Kelly Tyrrell doesn’t work at a newspaper anymore, “(sadly), but one of my favorite moments is actually captured here, in a first-person account I gave to the Tribune after covering the story (which happened to make A1),” she wrote in an email.
Earlier this week, in celebration of National Newspaper Week, I asked readers about their favorite memories from working at a newspaper. Tyrrell’s memory happened early one morning in 2011, when she went to watch a population of ospreys in Cook County basically come back from extinction.
Here’s part of what she wrote in that piece:
The bird was panicked, but relatively still, and it was strange to see this majestic creature turned on its back, helpless. The team worked quickly and got the bird back into the nest.
It was then, when the biologist was high up beside the nest, that he noticed the storm clouds rolling in.
This was Monday morning. You remember the storm.
In an instant, Jason (Wambsgans) and I were piling into the back of the pickup beside heavy equipment. As it battered back to the main road, tornado sirens drowned out the angry osprey behind us. Jason grabbed his heavy lens and I grabbed his tripod and we scrambled to get inside the waiting Suburban back to the parking lot.
It was intense, and exciting. The rapidly changing conditions served as a reminder that, where osprey have this new chance at life, the world around us can still abruptly change.
One of my favorites happened early in my career in St. Joseph, Missouri. Photographer Todd Weddle and I headed out into the rural areas around St. Joe to see how many stories we could find and tell in one day. It was dark and cold and in one small town, we saw the lights on in a farm house. So we pulled up, knocked on the door and the family let us in. We sat at the table with them, like it wasn’t totally odd, and talked as they prepared breakfast and got their kids ready for school. I still remember a sleepy little girl peeking down the stairs at us and her waiting waffles. And I’m still struck by all of the open doors that led to stories there.
I asked my coworkers for their stories, too. Here’s what Andrew Beaujon wrote (and he’s sorry if you’ve heard this one before):
In 2009 Washington City Paper, where I was managing editor, ran a cover story about D.C. Councilmember Marion Barry with the coverline “You Put Me Out in Denver ‘Cause I Wouldn’t Suck Your Dick,” a quote from a voicemail left by a friend of Barry’s. The cover was a big sensation in the Washington area, and we had so many angry phone calls the top editors had to split them up. I ended up talking to one business owner who told me he had pulled all the copies of the paper from their rack because he was worried children would see them. “What’s your business?” I asked. “It’s a bar,” he told me.
Seth Liss wrote that at the Idyllwild Town Crier (winner for best old-timey newspaper name,) they wanted to remove the tagline “Almost all the news, part of the time.” “I threatened to quit if they did. I told them I wouldn’t be able to deal with the pressure.” (We checked, and that’s still the paper’s tagline.)
Here’s what readers told us on Twitter and Facebook. Happy National Newspaper Week!
