who she worked for, but I will say she was secretly photocopying their records and giving them to me. All in the public interest and, yes, in my interest too.

Sometimes she would mail the records to me, sometimes she would leave them at the front desk, in the lobby of The News & Observer where I worked as an investigative reporter. This time, however, she wanted to meet. 

She didn’t tell me her name — she never told me her name — but she told me what she looked like, and that she would be wearing a yellow dress. She asked me to meet her at a restaurant, sit at the table next to her, but not to acknowledge her.

I saw her as soon as I walked in.  She was sitting at table for two, on a bench with her back to the wall. There was an unoccupied table for two beside her and I sat down there, not three feet away. There was a brown manila envelope on the bench between us, at her side, the records she had promised. I picked up the envelope and moved it to my other side.

A moment later she spoke to me. Only she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking straight ahead.

She told me she was afraid.  If anyone found out what she had done, what she was doing, she said, they might hurt her, or worse.

I didn’t know what to say.

She asked me if I ever worried about something like that, that I would be harmed.  I kept looking straight ahead, at the empty seat across from me.

“Yea, I guess so,” I said.  “Sometimes. Not very often.  But I took care of that problem. I have a ton of life insurance.”

She seemed to relax.

“I have insurance too,” she said. “I have a gun in my purse.”

Coming Monday: Liar!