I love my job. I truly do. I enjoy it, I find it rewarding, and it feels like occasionally it’s even relatively important.
But today, I hit a wall.
Local crime stories have basically become my beat anytime I’m at work. There are other people that can write them, of course, but when the news department gets an email with an arrest report, a probable cause filing, a request for a warrant…I’m on it. I relish that role.
I actually started running out of steam yesterday. It was late in the shift, and I was pulling video clips from the evening shows to attach to articles. It’s a standard part of the gig that I usually do for 60-90 minutes every night. But yesterday, I was on fumes, and I literally did not remember that a small story I had written about three hours before was something that I did that day. I literally would have bet money that I had written it the day before. It was mind-boggling.
Then today started pretty slowly, which I really don’t enjoy in the morning. I like sinking my teeth into a good article as soon as possible. There was nothing worthwhile sitting in my email box, so I started combing the local jail intake records. I stumbled across one from early this morning that looked interesting: a sex offender was arrested for venturing onto the property of a public school. As a Level 3 registered offender, that was a felony. I grabbed the guy’s name, emailed my assignment manager, and asked if it was worth looking into getting the arrest report and writing a story on it.
Little did I know that, before my time at the station started, this particular guy had already been arrested and convicted of sexual assault. Of a minor. At the school that he worked at. So, yes, it was well worth writing about. But reading all of the background material was rough.
So there was that. Then another child porn arrest. Then, I think, another child porn or sexual assault story. And then a whopper of a rape story came in about an hour before I was set to go home, when I’d normally be watching our news, clipping video, and winding down.
I had to give this one the Josh Duggar treatment, where I read all of the sordid, graphic, disgusting details and boil it down to a palatable story for my readers. So I did. It was…a lot. The suspect worked at a youth shelter. And the victim was a resident there. The *minor* victim. The…nowhere-close-to-being-of age-victim.
I finished the article, but my eyes felt like they were glazing over as I tried to proofread it. So I had a co-worker give it a final look and post it for me.
I’m usually good at letting go of stuff like this at the end of the day. And just writing this feels like it’s helping, actually. But I sure could do with a Northwest Arkansas dog stopping a crime or saving someone from a fire or something tomorrow morning.
That is so rough, I’m sorry. It’s crazy how there seems to be an endless supply of these type of crimes. And too bad that for whatever reason, humans are attracted to reading about these train wrecks. Definitely time for the superhero dog story!
I hope you get called for a feel good story. Maybe see what the Children's Safety Center in Springdale is doing. Positive needs to balance the horrific. Take care of yourself.