Reply #39: Sometimes I miss it a lot. Especially these days when sometimes I

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flatter myself into thinking - "well, I (the great and powerful - HEAVY sarcasm here) would be on the air doing thus-n-such. But I worked for AP Radio and covered Hollywood, so I'd be assigned to get to the bottom of Demi and Ashton, and Renee and Kenny (although the rawther aggressive country music reporter might have tried to yank that one away from me and claim it as her story - sometimes the lines were pretty blurry as to which story was on whose beat). So I wouldn't have served this issue much. Besides, I was in L.A. I do see Mark Smith of the AP at some of the White House press briefings and he's just sitting there taking notes, and sometimes I shout at him - 'WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH YOU, LAZYBONES?!?!?!? You were supposed to be one of our hotshot reporters!!! Not a single question out of you? Why are you letting David Gregory do all the heavy lifting? Whatza matter - cold feet? Protecting the one-on-one you've booked with kkkarl rove or something?

REALLY makes me frustrated. Anyway, I was mainly radio, a little TV, a little print - since sometimes I was the only set of eyes on a celebrity story and if the a-wire needed a people item or something other than just the press release about so-n-so getting his/her star on the Walk of Fame or something, they'd take quotes from me. Sometimes they took so many quotes and other color stuff from me that they'd give me the byline, which was kinda cool.

I worked with two Pulitzer Prize winners, too. They were the guys in the photo department next to our studio in the AP bureau. One of 'em, Reed Saxon, took the photo of Clinton playing sax on Arsenio Hall's show - which, along with a package of campaign photos won a group Pulitzer. The other was Nick Ut - whose name you may not recognize but whose work EVERYONE will remember as long as they live. He took the photo of that screaming girl running naked down the road after having been napalmed in Vietnam. That was such a stop-in-your-tracks photo. I remember Nick talking about the arguments that were held in the Saigon bureau where he then worked - over whether to use the photo because of the little girl's nudity. They finally decided to go with it because of the anguish it depicted - you could NOT get a clearer and starker and more horrendous smack-in-the-face view of what that war did to innocent civilians if you'd custom-designed it. THERE were the horrors of war in those open-mouthed screams - hers and that of a little boy in the foreground. I'd see him at all the celeb stuff, crouching down on the floor in the front, getting the shot, while I was standing usually just behind him, holding my mike out to grab some soundbite. They were both the nicest guys, as was everyone else in the place. I STILL see bylines on some stories of people I worked with, and it's interesting to see where some of them have been transfered around to different and unexpected places. I saw something written by Deborah Hastings on some angle of Katrina, she was in or near New Orleans. She used to write the TV beat in the L.A. bureau. She was a good friend, too.

THAT stuff I miss. A LOT. THOSE people I miss. And I miss the gallows humor in the newsroom that would erupt at the height of almost EVERY big story. Most of it was truly horrible, tasteless, raunchy, disgraceful, the you-should-be-ashamed-of-yourselves type of thing. And I loved EVERY bit! :evilgrin: