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.

All week I’ve done it – written from 8 or 8:30 to 4 or 4:30, maybe taking an hour or so lunch listening to the radio in various parking lots, outside the sandwich shop, outside the department store, on the back roads with light traffic. Those excursions were brief and a sufficient enough break to give myself before getting back at it. I like to listen to talk radion, not because the subjects are particularly interesting, but to hear the words and know that they can be easily pulled in. Opinionated blowhards and sports fanatics grab them from the air around the microphone, and they are not hesitant in letting their true thoughts come out. On the AM dial, their shows are closed to anyone whose privy to technology – AM not even a conceivable option to people under a certain age – so I can pretend I am the only listener until a caller dials in and shatters the fantasy.

These breaks are a good chance to realize the world is so much larger than the space between me and the computer monitor or me and the thoughts I am trying to gather on my subject. I can take deep breaths, feeel the air blow in the windows, see people move and laugh – the people not working on deadlines and who get to go home at decent hours and watch ballgames before switching off the TV for the night. I envy them. They don’t feel any obligation but to make it through another day and most struggle at that. Stamina and focus are not their strong suits and they are not typically mine until I make them be. So many must think I’m fortunate to make a living sitting in a chair writing and editing all day, but those people don’t see the real struggle – the invisible one thay goes on between the ears, the grappling at first for ideas to tell a story and then the words to tell them with.

How many thousands of words have to come first before the gold is struck. I practice as often as possible to avoid getting stuck, to avoid the block that occassionally plagues writers. My fear is that I don’t want to clam up on deadline and be left facing the blank page. You forget sometimes that every article begins that way. Somehow the void gets magically covered with black squiggles on measured lines. Pretty soon even poor writing can yield some brilliance and it’s the writer’s job to clear away the sentences that don’t work. In this post, I would guess the strongest words are near the middle – the more natural ones that flow when I forget I’m writing and that my fingers are moving. Lost, good or bad, lost in the page, lost in another world, and now I know why I envy those men I see setting foundations and trimming landscapes in the median on ordinary Thursday afternoons.

This week, I searched under some key terms to see what, if any, negative remarks would show up. I found only one reference to the Urban Times Person of the Year Article. I do not know Yael Abouhalkah at The Kansas City Star or Tom Ryan, a Crossroads resident who commented on Yale’s blog, but Mr. Ryan’s comments were somewhat flattering to the piece. I’ve provided a link in this post so I can have a record of the occurence. Scroll a bit and you’ll see.