The inside scoop on newsroom goings-on

Sometimes when the biggest of news stories breaks, I miss being in a newsroom, miss being in on the scoop long before it hits the wires or the presses, and miss being privy to details that might never make the news.

Perhaps we couldn’t confirm some details on the record, or ethics suggested we not publish them, like the name of a rape victim or an anonymous source.

More than a year after I walked down the stairs from my newspaper office for the last time, I remember some stories far better than others. The most memorable aren’t always the most important ones.

Consider the time I interviewed the late advice columnist Ann Landers, aka Eppie Lederer. I was working for The Associated Press in Chicago, and she had addressed masturbation in a recent column. In the interview, Landers endorsed the taboo subject as a form of safe sex. She spoke in the blunt, somewhat deep voice of an older woman no longer worried about offending anyone.

Some of my fondest memories come from the AP’s sports coverage. While I was never known for my sports acumen, few AP reporters and editors manage to avoid dealing with sports stories, whether the subject is high school preps or pro football.

The Chicago bureau didn’t have enough staff to cover all the pro-soccer games in the 1980s. So we took dictation from a stringer with a thick accent.

As a Romanian American, he was not fond of the Russians, and sought mightily to sneak in references to the KGB when he’d call in routine soccer stories. (Sadly for him, those references never got by the editors.) He was careful in his dictation, spelling out some names —“SMITH ”— le st we lifelong Americans misspell them. But he was just as likely to follow up with something like “Dimitru Mihai, like it sounds.”

I wasn’t known as an easy-going editor at the AP. “Slave driver” was the term one person used. I worked hard, often too hard and for far too many hours, so in hindsight I perhaps demanded too much from some reporters.

There was the time I instructed a bright young Chicago AP reporter named Ed to call a funeral home in an effort to get a comment from the family of a slain mobster.

Ed did as told, quietly hung up the phone, walked over to me and said, “I’m not calling them ever again.” I never asked Ed what the person on the other end of the phone said that upset him.

Journalists were also infamous for temper tantrums, more so in the past than today. I’ll never forget asking Mario, an older reporter in Chicago, to do something that I’m sure seemed perfectly reasonable to me. More short-tempered than Ed, Mario picked up an electrical fan and threw it into a nearby trash can. No one was hurt, and Mario and I moved on.

Thankfully, most news sources are more cooperative than mobsters or Mario. When I was reporting stories on corruption at the University of Central Arkansas during the presidencies of Lu Hardin and Allen Meadors, there were none too few sources. The question was often which ones were sharing legitimate information rather than just sour grapes.

I remember the first person who merely hinted to me about the coming $300,000 bonus that led to Hardin’s resignation and felony conviction. That source, whom no one has to my knowledge ever guessed, walked up to me at an unrelated news event one day in May 2008 and told me to watch for unusual spending at that afternoon’s UCA board meeting.

I wasn’t covering UCA much then and passed the tip on to the person who was. First of all, the unusual— actually illegal—spending was discussed only in a closed executive session. Second, a deadly tornado struck near Damascus that day, and no one had time to pursue the tip further until we began getting more detailed tips later in the coming weeks.

I never knew for sure who the original source was that learned of the bonus and passed it on to my tipster, who would not have had independent knowledge of it. I’m fairly sure who that original source was, but will say only that he was a UCA student.

From all I’ve pieced together, the student was aware of the bonus at least in part because of his job. At some point, he attended a party where he apparently had a tad too much to drink and shared his knowledge. And like the children’s game of gossip, one person told another who told another and finally a reporter; actually two.

Over the years, I’ve interviewed people as diverse as TV celebrity Ina Garten, aka The Barefoot Contessa, death-row inmates, a man who professed to be Jesus, and preschoolers sharing their recipes for cooking a Thanksgiving turkey. I’ve interviewed a couple of white supremacists, a group that’s sadly become so common it’s almost viewed as legitimate in some twisted minds.

I talked with Matt Hale, a white supremacist now serving a 40-year prison term for asking an undercover FBI informant to kill a judge who had ruled against him in a trademark case.

Hale, the “pontifex maximus” of the World Church of the Creator, has called for a “racial holy war.” Yet while living in East Peoria, Ill., he denied being racist when I interviewed him. I don’t recall how he explained that denial, or if he even tried. There are some statements that a reporter can only write down, report and try to forget.

More recently, I interviewed a young white supremacist during a protest in Russellville.

Earlier, a 96-year-old World War II veteran recalled helping liberate the Dachau concentration camp in Germany in 1945. The Jewish veteran said his worst memory was finding bodies stacked on top of one another in a boxcar—“women, men and children, some of them babies.”

Later, the white supremacist showed up and responded, at first politely, to the veteran’s memories. But when told the veteran was Jewish, he quit being polite and said that changed things. The supremacist was, by the way, wearing a T-shirt that said, “Death to all Christ killers,” a reference he said was to Jews, including those living today.

I’m proud to say that I don’t recall this guy’s name.