They were the ones who asked hard questions of politicians, who exposed corruption scandals and who went home every night feeling that they'd helped to inform the public.Īnd most of them had memories of their beat reporting days that they wanted to forget. He knew people would see the story in the next day's paper and wonder what would ever have possessed some insensitive git to stake out a murder victim's grave and wait for her family. He was just starting out in this business, yes, and the young blood usually had to push through unglamourous work in order to climb the ladder, but could he do this?Ĭould he invade a grieving family's privacy even to help memorialize their loved one? His editor, unflinching, went back to his desk. "Interview whoever shows up and write a story about it. "We need you to go to the cemetery and wait for her family to show up," he said. His editor handed him a short news article from another paper about the young woman.
One of the victims was buried near the city where Mike worked. There is no way I could accurately put it into words. There was this one particularly infamous double murder in the early '90s. He looked up, and the editor handed him a photocopy. This was nothing unusual his editors usually dropped by to ask how his articles were going or to assign something. The editors were nice, he got to write interesting stories and looked forward to coming to work every day.
Mike was excited about his summer internship at a major daily newspaper. It is the perfect summary of why I have given up on the profession I've studied for most of my life. A friend from school told me this story last fall.
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