Reporting From Cincinnati
August 1, 2002
I'm in a desperate race to figure out what I'm doing before they figure out that I don't know what I'm doing.
That's the story of my first month as a general assignment news reporter at WCPO-TV in Cincinnati. After spending most of the first 14 years of my career covering sports, I'm trying to move to news. And I'm trying to do it in the country's 32nd largest television market.
It's not much of a risk for WCPO, though. I'm working as a freelancer, which means that the station only has to keep me until the first day I screw up. WCPO's news director Bob Morford says he heard impressive things about me from my references. I hope they didn't have to embellish the truth too much.
I know how to put sentences together pretty well and I'm gambling that my storytelling skills will mask my other shortcomings until I learn how to properly cover the stories that my sentences describe.
People in the newsroom might not have the patience to wait.
Comments from some of the photographers I shoot with on my first few days worry me that I might be working a tough crowd as I try to win over my new colleagues. They tell me WCPO has lost several veteran reporters in recent years and replaced them by people very green by comparison. The most recent departure is a guy named Joe Webb whom photographer Scott Wegener calls "God's gift to journalism." Not that the reporter thought he was God's gift but that he was.
It's my fourth day at the station and my ambition is not that great yet. I confess to Scott that I am a recovering sports reporter who hopes he can stay afloat until he learns to swim as a newsman. Lucky for me our story that day is about tobacco farmers who saw a recent cigarette tax hike in Ohio as the latest in a long line of blows to their business. Feature stuff, right up my alley. The story turns out well; the live shot goes smoothly and both Scott and the producer of the newscast where my story airs are happy with the result.
"Glad you're here," the producer tells me after the show. Others have told me they're glad they got someone who looks like he's done this sort of work before.
About 4 o'clock in the morning of July 23, a man -- later described as a 5'7" 130 lb. black man with a round face, round ears and thin lips by the victim -- breaks into a house in a nice section of Cincinnati near Eden Park, robs the place and rapes a 17-year-old girl while her brother and parents sleep nearby.
Two hours later, I wake up in my bed inside the one bedroom mansion on Duke Road in Lexington.
At 10:30 a.m. I am standing outside the victim's house, waiting for the lead investigator to finish searching for clues to the crime so he can come tell me about it. Can you imagine? You wake up to find that your house has been robbed and your daughter was raped -- while you slept through it all? And now police are in your house, carting some of your stuff away that might be evidence while your daughter lies in the hospital and the media gather at the end of your driveway.
In vastly different ways, the experience is surreal for both of us. I drive from Lexington to a city I don't know to work at a station I can't watch when I'm home. I work with people whose names I barely know and I'm covering things I've never faced before. It's almost like pretend. "Oh, sure. I'll cover a rape story."
The experience ends much better for me than it does for the family.
My new boss Bob Morford praises my telling of the story after it airs that night. "The writing expressed the outrage" that this sort of thing could happen in that sort of neighborhood without the emotion showing in my delivery, he says. He notes that rival WKRC-TV had put a reporter on the story he calls "a fixture in the market" and says that people comparing her version to mine "would prefer ours."
He is very pleased.
"I guess that means I should come back Friday (my next day on the schedule)," I joke.
"Oh, yeah," he says.
My day-to-day contract gets extended another day and I leave work happy but feeling uncomfortable that someone's tragedy could turn into a good day at work for me.
On August 1 I thought Bob Morford was going to ask me to join the staff permanently.
Back at the station after doing a live shot about the new federal baggage and passenger screeners -- or lack thereof -- at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport, Morford comes out of his office and walks to the desk I use (It's the one I always use but as a freelancer who works three days a week on average, I'm not ready to claim it as "mine.") and says, "You did a very good job on your story today."
"Thank you."
"You really did a good job," he tells me again.
I'm surprised. Not that he'd compliment my work because he did that after the rape story. But while I have done some decent stories at the station, I didn't consider this one of them.
Turns out that the premise for the story that the federal government's new Transportation Security Administration was having trouble generating interest in its baggage and passenger screening jobs wasn't quite right since more than 8,600 people had applied for the 328 open jobs at our airport. I didn't learn this until nearly 4 o'clock which was, of course, after we had shot the package so I had to make what we had fit the facts.
The video for the piece came mostly from file video of baggage and passenger screeners with video of the TSA's online job application and video from a recent TSA job fair designed to attract applicants. We had only two interviews in the story and we had shot those in the airport's employee parking lot (which only took us 35 minutes to find, thank you) with two current screeners who had to apply for the new federal screening jobs like any Joe off the street.
Exciting, huh? I didn't think so, either. All I could think as I rode back to the airport in the live truck was how I couldn't believe that they could lead a newscast in a city as big as Cincinnati with a story so lame. Lame! Lame! Lame! I thought.
So I was prepared for almost anything except the abundant praise gushing out of the boss' mouth about it.
"The intro was thorough, well thought-out and well delivered," he says. He got the last part right. I was smoother than silk on a baby's bottom in the live shot. "The package was interesting," he continues, "and I thought you handled the story very well."
Then he reaches out to shake my hand.
That's when he asked me if I was looking for a full time job. Sounding to me like a permanent position at WCPO was mine if I wanted it he said, "I've been very pleased by what I've seen." I was probably dumb to tell him that I was content to freelance for now. But I was cheered. After five weeks, the fact that they still like my stories has to be attributed to something more than beginner's luck or the honeymoon period any new employee gets. It's still strange covering murders, rapes and tax issues instead of the stories about football games I used to do but it's becoming more natural.
I'm leading the race.
John
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©2002 John McQuiston