At the end of next week, my time at The Evening Sun will be over and there are certainly things I will miss. A few weeks ago I found myself climbing through the fallen timbers left in the wake of a Pharsalia tornado and had the chance to explore the flood damage the day of the storm. Recently I’ve responded to the scene of a head-on crash between a tractor trailer and a pick-up and observed a spirited court debate between attorneys in a drug case involving tens of thousands of dollars.
Of course during about this same three-week period of time, I had two different people threaten to sue me and the newspaper. Just a word of advice to future plaintiffs looking to keep their names out of the police blotter: a threat of a lawsuit isn’t going to work. The pages would’ve been sued blank a long time ago.
Another woman, who was not named in a published black and white photograph, complained when I referred to her unidentified, quarter inch tall image as “elderly.” Honestly I’m not exactly sure if I can offer a clear definition of what I think elderly is, which dawned on me a second or two right after this woman dropped by the office and demanded an explanation. It was one of those surprise reporter quagmires.
Every so often the circumstances of the job set the stage for a great internal debate. Apart from determining the proper time to use the word “elderly,” the job has me tossing the moralities of justice and fairness around in my head at the conclusion of any good court case – especially the ones I know I’ll be writing about the next day. It’s never been my job to create a story, but what particular facts and points to compress in a 400-word article from an hours-long court hearing, can cause a lot of stress. When writing I often imagine how a story may read to a defendant, a victim, the attorneys involved and to someone who’s never heard of the case before. Sometimes my own judgment can be paralyzed by the several different points of view I’m considering.
By imagining the different perspectives, I’m not trying to write an article to make them all happy, but rather the dissenting views help keep my work more balanced.
