Photo By Clay Lomneth
The prompt, “Write up the best story I’ve heard,” is tricky.
It’s not that I lead a boring life devoid of stories, but it’s the word “best” that throws a wrench into it. I end up overthinking and all-of-the-sudden nothing’s good enough. Not the time that I drove halfway across the country with my best friend’s little sister and we shot a .22 in a field somewhere in the middle of Wyoming then later that night she showed me the self-inflicted scars on her arms, or when my mom kept me and my brothers home from school to spend what we thought would be the last hours of our childhood pet’s life, a 120-pound rottweiler who for better or worse was a second mother, or the time that I nearly ran over the murderously jealous ex-boyfriend of my prom date… on prom night… in front of about 20 witnesses at a 24-hour donut shop. When I’ve got to choose the very “best” my mind goes blank, my mouth dries up and it’s like I’m on the spot in front of a crowd forgetting my lines, painfully aware of my lack of words.
So instead of writing down the best story I’ve ever heard, I’m going to go ahead with the only story I’ve been a part of in the 12 hours prior to writing this story.
When I could call myself a journalist.
I’ll start out with a little preface, because every first draft of a story needs the preface, I’m the editor of a sad little college paper in the sad little industry that is traditional newspaper journalism. I’ve sat in on plenty of gloomy meetings heralding in the death of what we do in favor of what the Web does faster, cheaper and, in most cases, worse. This bleak prognosis, combined with my out-of-left-field decision to run for the position and my predisposition to avoid conflict, I’ve spent the year working passively at the paper and none of the grand improvements I wanted have happened.
But it wasn’t until we hired my next-year’s replacement, where someone called me “hands off” with an air of reproach in his voice, that I realized how passive I really was. So this week I dropped weak act and pitched–well more like forced–a story that was important to me. The details are lengthy, bureaucratic and would merit an an entire story on its own, but I’ll say that a minority was wronged four months ago, and it’s not until now that anyone has attempted to do anything about it. Including the paper.
The student government would be hearing an open panel, discussing and eventually voting on a bill that would provide some meager reparation for the incident. For the first time this year, we took the news into our hands. We wrote a story before the fact that dredged up some appallingly racist comments from the community. But among those comments were a few from the minority voicing their hurt, we needed to continue our coverage.
I showed up to the meeting a half-hour early with arm load of cameras, cabling and computers with the intention of live streaming the event to our poorly visited Web site. I was worried that the negative comments would translate to a poorly attended meeting.
I talked a bit, planning out my expectation with my reporters and photographer for the event and quietly set up my video camera and laptop in a corner, hoping that I chose the right place to set up. As the inevitable connectivity issues with getting the broadcast live, I didn’t pay attention to the nearly 100 people who piled into the small space, I hardly noticed when they had to pause the first few moments of announcements as extra chairs had to be found to seat the overflow. All I could focus on was the slow, methodical crashing of my laptop as the open forum–and the important moments approached. I almost cheered as the computer mercifully connected and the image was broadcast live onto the the homepage of the newspaper.
After that, it was easy.
We broadcast the story so–as later metrics showed–130 unique individuals were able to see the meeting, have their own discussion, ask questions and generally put added pressure on the students to act. The actual events of the meeting are a general blur as it stretched past its typical two-hour period to a long 5 hours. But here are the points I know right now. The perpetrators of the act made a surprise appearance–I would like to think spurred by their appearance on the front page of the paper that morning–apologizing to the minority they wronged, my paper was attacked for its lack of credibility, referenced for its hard-line take on the insensitivity, used as a scapegoat for their personal inaction and slandered, but at the end of the night, the bill passed. Narrowly, but it passed, and the students in attendance–the 20 or 30 that could stick it out–cheered and hugged in relief.
Something had finally be done.
The change that all young and idealistic journalists set out in the world to do was accomplished.
And I finally felt like I did something right.
About this story
I used to write a lot creatively, nothing too great, but it really got my writing up to the readability that won’t force people to scratch their head too often.
This prompt “write down the best story you know” came from a fiction writing class a few days before, and I didn’t have anything good on my mind until I covered this story for the Daily Nebraskan.
