The Fifth Rule of Journalism
Yes, your prof assured me the rules will be on the test. You'll have to stand and recite them.
THE FOURTH RULE OF JOURNALISM: THOU SHALT FUCK UP
See? You will make mistakes. You will spell names wrong, get the date of something mixed up, and misreport because you misunderstood. Sometimes people will tell you bullshit that sounds reasonable when you hear it, and you go with it.
As a rookie cops and court guy with the beloved Springfield News in the early 1980s, I made some mistakes that still sting. No, not sting, really. They were mistakes that just make me grimace at this point in my life. Most of the time, they just make me laugh, which is always better. (See future entry under Laughter, Importance of)
Anyway, back to the beloved Springfield Snooze, which hosted many legendary characters in its fun newsroom. One time, the local private ambulance company folded in the middle of the night and the city fire departments in Eugene and Springfield had to take over. We’d been covering this as a developing story, mainly the city hall reporter, the also beloved Tony “The K” Kneidek, or Nosedeck as we called him. Being the public safety reporter, I was happy to jump in and help when the switchover happened.
Among other reporting I wrote a front page sidebar telling people What To Do Now if they needed an ambulance. This was before 911 systems, so people actually had to dial seven digits to get cops and medics or firefighters headed their way.
We were sharp on deadline and I pounded out the sidebar. If you need an ambulance, I wrote, call this number.
And I typed the wrong number. I typed a number that belonged to some hamburger joint.
And that number went out on the front page to several thousand households and newstands. I felt sick to my stomach when I realized the next morning how I’d messed up. I immediately told my editor about it. We were a tri-weekly paper, and the next edition was two days off. The Internet hadn’t been invented, so there was no on-line version of the story that could be instantly corrected.
The city editor, Cynthia Anderson, was a gravelly-voiced smoker and drinker of the old school. Thank god. She got on the line to the phone company, and I heard her explain what had happened. She talked back and forth with them, hung up, and told me the phone company had agreed to intercept every call to that wrong number for the next couple days, and to ask callers if they needed an ambulance or a cheeseburger.
I never felt so relieved. And I’d never felt so glad that our circulation was so small compared to the big daily next door, the nationally-recognized Eugene Register-Guard. We put the correct number on the front page of our next edition, and I never heard that the mistake had caused any problems.
Years later, I began to wonder if Cynthia, who played the brassy broad but was like a mother hen to her young reporters, had actually called the phone company after all. It seems unlikely, now, that she could have just called up the phone company and got them to intervene, just like that. Maybe she just faked that conversation because she saw how stricken I was and she wanted me to feel better. She might have; I don’t know. God bless CA, as we called her. Her husband, Jim, too. And their kids. Bless them all.
The second mistake I want to tell you about was an operational error, I think you could call it. A blankout. Sometimes you won’t be great when you have a chance to be, and that’s just the truth.
It also happened during my Springfield News years. We heard on the cop scanner of a hostage situation at one of those big motels chains along the freeway north of town, a nondescript complex of the type favored by truckers and travelers who didn’t want much more than a relatively clean place to sleep.
I headed out there in my Datsun pickup, and Jim “Flash” Clark, the lone staff photographer, got diverted to head that way, too. Deputies and detectives with the Lane County Sheriff’s Office were there but wouldn’t tell me anything. The motel desk staff filled me in with what they knew.
They said some trucker had kidnapped his ex-girlfriend up around Seattle somewhere and forced her to go south with him in his rig. They’d stopped for the night at the motel north of Springfield. The next morning, they went down to eat and the woman convinced him to let her go to the bathroom by herself. She had time to write a note before the man came into the women’s bathroom and yanked her out of there, alarming another guest who was in the bathroom. The other guest found the note and took it to the desk clerk in the lobby. The note said something to the effect of, “I’ve been kidnapped, I’m in room 206,” or whatever.
The sheriff’s office was trying to figure out what to do, so I settled in to wait in the lobby with my friend, Flash, the photographer, who I’d known since our days on the college paper in La Grande, at Eastern Oregon State College, as it was known when we were there. Flash was and is a great guy; we ended up living in the same neighborhood in Portland.
After a time, though, Flash was getting antsy. He was due at another assignment.
Finally, Flash just had to leave, so he hung one of his fine Nikons around my neck and said, “Just in case.”
This was in the old newspaper days, I guess I should remind you, when staffs included reporters and photographers, not content producers with iPhone cameras. The photographers shot film.
I waited. One of the detectives told me they were quietly evacuating the rooms around the one occupied by the trucker and the woman. The guy had a record, apparently, and they figured he was armed and a bad dude.
The detectives disappeared, making it plain they didn’t want me bumbling along after them. I waited in the lobby, occasionally glancing out the sliding glass door that opened on to a courtyard between two wings of the motel. Inside, I looked up and down the hallways. Nothing. Sometimes you just have to wait.
I glanced out the sliding glass door again. This time I saw a hard-looking man, short, mean and wary, approaching the lobby. He gripped a pale, blank-faced woman by the arm. About 20 feet behind them were the two detectives, in their jackets and ties. One of them saw me looking out and silently, urgently, waved at me to get away from the glass door.
I moved over to a wall display and pretended to study road maps and golf course brochures. The man and woman came in and stopped in the center of the lobby; he gripped her arm and looked at me sideways. I stood there with a notepad in my back pocket and a camera around my neck, trying to look nonchalant. I looked at the brochures.
The detectives stepped into the lobby behind the pair. One glanced at me, then stepped forward and pressed a .357 revolver into the trucker’s right ear. Pushed the gigantic barrel INTO THE GUY’S EAR HOLE and shouted “Freeze!” as his partner stepped up with handcuffs and a third detective appeared from a back room to pull the woman away and out of the lobby.
I gaped open-mouthed at the scene unfolding 6 feet in front of me. “Whoa! Look at that!” my brain shouted as the detectives finished cuffing the trucker and hustled him into the back room to search him.
Then I looked down at Flash’s fine Nikon hanging untouched around my neck.
I’d missed everything. In the excitement, I hadn’t even remembered it was there.
I shot a few fuzzy frames as they led him out again and took him away. He glared at me. One of the detectives said, “No pictures.” Which was about right.
I had the story and nobody else did. The three network affiliates in the area didn’t show, and neither did the radio station that still had a newsguy. Even better, the Register-Guard was nowhere to be seen. In fact, the RG’s cop reporter called me the next day and asked how I’d heard about it. I said it was on the scanner. I could tell he was upset that he’d missed it, or maybe his editor demanded to know what the hell. I guess he wondered if the sheriff’s office had tipped me off. They didn’t.
We used one of the fuzzy frames in the paper the next day alongside the story, after I begged Cynthia to run something, please, because damn.
But here I sit, more than 40 years later, seeing that long pistol barrel in that trucker’s right earhole and still kicking myself about missing that photo. Thou shalt fuck up.
Three thumbs up, Eric! Sixth Rule of Journalism: Always carry an extra thumb.
Great, story! Bringing back good (well OK, the mistakes are painful) memories of our days back at the Snooze. We were a scrappy bunch!
One of my more memorable fuck-ups was publishing a headline on the front page of the Lake Oswego Review that said "pubic meeting" instead of "public meeting." GAH. Tony made a somewhat cuter mistake at the Gresham Outlook when he spelled the town of Camas, "Camus" on the front page. Ahh, fuck-ups indeed.