The Absurdity and Joy of Being a Local Newspaper Reporter

CareerCast just released its annual list of “the worst jobs in America,” and for the fourth year running, newspaper reporter came out on top.

The rankings take into account “hiring outlook, income, stress, and environment.” Newspaper reporters apparently face a bleak future as online media replaces print papers, fake news is more interesting than real news, and the population becomes increasingly illiterate (the latter is based on this writer’s first-hand observations).

Still, as an on-again, off-again newspaper reporter myself, I would like to set the record straight: newspaper reporting is the best. I was born to be a small-town journalist (a fact I can’t seem to reconcile with my preference for top-shelf gin and need to drive turbo-charged cars), and though it’s certainly not for the faint of heart, newspaper reporting has been some of the funnest, funniest, most interesting, enlightening, and rewarding work I’ve ever done.

My first job out of college was at a daily newspaper in a small Pennsylvania town. Never in my life have I been so confused and learned so much.

I started as an intern at my hometown paper, and at one point was somehow interning at three small papers in three different towns simultaneously (they were all owned by the same parent company). So much for reporters’ job prospects being “weak”—these people are desperate!

I remember my first assignment like it was yesterday. I was told to conduct “Man on the Street” interviews, asking locals what sorts of businesses they’d like to see come to town. A softball assignment, thought I.

I only needed five interviews with accompanying photos. The photos were the hard part. One man obliged my interrogation, but when it came time to snap his picture, he exclaimed, “I can’t have my picture took!” and darted away to who-knows-where.

This initial assignment took me two hours. Two hours to get five people to give me a single-word response to a non-controversial question. And did I mention it was January and I couldn’t feel my hands? My fervency for hard-hitting, life-changing journalism cooled significantly that day.

Once I landed my “big break” as a full-time reporter at the daily, it was my job to cover the weekly county commissioners meetings. The courthouse was where my passion for limited government, rooted in me since childhood, really took hold and blossomed, under the cultivation of a fat government employee who thought he was Santa Claus.

Not only was this man rotund with snow-white hair and beard, but his job as “grant administrator” or some such was literally gift-giving. I’d sit there and take notes as he nonchalantly rattled on about a grant proposal to use half-a-million in tax dollars to fix some little bridge in some township the people who gave up their half-million dollars would never use. The commissioners would look to one another, nod agreeably, and vote away money on “community development projects” with a single, blasé “yea” week after week.

Grants were a common theme in my early reporting duties. Everyone got them. The hospital, the schools, the library, the local rotary club, an older couple who decided to buy a historical fixer-upper of an old ramshackle building to remodel in their retirement years—you name it. If this much money was being flitted away in such a tiny town, how much was being wasted in places with more sizable populations? I shuddered to think.

The township meetings I had to cover, in contrast to the dry county ones, almost made government seem exciting. Almost. Colorful characters would express their outrage—most of it not fit to print—about various issues I didn’t understand during the public comment period. I’d scribble notes (and lots of question marks) as elected officials debated the value of re-routing the drainage system “down by where Rusty Dunbar’s old house used ta be,” and talked about how to stop kids from playing in the field “​where you go down back when Russell’s corn’s on.” I was berated once by one of the township supervisors—quite harshly, I might add—for my inadvertent misidentification of what location was meant by “up at Gary’s.”

This particular newspaper published (and still does) a weekly feature so bizarre and entertaining that the Wall Street Journal wrote about it a few years ago when the “Opinion Line” was in danger of going extinct. This salacious section contains anonymous comments from readers on every topic under the sun (and I mean every topic). The reporters were sometimes tasked with typing out the messages left on the machine, using a foot pedal transcriber. One day, it was my turn, and this is what I heard: ​

“I have a live hornets’ nest in my backyard. If anyone wants it, call…”

“You should be able to buy anything you need with food stamps, including cigarettes.”

“The only way people around this area will support gay marriage is if Jeff Gordon would marry Tony Stewart.”

“In my opinion, Froggy is the worst radio station on the air. I used to listen to it all the time, now the only time I listen is to hear the pledge of allegiance and birthdays. Otherwise, I do not like it. I don’t know where they are getting those songs.”

“I don’t know why they make such a big deal about snow in April. At the end of April 1928, we had the biggest bush-bender you ever wanted to see.”

“This is to the person on Cold Springs Road who owns the orange cat. Its collar is too tight.”

​ “When are Mount Union Little League parents going to wake up and realize the president and vice president are in cahoots to raise money for themselves?”

“I think I’m going to send my AR-15 back to the manufacturer. It must be defective, because it won’t do anything on its own like the ones I keep hearing about on the news.”

“People who work at restaurants shouldn’t cough into the food.”

I moved on from rural Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C. several years back, and after a couple corrosive years in the swamp, retreated to my role as small-town newspaper reporter, this time in Idaho, with renewed appreciation. My goal was to move somewhere I wouldn’t have to parallel park; I ended up at a place where one refers to the stoplight in town…

This article was originally published by The American Conservative. Read the original piece here.