What was your best day in journalism?

[UNCGrad]

I wrote a Substack column recently about one of my idiot young days as a small daily sportswriter (if you want to subscribe, just PM me, lol!), but it got me to thinking. On that day, I ended up reporting a sports story that blew up and got onto the wire and ended up being read on SportsCenter in the late '90s.

So, that's this thread. You don't have to out yourself, but what was your best day, or your biggest story, or the moment that was the most "what the ****" day of your journalism career?

Let's celebrate those magical moments.

 

[John]

Years ago, local very successful mid-major hoops coach takes job at a bigger (but not big-time) school but didn't really seem too excited about it when I interviewed him about leaving. His wife was more into the move than he was. Three days later, after his introductory press conference, I'm driving a few hundred miles to JazzFest in NOLA when I get a call from the SID at the school I covered. I answered the phone by saying, "No way." Yep, I was told the coach was heading back to his old school and would be calling me shortly. I wrote the story from my car at a gas station in the middle of nowhere Mississippi. Job well done.

 

[rtse11]

1-1,999, Anytime we broke a big news item, or wrote a story that made people uncomfortable (but we had all of our facts correct and verified).
2,000, The day my buyout took effect.

 

[micropolitan guy]

Breaking football/basketball coaches hired/fired stories. Had about five of those. And no matter my sources, seeing the guy I said was "expected to be named" actually show up at the press conference was always a huge relief.

Filing my final story/blog post at about 7 p.m. on a Saturday, about a women's hoop game, felt very satisfying. I went out doing my job until the very end.

 

[Jake from State Farm]

Covered Super Bowl XVIII, the Miami-Nebraska national championship game and the Flutie game against Miami but the biggest thrill was sitting in our strike newspaper office, which was above the Anchor Bar, with a pitcher, a couple of joints and my writing buddies, looking out the window and watching people celebrate the Red Wings’ first Stanley Cup in 42 years. Little did I know I would become a cop reporter when a drunk driver crashed the Red Wings limousine and made Vladimir Konstantinov a quadriplegic

 

[Jake from State Farm]

Filing my final story/blog post at about 7 p.m. on a Saturday, about a women's hoop game, felt very satisfying. I went out doing my job until the very end.

On my last night it was about 15 minutes before deadline and our ASE, who was slotting, asked me to pick up his two stories. I did, we made deadline and I went to the Anchor

 

[I Should Coco]

Although I worked for a couple years at two suburban weekly papers in Chicagoland immediately after college, my best efforts and learning experiences were as the “editor” (aka entire staff) at a small town weekly in Michigan’s U.P.

Everyone read the paper then (this was the late 1990s) and when you broke a news story about, say, the county hospital having to close its OB department or accusations of embezzlement at city hall, your work was important to the community.

They appreciated having someone who knew sports and actually covered the games, too. I learned how to shoot sports — from taking photos on the sideline to developing TriX film — and enjoyed capturing a handful of good photos amid the mountains of mistakes.

 

[MisterCreosote]

The day our Sixers writer couldn’t make training camp and they sent me instead.

Sitting there next to one of my idols, Phil Jasner (who couldn’t have been nicer or more welcoming), and getting into an extensive discussion with him about Samuel Dalembert’s footwork, and just in general finally covering the team I grew up rooting for.

 

[playthrough]

My favorite day/fave story was when I covered a big amateur triathlon in town, one of those where people go off in waves by ability/age group. The first group out are the seasoned ams/hopeful pros and the person who crosses the finish line from that group is the overall winner, with us newspaper hacks and TV there to meet him (and her).

Well, that's supposed to be how it happens. I had some other locals to cover so I stayed the entire race and then waited for a full-field printout (I'm dating myself) to take back to the office for agate. I got back to the office and discovered there was a guy from the 20-29 age group who had a better time than the overall winner we had all feted hours before. I called the race director and pointed this out -- then heard him pull the phone from his ear and curse loudly.

My story was the centerpiece of the sports front, no small feat at a major metro where the editor only cared about the pros and top colleges. Took some creative liberties to write, since we only had photos of the not-winner and I couldn't reach the actual winner before deadline (no social media and few cellphones then). But I got to write a follow story the next day when I finally tracked down the guy (a swimmer at State U) and broke it to him that he won. The race director hadn't bothered. He cursed too, with happiness.

 

[micropolitan guy]

On my last night it was about 15 minutes before deadline and our ASE, who was slotting, asked me to pick up his two stories. I did, we made deadline and I went to the Anchor

What, Lindell's AC wasn't open?

 

[Cosmo]

Best single day? Covered a state volleyball championship match where one of our locals won, busted it to Bank One Ballpark, wrote that up in the press box then covered Game 2 of the Diamondbacks-Yankees World Series. Long day but it was super fun.

 

[Jake from State Farm]

What, Lindell's AC wasn't open?

Been closed for years

 

[MarkWatney]

Decades.

 

[micropolitan guy]

Been closed for years

Didn't know how long ago your final working day was.

 

[Here me roar]

Good thread. Gotta think about this

 

[ChrisLong]

Here are 2, as a writer and a desker:

WRITER -- March 1990: Hank Gathers dies on the court 30 feet in front of me at Loyola Marymount. I still retain vivid memories of Coach Paul Westhead running onto the court, turning to me and saying, "Chris, call 911." It took a few minutes for paramedics to show up. They needed to use a defibrillator but they didn't want to in front of 4,500 witnesses, so they used a gurney and hauled him out. That turned out to be a huge mistake. The game and the other that was supposed to follow were canceled. After that was a lot of waiting, wondering. I phoned Father Dave, the neighborhood clergy from Philadelphia who helped Gather, Bo Kimble and Pooh Richardson. He told me "I guess he's gone." That was the first we knew that Gathers had, indeed, died. I had it, nobody else did. But, of course, I couldn't do anything with it. I reached Stan Morrison, who recruited Gathers and Kimble to USC before he was fired. Got some comments from him.
We were instructed to go to the hospital, about 10 minutes away. I grabbed Jake Curtis from the San Francisco Chronicle and drove him. We got all the info at the hospital. I wrote the toughest story I'd ever written.
I filed near deadline and the desk told me that AP has been trying to reach me all night. I was a voter in their poll and releasing the poll was being held up because they didn't have my vote. Back then, it wasn't always easy to get Sunday night results. I went home to do it, about 15 minutes from LMU. And, I find out there is a power outage in my area and the electric gate to my parking spot wouldn't open. I finally got home and did the poll using a flashlight. Luckily the phones still worked.
I probably got more acclaim at work for this than anything I'd ever written.

DESKER -- October 2001. I'm night editor on the sports desk. Barry Bonds is trying to break the single-season home run record with 71. It's a Friday night ... a high school football night.
We had a columnist on the road tracking Bonds, and the Giants happened to be playing the Dodgers in S.F. We had prepared about 75 percent of a special section, where all we had to do was put in the news story, photos and captions, update some numbers and check to see if everything we'd done in advance was still correct. Bonds got the milestone homer by mid-game, but the Giants rallied and it became an 11-10 game, pushing it later and later into the night, and Bonds kept getting more at-bats.
We did a special section called OC Varsity every football Friday. We covered a ton of games.
Oh yeah, we had the regular sports section, too.

We put out three sports sections that night, all right on deadline and we weren't so late that all the bosses were pissed at us. I felt a great deal of satisfaction, the satisfaction you get for undertaking a monumental task and pulling it off.

 

[BTExpress]

We did something similar in 1997 in Fort Lauderdale, perhaps the biggest single live sports section I've ever worked on.

World Series section. College football section. Regular sports section.

Came in at 180 columns of editorial space. The equivalent of 30 open pages. Ah, the days of 50-person sports departments.

As a desker I never had the enjoyment of beating anyone to a story. But coming up with a centerpiece idea on a Friday during the home NFL team's bye week and making it work was highly satisfying.

 

[Jake from State Farm]

On the desk I wrote my best headline when the Pistons won their second title in 1990. I stole it from a headline written by a friend of mine when the Bucs drafted Vinny Testaverde. But when Vinnie Johnson hit the winner against Portland I came out with “Vinnie, vidi, vici.” I met Vinnie years later and told him I was the guy who wrote the headline. He smiled and said: “That was you?”

 

[PCLoadLetter]

I was working in a unit that fixes people's consumer issues. I found out about a girl who had an issue with the power company.

She was 18 years old. She grew up in a wildly unstable house. Her mom was an addict. Her dad -- a one-time marginal MLB player -- was dead from an OD.

The girl had moved out on her own into subsidized low-income housing and was raising her 15 year old sister to get her out of her mom's home. The girl was working and going to school, barely scraping by.

The issue: the power company insisted that she had thousand of dollars in unpaid electric bills, and they were on the brink of cutting off electricity. She was 13 years old when those bills went unpaid. Her mom's boyfriend had used the girl's Social Security number to sign up.

The girl didn't have the money to pay the bill. If the power gets cut off in low-income housing you are immediately evicted. She and her sister were days away from being homeless.

To top it off, the girl was living with heart failure because she didn't have insurance, couldn't afford a doctor's visit and got kicked off the state's Medicaid system because they said her (estranged) mother's income put her over the threshold for coverage. (I left that part out of the story.)

And this kid is ****ing AMAZING. She had been speaking to groups about her dad's addiction and loss since she was 13. She was working her ass off to get by. She didn't even have a harsh word to say about the mom's boyfriend who used her SSN -- she shrugged it off, understanding that it was probably the only way he could get the power turned on in the first place.

So, I got the power company to erase the old debt, so she's in the clear. The girl is thrilled. She tells us now her goal is to save enough money that she can buy a car to drive her sister to school instead of relying on terrible bus service.

We aired her story and started hearing from viewers wanting to help.

We did a follow-up story where we surprised her with nearly a thousand dollars donated by viewers, along with a car donated by a dealership.

Off camera, I also got to tell her that I got her reinstated on the state Medicaid system and that a couple contacted us offering to pay for her to finish college.

When I retire, I suspect that's the story that will have meant the most to me.

 

[playthrough]

We did something similar in 1997 in Fort Lauderdale, perhaps the biggest single live sports section I've ever worked on.

World Series section. College football section. Regular sports section.

Came in at 180 columns of editorial space. The equivalent of 30 open pages. Ah, the days of 50-person sports departments.

As a desker I never had the enjoyment of beating anyone to a story. But coming up with a centerpiece idea on a Friday during the home NFL team's bye week and making it work was highly satisfying.

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What a time to be in Florida newspapers. Around 2000/'01 I covered the state swim finals at the Swimming HOF at Fort Lauderdale, a helluva venue for high schoolers and my first big overnight trip on the company time. I'd grab your paper and your competitors each morning and just marvel at the work.