Tag: The News & Observer

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

 

The Senator’s Proof

I can’t say much about the poison ivy email someone gave me when I was a reporter because it was just too sexually explicit.

It was a written by a young woman who couldn’t type. Back in the old days that was newspaper shorthand for an unqualified female political hire. She had been given a job at the N.C. Department of Transportation and she was writing to another young woman, obviously a confidant.

She worked here, across the street from the Capitol
She worked here, across the street from the capitol.

She told her friend how much she liked her job, how she didn’t have to do anything. And she talked about the state senator who got her the job, a senator she knew intimately. She said she had seen him a day or two before, on her way back from the beach.

The guy had a serious case of poison ivy, she said, and she described the infected area in great detail. 

I knew my newspaper, The News & Observer, wasn’t about to publish her email, not in a million years, but maybe I could get the gist of the story in the paper. Anyway, it would be interesting to see what the DOT spokesman had to say.

When I showed him the email he looked distressed but he said nothing, not a word, regardless of how I phrased my questions. And then he asked, “Can we go off the record?”

I wasn’t going to get an on the record comment, so I agreed. I was as curious as you may be — did the senator know the cat was out of the bag?

He did indeed.  The senator had heard about that email –bad news travels fast — and telephoned the DOT spokesman. 

“He asked me if I had seen it, if I had a copy,” the spokesman said.  “I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘Read it to me.'”

[Yow!]

“And I did.”

And what was his reaction, I asked?

“The senator said, ‘Well, I guess that puts to rest rumors that I’m a homosexual.'”

Postscript: I did get a sanitized version of the story in the paper but, alas, not the senator’s reaction.  That was off the record.

Coming Friday: The E-Light Club