Daily Newsie

I used to love doing First Person stories. Predictably, they involved doing something cool and then writing about it in the first person, and I loved them because they let me be funny and personable. I wrote one on a ride-along I did for the local police department and a woman e-mailed to me it was the first time she’d ever turned to the jump page from the front — she usually just read until the jump, then put the newspaper down. It was obviously something I was good at, which of course meant that my editors wouldn’t let me do it.

After the city police ride-along, the chief of another local force contacted me to ask if I would do a similar story for their department. I waited for a few months — much as I love them, First Person stories are not an everyday occurrence in newspapers — and approached my editor, who gave me the go-ahead to do a ride-along and write a First Person about it. An officer picked me up at the office that evening and we spent his entire shift together, solving crime on the mean streets of southcentral Kentucky and swapping stories over Whoppers on his dinner break. We had a great time, and I picked up plenty of interesting details for my First Person.

As I left my apartment the next morning, my editor called. They changed their minds, see — I wasn’t going to write a First Person after all. I argued that I hadn’t interviewed anyone else, so it couldn’t be a story (stories, as a rule, need at least two sources). The editor returned that I could write it like a First Person, just not in the first person. So, basically, the story was going to read like a tabloid interview with no real point. If I had interviewed some others, I could have at least turned it into a story about this police department … but now it was going to seem like I was fawning over this guy for no reason.

I went into the office and wrote the First-Person-but-not-really, submitted it, and went on with my day. The police officer I shadowed asked for a copy of the article when it came out, so when that day’s paper hit my desk I picked it up along with a pair of scissors … and gaped at the page. My article was nearly unrecognizable, and definitely sounded as though I was some sort of magazine writer giggling over a famous actor.

“Oh, (Managing Editor) didn’t like your lead. He said you took too long to get to the point,” my editor said when I asked her about the changes. (I was tempted to rejoin that there wasn’t a point in writing a First Person without writing it in first person, but I bit my tongue.)

Apparently, this transgression didn’t warrant anyone actually telling me that they didn’t like my lead; rather, they chose to mangle the story and run it. I was humiliated, and I still had to drop off a copy at the police department for this officer. I did the only thing I could do — paper-clipped an apology to the article, stuck it in an envelope, and handed it over. The officer later contacted me to tell me that he liked the story, but I knew better.

One would think it’s not common to have one’s work mangled without notice, but it’s really not. That was one of the most aggravating things about being a reporter, because you were the one left to explain to your sources why your article sucked and it sounds like a cop-out to blame your editor. Luckily, most people in this town know how it goes, but my cheeks still burn when I think of that story.