‘Driveway Weekly’
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
My first real writing gig was as a reporter for a driveway-weekly newspaper. You know the kind. The kind that nobody picks up to read, that bake in the sun until they are stacked like kindling and threatening to catch flame. No one read the newspaper I worked for so no one knew the name of it or who to call to hold delivery if they took a trip with the kids to Disney World. In the summer, every other driveway in the suburban delivery zone would pile up with them because no one was there to feel the shame from being too lazy to toss them. The glory in writing for that paper wasn’t in the byline and certainly not in the paycheck. What should have sweetened the deal was that I had my own office, even if it was a storage closet with no view onto the quaint rivertown streets.
I was assigned to work the Parkville, Mo. field office for this weekly chain. Once a week, I’d stop in town, replenish the newspaper machine outside the real estate office by the stairs to the office, walk a block to check the post office box jammed with press releases, and then try to write. I sat at a paper-piled desk and tried my damndest to capture the magic of county commission meetings, school board meetings, city council meetings, and when I had time, try to unearth the more interesting stories in Platte County. The office was a smokescreen meant to make it seem as though reporters were imbedded in the community covering the news. We weren’t. I wasn’t. The real reporting and design work on the newspaper was conducted a half hour away in a strip mall outfit in Liberty. The office space there was more corporate, announced by a neon sign with the newspaper logo. But the Parkville place was better off unlabeled. And it wouldn’t have seemed so bad (a lot of writers would like to dictate their own schedule and have a quiet place to write) but it was too obvious to me that I was trying to lay down the words I wanted with abilities as limited as the cast-off newsroom.
The Liberty office was cutting edge compared to my work closet – and there were people there. There were six work stations in the main office cluttered with the usual press releases, notebooks and print outs. One reporter – a sports writer – had gained a reputation for being especially absent minded and downright slovenly in the way he kept himself and his workspace. He’d come to work with his hair uncombed and his belt undone or maybe his shirt un-tucked in the back. There was a photo desk with a long folding table and light display for negatives – digital was just beginning its take over then. The newspaper had his own well-organized space in the back behind the privacy of his own wall and there was a small bathroom and darkroom, both remained closed off from visitors. Overall, the newsroom was presentable. In fact, compared to metropolitan dailies, it was spic and span, nearly spotless. The newspapers in the rack at the front door were even positioned evenly.
As glorious as Parkville was, the office was the antithesis, a homeless equivalent to a journalist’s dream work space, which is a low standard to meet to begin with. Crusty newspapers were stacked on the two desks that were in the office and occupied the floor and what would have been open space along a wall. A computer sat on one desk, but it was a dinosaur, the model of which I forget, but it was of the 1980s variety with the green text on the dark monitor and a floppy disc drive that wasn’t compatible with more modern floppies. In one corner, a fax machine was surrounded by press releases that were printed and lying on the floor, the fax out of paper. The room looked like a reporter stationed there had spontaneously combusted, like the small town he covered outside the newspaper office walls had been completely obliterated and he’d holed himself up inside hoping to capture the story, leave behind some concept of what had happened to the townspeople.
The town couldn’t have been quainter and there was no view of it from the office unless you knelt and looked down the stairwell at a sharp angle. Parkville is an unusual throwback to the river town concept. While other towns along the river, including some down the road a few miles, modernized with the influx of strip malls and riverboat casinos, Parkville hadn’t. The streets were the same width as they were when horses and covered wagons would leave deep wheel impressions in the mud. The streets were overhung with store signs dangling from chains, broad, colorful awnings, and window displays filled with art work, antiques or views into small eateries and a coffee and fudge shop. The place could be transported to the Ozarks and it would fit in easily as a resort town.
Regular occupants kept an eye out for me to make offers to rent the space out from under me. I didn’t care since it wasn’t mine. I dodged these people to attend meetings and to make sure the fax machine hadn’t caught fire. I basically interviewed people by phone when I couldn’t catch them all in board rooms, wrote for a couple days and designed the newspaper in one grueling 12-hour day. Only a few failed writing hours transpired in Parkville, and those seemed the longest part of the week.
My third day on the job was the most memorable. The office was about 100 feet from railroad tracks where that spring several cars spilled thousands of pounds of coal on the streets and took out an antique sellers building. Early in the night, a car loosed itself from the track and created a log jam of coal cars careening into each other, parked cars and red-brick buildings. The narrow downtown streets were swarming with reporters from local and national television outlets who were reporting against the strange backdrop – heaps of black coal with cars sitting atop them, lop-sided, as though the asphalt beneath them had suddenly festered and bubbled up. Clouds were spitting rain that morning and it was chilly, so police and reporters were stepping around puddles and the spilled coal that’d been sifted across the town.
I carried a wet notebook and took notes in large groups of journalists surrounding witnesses and emergency crews. I recorded the thoughts of some townspeople and a staff person from the local college – a historian, in fact – who’d come to witness history himself.
His last name was Harold Smith. He was walking up a hill back toward campus and I stopped him a broken sidewalk and penned his perspective. I remember I felt like I was letting him and everyone else down. We’d set up this field office and I was the vacant reporter who abandoned it. I wrote that story the best I could with what limited ability I had my first week on the job as a full-time professional, but I always felt I could have done better in that first job. We’d forgotten to tell stories in the rush of the news and the laziness induced by demanding deadlines. A few phone calls made it easier.
Occasionally, I’d rebel and write a feature piece about someone in the community who was either extraordinarily unique or unique because they were so ordinary, but it always cost me in the area of news coverage. I am wondering, today, with the death of newspapers upon us, if anyone shares a similar sentiment, if any other reporters felt let down by the system they were faced with upon graduation in which sales staff was clearly favored by employers and copy was treated as filler, and real storytelling suffered so that the news could be timely and most importantly done, on time. I could be the only one. I did the best with what I had.
When my superiors came to me and asked my opinion, I told them to shut down the office. And after it was closed, I still made the trip to replenish the newspaper box and check the mail. I suppose that the chance to make the call myself as a poor cub reporter was ability than The Rocky Mountain News and The San Francisco Post Intelligencer could do in the age of the Internet, immediate news, and uniform reporting.
