The reporter who cries

I've been filling in for our newspaper's editor while she was away on vacation this last week. I've definitely learned a ton and have even greater respect for my boss. She makes so many decisions each day; it's quite remarkable.

It was a crazy week that included multiple fires, a violent wind storm that toppled trees and semi-trucks, including one that was transporting half of a mobile home, a break-in at a pharmacy downtown and a vehicle/bicycle collision that killed a man and put his wife in ICU.

Our small town is not usually so grim.

Add to that some of my usual government beat reporting and the fact that we're down our sports reporter, and I'll admit my bed was my best friend each night and my coffee my best friend by day (apart from my dear fiance, of course).

Today, I even got the chance every editor secretly dreams of, the chance to yell (or in my case, quietly state), "Stop the presses!"

We were waiting on the name and charges against the driver in the death of the bicyclist. Our cops and courts reporter received the court documents at 11:55 a.m. and called in the details to me. Our publisher had stated he wanted that information in the story if at all possible, so I made the decision to re-send the plates and update the story.

I took the fastest, sloppiest notes ever and wrote the quickest couple of paragraphs of my life. The story printed, and we beat the local radio stations, our media competition, with the story -- in print -- thanks to our cops and courts reporter's timely diligence.

It was a satisfying, if not completely draining, rush of adrenaline.

We posted the story online and on Facebook, and the views are already in the thousands.

This afternoon, though, while surrounded by piles of paper and enjoying some pride at what I felt was a job well done, a comment made on another Facebook page about the story on the vehicle/bicyclist collision missed my head and hit my heart. It was about the driver and was something along the line of, "See ya in 30 years, missy."

I began to cry in my cubicle.

I began to cry as I thought about a woman my age who will now spend her years until retirement age in prison. I began to cry about the horrendous death of a well-loved member of our small community and the body pain and heart pain his wife will feel when she recovers. I began to cry about the fact that it was I who had printed the cold, hard facts that can never, ever capture the...tragedy...of it all. Tragedy isn't even the right word, but I can't find a better one in my head right now.

I should be writing another story instead of this blog post, but I needed to clear my head. And I needed the world to know that journalists do care -- or at least this journalist cares -- about the pain behind the words we write.