One year ago this Saturday, I walked out of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for the last time as an employee. I quit. It had been three and a half years and it was time. After a week off, which was busy enough it didn’t really count as a week off, I got in my car and [...]
Archive for the ‘The job’ Category
Ever since I got my new phone, I’ve become a little different as a reporter. I’m a writer, so I often think in words, using images as a guide. Go to something — press conference, crime scene, someone’s office or house — and translate what I’m looking at into pages and pages of scribbles in [...]
An editor sent me an e-mail last week and told me one of my two stories that day was going to run on the front page. I didn’t believe him. It was a fine story, but there wasn’t much I had to add to the basics — charges in a year-old killing on the side [...]
Even people who want to be found aren’t always easy to find. When the cops made an arrest in a 15-year-old homicide on Monday, I didn’t have any luck finding someone from the dead guy’s family. Dead guy’s nickname — right there on the original 1995 police report — was “Lunch Meat.” So as much [...]
It was only 85 degrees. That’s what my phone told me. But I watched a photographer sweat through both of his shirts and a detective dripping like a high school wrestler trying to make weight. My glasses slipped toward the end of my nose. Hot means something different in the South. This is the first [...]
Monday brought a story about a young woman — smart, promising — stabbed and then set on fire. With Tuesday came a story about a woman who said her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend whacked her in the head with a golf club, bound her wrists and ankles, gagged her, rolled her up in a [...]
Mike Huckabee, the former governor around here, has gotten quite a lot of attention for his pardons and prison-sentence commutations. Wayne Dumond, Maurice Clemmons — both notorious and easily Googlable. Releasing those men raises questions about Huckabee’s judgment. How he came to believe they were redeemed or redeemable. What kind of men he thought they [...]
He could have been somebody. He could have been a contender.* I found the story of Erick Brooks quite by accident. A source of mine was grumpy because a guy who’d been arrested a few times and sentenced to weekends in jail had been arrested again — ostensibly while he was serving that sentence. That [...]
Crazy. I get back into work today from my furlough and one of my messages tells me a story I wrote last year is the basis for two lawmen killed in 1887 getting added this year to the Arkansas law-enforcement officers’ memorial. This happens next week on the Capitol grounds. I call the lady back [...]
It just so happens that my favorite editor joke is just as easily switched around to make it an editor’s joke about reporters. Maybe that’s part of why I like it. Nonetheless: An editor and a reporter survive a plane crash in the desert. They walk on and on through the sand, then come to [...]
I realized why a certain judge doesn’t allow cameras in his courtroom. It’s because there is so much dark wood paneling in there that with a few additions — stuffed animal heads on the wall, a wood stove, an ancient recliner, maybe a kegerator — it could be somebody’s rural Grandpa’s den. It could be [...]
Some days are stranger than others. More testing of the human condition, the ability to appreciate both the dead-serious and the comical. Yesterday was one of those days. I wrote two stories. One was about a man who shot himself in the toe after an old Jack Russell terrier named Bandit came outside and barked [...]
