What is this!? A little hard news!? Nothing like distracting yourself from horrible news at 8 a.m. Monday morning and the looming prospect of a funeral like trotting down to the county courthouse to see if some dude pleaded guilty or non-guilty for murder (okay, okay -- voluntary manslaughter). I never ever thought I would enjoy writing this sort of piece (and I'm not saying I want to be on the crime beat), but the whole courtroom scene was pretty...fascinating. I felt like a little kid pretending to be a journalist, especially when I audibly sucked in my breath as ten men in prison stripes were marched into the courtroom, hands handcuffed to their waist, feet shackled together. I won't lie, I teared up as a man in his forties who had a crack cocaine habit sniffled and choked up while being sentenced to seven years in prison for using a stolen credit card. (And for only buying $500 worth of stuff! I guess that's what prior offenses will get you.) I couldn't help wondering what his childhood had been like and what sorts of troubles he'd been through to wind up there. It had to be humiliating for him, sitting in front of strangers and admitting all of his mistakes out loud. Anyway. I'll get off my bleeding heart high horse. The moral of the story is it was an intense experience and I'm glad I took the assignment. (Birkhead, by the way, gave me the total creeps.)
I also took my Cross Cultural Journalism lessons to heart while trying to tell this story about two homeless men killing another homeless man without making it sound like this was a hobo brawl and no one should care. Ann and I mulled over it at the ACE desk for quite awhile before finally adding, "All three men were a part of Columbia's homeless community." It was important that we made that clear, but that definitely wasn't the first thing that needed to be said. (Even though the headline kind of takes care of that.)
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