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Local Coverage
Tip 8: Kappa Sig frat mom. Photo by Michael C. Weimar.
of whether or not they wanted to do it. I
found one guy who actually let me follow
him through as he had the procedure done,
but it was mostly a profile on her—how do
you sell free vasectomies
Tip 8: Work holidays. I used to dread that,
but now I relish it because when you work
holidays usually your story is going to go
on the front page the next day. And usually
people are going to read it the day after
the holiday and then go, “I wish I had written
that story.” So I take it as a challenge:
What am I going to do that’s different for
Valentine’s Day What am I going to do
that’s different for Mother’s Day I try to
start thinking far in advance so that I can
be the one with that idea.
I did a really fun story for Mother’s Day
last year. I found a frat mom who was the
Kappa Sig frat mom at the University of
Florida, who had like 89 18- and 19-year-old
drunk debaucherous guys, and this woman
was 80 something years old and she lived in
this little room off the foosball table. I spent
two days with her because I had to stay for
a party one night. She hunkered down in
her little room behind all the frat boys.
Holidays and rituals, too, baptisms, funerals,
weddings, bar mitzvahs, all of those are
built-in narratives because people understand
what’s going to happen at a wedding,
what’s going to happen at a funeral. You’ve
got your narrative structure already built in.
When something weird happens, it makes
that much more of a surprise.
I did a story that came from a lady who
was a PR person from hospice. She kept
calling me and wanting me to write stories
about their fabulous hospice volunteers,
and I was like, “Alright, but you got to
find me somebody. I don’t want to just
write about the one person that put in the
most hours as a hospice volunteer. I need
somebody doing something extraordinary,
or find me an ordinary person who’s dying
who has something that they want to do
before they die.” You can kind of train PR
people sometimes and tell them what kind
of stories you’re looking for or what you
like. It took this lady about two years. She
finally called me back, she goes, “I think I
found somebody for you. This woman is
dying of AIDS and she really wants to be
baptized before she dies, but she’s Southern
Baptist and she wants to be baptized in
the full immersion pool.” And none of the
churches would do it because of the fear
of contamination. So they found this one
minister who agreed, and he partnered with
the local hospital to come and drain the
baptismal pool and baptize her there with
all of her family around and then have the
hospital sort of disinfect it and take care of
it. It was a simple baptism frame, but it was
a profile about this woman who, before she
died, really wanted to be baptized.
Tip 9: Be late. I don’t get to cover the news
on the day it happens, but I think that a lot
of our stories can be more rich, especially
profile writing, if you wait a little bit. It’s
easier to talk about how it felt to have your
kid die two months later than it is the day
of the accident.
So I keep a little file on my desk that I
pull out of our newspaper and other publications
of a news story that happened
that I might want to go back on and write
about the story behind the story or the effect
of that story on that person months or
weeks later.
One story I did was off of a police brief,
which said “Officer so and so was very happy
because after three years of chasing this fugitive,
the fugitive turned himself in at 11:30
p.m. last night to the Hillsborough County
Sheriff ’s office.” This detective had been
48 Nieman Reports / Winter 2007