Today on Stringers Gone Wrong ...

An elementary school teacher who also freelanced for her town's tiny weekly newspaper got popped for showing up pickled at a city council meeting.

Alabama teacher and newspaper freelancer arrested for drunkenness at City Council meeting

 

You say that like it's a bad thing.

 

Cue joke: "Have you ever been to a city council meeting?"

She must have been pretty damn drunk for it to be noticed. Maybe after the meeting she asked a question and she was slurring/smelling, then the police didn't want her driving.

 

She was charged with "possession of prohibited liquor?" Is that a dry county?

 

I'm told it is a dry county.

 

If being drunk at a council meeting is a crime, I know a few council members who should be jailed.

 

In that same county. (And yes, Franklin Co. is dry.)

 

I remember one stringer -- maybe he was sober -- who covered a high school football game and turned in about 6 inches of terrible, error-filed copy on deadline. We had about a 10'' hole for the story.

I was trying to work with it to make sense of it, make it accuarate and fill the hole. I called him back to ask if he had any more information, stats, quotes or something to add to the story.

The only quote in there was the coach saying something like, "We played hard."

He said, "Yeah." Then he reeled off a lengthy quote off the top of his head.

I assumed he was making it up on the spot -- otherwise it would have been in the story -- and didn't use it. Never used him again either.

 

I've been to a few -- for most of them you'd need either alcohol or large quantities of caffeinated coffee to survive.

The last one I went to was quite entertaining. When I was hired for my previous gig as an assistant metro editor at a medium-sized daily, part of the orientation during one of the first few weeks on the job was to accompany the beat reporter to a commission meeting in the largest city in our circulation area. That city was notorious for bad government, and the beat reporter told me the meetings often were nasty. Wasn't long before the meeting degenerated into a vicious free-for-all with plenty of name-calling and finger-pointing. It was a good thing food wasn't being served there -- otherwise, there would have been a re-enactment of the famous scene from Animal House.

 

It was my understanding when I lived in Kentucky that "dry" only meant alcohol couldn't be sold there, not that possession or drinking in your own home was illegal.

 

Unless she lives at city hall, that doesn't apply here.

 

I always had good luck with stringers for the most part. When I was a sportswriter in Florida, a high school kid approached me at a game and told me he wanted to write sports. We hired him and found him to be both a lifesaver and a great writer who took correction in stride.

At my first shop as SE, where I was the lone full-time gun, we had three stringers. One was a librarian, the other was a college student who now works for Bus Cook (Brett Favre's agent) and the other was a guy who dropped out of high school and lived with his parents. All three were wonderful writers, better than a lot of full-time folks who just did it for some extra money and fun. The last I mentioned is now an SE at a smaller paper.

If you find the right stringers, life is great. You just have to vet them very carefully and be patient with them and their copy. Plus, not showing up drunk is likely a plus.