I’m Darren Samuelsohn, and you’re reading a bonus edition of love, journalism, a weekly newsletter that’s published every Tuesday around noon EST that’s full of insights, interviews, ideas and inspiration from me, a veteran journalist who has been reporting and editing writers for 30+ years.
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I love journalism for lots of reasons, but one of my favorites has to do with a urinal.
Back in the late 1990s, while covering the outdoors for The Olympian, I found myself in the restroom of a local bar and saw a clip of a recent story I wrote tacked above the urinal about a guy who made deer decoys for the state wildlife department to catch drive-by poachers. The dude got arrested for shooting at one of his own decoys from the driver’s seat of his car.
Anyone want to share a reason why they love journalism?
I wrote a story about an avant-garde filmmaker in a Newspaper in Tokyo in the mid90s. I saw it posted on the wall in the cinema/film center where it was screening and was super happy. 😀
Back in the “90/s I was covering local news in SW Florida (Sanibel/Captiva/Fort Myers Beach mostly) and if we needed a mugshot of a local arrest we had to drive to the Lee County courthouse in downtown Fort Myers where they would give us a wallet-size print with a tiny piece of scotch tape placed on top. We took the print outside to (wait for it) re-photograph it in natural light and then process in our own darkroom. I would tape it vertically on a trashcan to get the correct angle. And one day, while totally concentrating on taking a pix of a pix of a perp, a guy walking by stops and says, “Boy he must’ve really sone something awful to you.”
I wrote a story about an avant-garde filmmaker in a Newspaper in Tokyo in the mid90s. I saw it posted on the wall in the cinema/film center where it was screening and was super happy. 😀
Back in the “90/s I was covering local news in SW Florida (Sanibel/Captiva/Fort Myers Beach mostly) and if we needed a mugshot of a local arrest we had to drive to the Lee County courthouse in downtown Fort Myers where they would give us a wallet-size print with a tiny piece of scotch tape placed on top. We took the print outside to (wait for it) re-photograph it in natural light and then process in our own darkroom. I would tape it vertically on a trashcan to get the correct angle. And one day, while totally concentrating on taking a pix of a pix of a perp, a guy walking by stops and says, “Boy he must’ve really sone something awful to you.”