Too Edgy, Too In-Your-Face:

Misadventures in Daily

Newspaper Reporting While Black

A Memoir

by

Elaine Tassy

PROLOGUE

On a steamy June morning five days after my twenty-seventh birthday and two weeks after moving to Baltimore, Maryland, I took the elevator to the fifth floor of The Sun, the city’s main daily newspaper. It was my first day as a reporter at a big, well-known, award-winning paper, the kind of job I had wanted since high school. I got off the elevator and walked into the newsroom filled with jumbled metal desks, file cabinets and computer terminals straight out of the 70s. The threadbare carpets looked colorless, and dust covered everything like ivy.

            I had just completed a one year-training program at the Los Angeles Times that had set me up at this new job. I had never been inside the building downtown on Calvert Street, because my interview for the job had taken place in Los Angeles a few months before, so I thought The Sun’s managing editor who had interviewed me on the west coast would be in the newsroom that day to set me up at a desk and to introduce me to my editor and colleagues, or that he would have at least told someone else to expect me. But when I showed up, I wandered around the unfamiliar newsroom for a few minutes. Then I asked a clerk if he knew where he was. The clerk said that the managing editor wouldn’t be in all day, and that he hadn’t told anyone I was coming, either. This reception was the first of many indicators that I was in an alien, perhaps hostile work environment.

It was how I was received at The Sun, where I spent four years in the mid-nineties. It was the reception I received again, almost two decades later, on my first day at another newspaper job I took, two thousand miles away, at the Albuquerque Journal in 2013.

            Some memories I’ve made that I’ll keep for the rest of my life happened while out reporting a story for the Los Angeles Times as a trainee, for The Sun for four years on various beats, and for the two years I spent at the Albuquerque Journal after a fifteen-year gap in between. Such moments kept me addicted to this toxic line of work, because I knew there would be more such moments.  During a training program at The Los Angeles Times I participated in before I got to Baltimore, I wrote about a boy who had unexpectedly dropped dead on the basketball court, a woman who’d been at fault in a hit-and-run accident, a girl who lived in a gang-riddled area taking dance classes for solace, and a boy who faked an assault on another boy in juvenile detention so they could all get burgers from McDonald’s. During my four years in Baltimore, I met and wrote about a grandmother learning to read, a homeless man whom Sun readers helped get a place to live, and an endearing couple from Ukraine who had sacrificed everything to open a bakery in the Baltimore suburbs. I reported several stories concerning a motorist who, while rushing to work, accidentally ploughed his car into a bus stop where a family was standing waiting for the bus, killing almost all of them. I wrote about a girl who walked into her mother’s bedroom to find her mother’s new husband in the process of stabbing her mother to death. When I covered education and family issues in a Baltimore suburb, I wrote about open-space classrooms, overnight childcare, adoption, child support, and changes in home economics classes. After time away getting a Master of Arts degree and teaching journalism, somehow those highs sucked me back in and I was again having adventures only a reporting job would provide. While working at the Albuquerque Journal, I took a balloon ride at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, visited a Native American pueblo an hour outside of town where residents chose not to use electricity, wrote a long investigation into why a group of teenagers used blocks of concrete to beat to death two intoxicated men when they were passed out near one teen’s home. I reported on the state’s first gay couples getting married, a teenager who tried to stick up his own grandmother by covering his face with a purple bandanna, and families who had adopted older children, among many other articles, probably close to 900 articles at all three papers combined.  The reporting that I did to write these stories in different sized papers in different parts of the country allowed me to go to places and have experiences that I never would have had access to, and the conversations and observations I had on such outings, many of them described in these pages, are among the proudest and most unforgettable of my career.

But a multitude of disturbing events arose that followed the shady reception on my first day at The Sun, and a multitude more arose following my shady reception at the Albuquerque Journal twenty years later. While often enjoying my reporting and writing duties, I had dozens of experiences with the paper’s mostly white, mostly male editors who, probably without recognizing it, misused the talents of female and minority reporters and underplayed the importance of local news stories about the city’s black residents. In Baltimore, for example, most reporters of color got demoted to the low-readership parts of the newspaper—daily or semi-weekly sections or inserts whose bureaus were located dozens of miles from the city proper -- and only women of color who were assigned to churn out weekly puff pieces about church ladies making chocolate Easter eggs or middle school students staying overnight at school to learn about science. In one newsroom, women of color were more frequently tapped to write fire or shooting stories on deadline, when even the newest staff reporters weren’t similarly interrupted. A white male staffer received credit for the reportage of a cover story done by two female reporters of color, and a white editor sent a black reporter out to a black neighborhood with a reputation for being unsafe, so that the white reporter who was actually covering the story didn’t have to go out himself. Editors selected a 22-year-old white male intern for a beat that was also sought after by two full-time black male reporters. Also, minority reporters’ articles appeared on the less-visible inside pages (as opposed to the more desirable cover pages) as often as more than three times more frequently than articles by white reporters who had identical or comparable beats—a trend traced by analyzing the page numbers and bylines of articles archived on The Sun’s website.

Years later, when I got to the Albuquerque Journal, I was, in 2013, the first black person ever to work on the City Desk. Only one other black person had worked as a reporter there before, in the Features department, and she had been denied the opportunity to cover higher education on the city desk. I was the butt of a racist joke told in a staff meeting, and regularly yelled at by my editor, who didn’t tend to yell at other people. Because I used the skills I’d learned at The Los Angeles Times and The Sun – much more rigorous, prestigious, widely-circulated and prize-winning dailies than The Albuquerque Journal, most of my colleagues barely spoke to me, because my diving into my reporting work made their reporting processes seem less committed. After six months at The Journal, I was squeezed out of the social services beat I’d been hired for, where I was outperforming my predecessor, simply because a white man wanted my job, and forced to work in the cloistered, sequestered Features department where none of the editors had any reporting experience and where editors forced me to write articles based on their lame ideas rather than allowing me to come up with my own. In that cloistered room, all the rules of journalism went out the window. When I found out by looking at a written document that The Albuquerque Journal was exchanging event coverage for free seating at an event, the editor who made the arrangement criticized me for finding fault with it.

 In all of the newsrooms I’ve worked in, as the stories in these chapters describe, editors did not notice their own bias towards white reporters. In dividing up the reporting staff between two editors in one newsroom, one bureau chief selected for his team reporters who were all white and mainly male. In that newsroom, each of the women reporters shared computer terminals, while each male reporter had his own. Besides being biased in how it utilized reporters and their work, all three newspapers showed bias in terms of news coverage. For example, The Los Angeles Times decided not to name a white teacher who I observed giving her students misinformation about black history. The Sun wouldn’t publish a balanced accounting of the Million Woman March, opting instead for a sanitized edited version that painted the March as a much more positive experience than what I witnessed and reported on. At the Journal, editors openly requested that reporters interview people who owned the businesses that had brought advertising space in the newspaper without any awareness or care of who this was a violation of journalistic ethics.

What could be particularly shocking was editors’ own obliviousness to their racism towards non-white staffers, not only in their editing, but in casual newsroom conversation as well. One Sun editor enthusiastically trotted over to my desk to give me a flier about a charter trip to Africa he seemed sure I would want to go on, and another asked me a question about a character from the TV miniseries Roots. At the Journal, I was referred to by two of my colleagues as a “cotton-picker” and given the task of writing the Nelson Mandela obituary, although I was not the obituary reporter.

            Usually, I plugged away at my reporting jobs, trying to ignore the multiple pressures of deadlines, competition with local TV news broadcasts, the scramble of finding stories and the daily microaggressions that were part of my daily life. Sometimes I was unable or unwilling to hold my tongue, and I let editors know how I felt about the racist trends I saw. It seemed like a normal thing to do, because they struck me as overwhelmingly obvious and completely unacceptable. But often, opening my mouth would cost me. Whenever I offered my unsolicited feedback, I paid for it. One editor in a suburban Baltimore newsroom secretly moved up my departure date to bilk me out of $500, while editors at the Albuquerque Journal, most of whom lacked reporting experience, tended to bully, control, under-pay and berate reporters with impunity, and do no self-evaluation as reporters continued to leave the paper.

In researching this book, I learned that the sorts of trends I saw at all three papers’ coverage of non-white citizens, its usage of non-white reporters, and the consequences dealt out to those who dared mention it, were real, not only according to my own interpretation of data and what’s found in academic papers, but also in terms of mental health consequences. After my four years at The Sun, and again after two years at The Albuquerque Journal, I gained over 25 pounds and I suffered headaches. I came away from each reporting experience doubting myself, thinking perhaps I had been drawing to myself any and all negative experiences I was having, by provoking editors with what they felt were inappropriate questions and observations. In some instances, I probably was being insubordinate and provocative.

In May, 2020, the murder of George Floyd had an impact on many parts of journalism. His murder created a post-journalism landscape and a new lens through which stories of what it’s like to spend your day alongside people whose white privilege impacts your career are being told, heard and believed. This is one of them. In many ways, many of the experiences I had working as a reporter had left residual bruises that felt healed as I learned of so many other reporters of color who had endured experiences similar to mine. Another way that healing occurred for me was in June, 2020, when both black reporters at the Los Angeles Times, and I used the reframe his murder provided to allow our own anguished voices to be heard. Black reporters at the Los Angeles Times, where I had always felt I had been trained in good faith, filed a lawsuit against the paper, citing and documenting the fact that the trainees of color they were growing in-house, were being paid less than white reporters.

Inspired by how people were honoring his death with the engagement of conversation or action that otherwise might not happen, I end my misadventures with the act of inviting a former while male Albuquerque Journal city editor to have a mediated conversation with me about how his abusive behavior had made me feel. During my hours-long, uninterrupted comments, I felt I had contributed to my own self-care when after I described working with him as the newsroom version of an officer’s knee on George Floyd’s neck, he couldn’t contain his emotion, and as I got out every detail of what working for him had been like, he and the lawyer he brought with him were in tears. Stories like these coming to light normalize the experiences of other high-achieving reporters and professionals in other fields of color who have managed to find their way through the unwelcoming maze into a newsroom door, only to lose confidence in themselves as they navigate the unwelcoming newsrooms of large daily newspapers, most of which employ a percentage of black reporters much smaller than the population of black people in the area it covers. After reading scholarly research articles and tabulating information on The Sun’s website, and hearing the stories of other well-respected black female journalists such as Ferai Chideya and Nikole Hannah-Jones, I realized something eye-opening: my experiences, described in detail here, were often merely thumbnail sketches of what tended to happen to women and people of color working and speaking up in predominately white-male professional climates. Examples of newsroom and workplace racism or sexism at these three papers is addressed in dozens academic journal articles that I consulted to contextualize these stories, based on my experiences of working in three newsrooms.

Learning about other people’s experiences, in context with my own, along with years of distance that gave me time to find and understand academic research quoted in these pages, has neutralized much of the negative baggage and the bitterness, but that knowledge is bittersweet. An investigation done by VICE led me to research that showed that METPRO, the training program at the Los Angeles Times, was in turmoil. The paper where I had began my reporting career, was the subject of a lawsuit for paying reporters of color – the very ones they were ostensibly training in METPRO – less than they were paying white reporters. The Los Angeles Times settled the case for $3 million, after the union produced data showing that the Los Angeles Times, creators of an elite program to train journalists of color like me, also paid women less than men.

The endless institutional racism and sexism allows daily, undiscussed microaggressions to eat away at the mental health of women of color working in daily newsrooms. One of the METPRO participants in the Vice investigation spoke of questioning himself, being led to believe that because he hadn’t been able to find his footing and a path to success at the Los Angeles Times, that something was wrong with him. It has been a feeling I faced, which diminished, the more I learned of the stories of other reporters facing the bias of the editors. It was, in fact, a story of a reporter at a daily newspaper in Pittsburgh sanctioned by her editor that led me to address mine in forum with witnesses, and for it to be openly recorded, so that I could see my two years there with my voice as a through line of what no one could deny: the opportunities for black women to survive and advance in daily newspapers can easily be inhibited by editor for anyone and everyone to witness. Knowing it is truly happening to many people, many whose voices are then no longer heard, alleviated me from much of the blame I put on myself again and again, by wanting to feed the addiction of telling interesting stories, in spaces I was not allowed to belong, the kinds of workplaces like daily newsrooms, where in my case and that of many others, the confidence and dreams of intelligent, hard-working, unsuspecting non-white and female professionals begin slowly to unravel.

CHAPTER 1:

INTERNSHIPS

My plan to become a journalist incubated in the mixed-race suburb of Montclair, New Jersey, a suburban town of over fifty thousand located fifteen miles west of New York City. Comedian Chris Rock once called Montclair the country’s best city for mixed-race couples. When I was growing up there in the 70s though, there was little mixing—everyone I knew self-segregated by race. Some communities, like mine, were mostly white except for a few professional black families. That meant there were many white spaces I stumbled into where I did not belong. The cool group of white kids at my summer camp waited for me to slink away before they started games of Spin the Bottle. In high school, white kids played tennis and field hockey, got leading roles in the plays and ate on one side of the cafeteria.

Meanwhile, black students comprised about a third of the student body, and black boys distinguished themselves by dominating the football and basketball teams, dancing to Disco music at all-black parties, and dressing in Swedish knit pants with one leg rolled up.

            For some reason, I thought this racial stratification was the natural order of things in exclusively schools, churches and hair salons, but that it would miraculously and spontaneously not exist at whatever office I worked in by the time I began a career.

I grew up in a high-achieving family with culturally atypical black parents who almost never discussed or responded to racial discrimination. My social worker mother is part black, part white and part North Carolina Cherokee, and identifies herself as black but is sometimes mistaken for white. Research shows that the color of her skin, about the same as Lena Horne’s, diluted some of the racial discrimination she would have faced if her skin were darker. As a child, I don’t remember having conversations during which she or my father armed me with the knowledge that I wasn’t going to find a level playing field in the workplace. My sometimes-Republican-voting physician father didn’t do much to prepare me for the anti-meritocracy of the workplace, either. He had come to America from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Many Haitian families couldn’t afford to pay for their children’s schooling -- which isn’t necessarily free there -- making many Haitians living in the U.S. inclined to view education as a bonus not be wasted.  It was a ticket to eventual financial security. By the time he arrived in the United States in his late 20s, my father was well-adapted for the challenges of becoming a Veterans Administration pathologist. Later, the respect that his status as a physician gave him trumped the degree of racism he would otherwise have faced, were he, for example, an orderly. With his heavy accent and skin so dark that he never wore black clothes for fear he’d blend into the color of the fabric, he would likely have been treated differently if he were not in the rare profession where reverence is attached to everyone in it. He thought that his ability to come from a politically unstable, impoverished country without much infrastructure -- and become a doctor -- meant that racism was no worthy explanation for anyone’s professional failure or mediocrity, particularly not his own children’s.

            My parents imposed high and socially uncool expectations on my older sister, younger brother and me, all born within three years of each other. We all took piano and swimming lessons; we went to a white Catholic Sunday school and church; we did our homework every day after dinner. We were models of discipline, punctuality and attendance raised never to use improper English. I was so willing to interact with all branches of the segregated school population that in chorus in fifth grade, a black girl named Pauline whispered from behind me: “You’re the only black person in your row.” I hadn’t noticed that some rows were comprised of only white kids, and others of only black kids because, as a chunky four-eyed fifth-grader, I was in what scholars refer to as the Pre-Encounter Stage of racial identity, the first of four stages that people go through in developing attitudes about themselves as part of their race. It is “characterized by dependency on white cultural norms for self-definition and approval.”[1]           

Approval was often elusive for me, though. In high school, I spent lunch periods in the library doing my homework, and was one of few black students taking advanced placement science classes. In my third year of high school, I joined the staff of The Mountaineer, the monthly newspaper, for something to do with my spare time. The editor of the news page gave me my first assignment: to write an obituary of a high school teacher who had died over the summer. I met with another teacher who had known him, and a few minutes into the interview, she started dabbing at her eyes and sniffling. “This is hard,” she said with her head down. Our conversation pulled me from my isolated, narrow perception of the world into one with a deeper understanding of life, formed by more extreme encounters with what other people were thinking and feeling. During my junior year, I wrote a handful of articles for the twelve-page paper, and before summer break began, the faculty advisor asked me if I wanted to become Assistant Front Page Editor the following school year. She also suggested that I apply for a two-week summer workshop for minority high school students considering journalism careers, which would be held on the Central New Jersey campus of what was then Rider College, now Rider University.

I took her advice and got accepted to the workshop, which accepted about two dozen minority New Jersey high schoolers to study and practice journalism with local professionals and to use the campus classrooms for lab work. Under the guidance of area journalists who took time off to lead the program, we went on ride-alongs with police, and interviewed community members about drugs and alcohol -- the focal point of our workshop that year. Then, using manual typewriters, we wrote articles that were later printed in a small laboratory newspaper.

            Often during that hot July, I hung out with another workshop participant, Cheri, who was from Trenton. We were walking around campus discussing boys or our families when I blurted out a question that I didn’t realize was too personal; I think it was whether she had ever had sex with a boy. “You’ll be a great journalist someday,” she said with humor and amazement in her voice, “because you are so nosy!” Before we had that conversation, I had considered this workshop to be more of a teenage sleep-away camp than a career primer. Being on the school paper was one thing, but I didn’t see myself as extroverted, persistent, confident or disciplined enough to ever be a real journalist and report and write important, timely articles on deadline. Real journalists were well-informed on local politics and international current events, areas I did not feel I was strong in. But after talking to Cheri, journalism became a career to consider, even if based on my nosiness alone.

When I returned to high school after the Rider summer program ended, I continued writing articles for the newspaper, hokey ones about a field trip to a New York City museum, a girl who designed T-shirts, the Middle States Association high school accreditation process taking place in school. As assistant editor, I also assigned student writers articles to work on. I was second-in-command to the front-page editor, a preppy sandy blonde-haired guy named Chris, who remained a friend and point of reference for workplace differences for years afterwards. In 1984, I graduated from high school and started college at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, my top choice of colleges. Wesleyan is a well-regarded private college of about 2,600 that makes up one third of the Little Three. With Amherst and Williams Colleges, this trio of small, highly competitive New England schools are the little half-siblings of the more venerable Ivy League.  I arrived to learn that there were rules according to an unspoken code of social behavior during the mid-eighties, for the small, close-knit population of black Wesleyanites who didn’t want to be branded “Incognegroes:” Black students generally didn’t write articles for the mainstream paper; Black students didn’t sit with white students in the main dining hall, and instead sat near the cafeteria windows in what was known as “the black section”; Black students didn’t use cafeteria trays as sleds to ride down hills in the snow; and Black students didn’t live in the dorm populated mainly by white frat members. Even though I was breaking some unspoken rules, I occasionally wrote articles for the semiweekly mainstream paper, The Argus, and for the quarterly minority-oriented news-magazine, The Ankh. I found the interviewing exciting and the writing gratifying. Asking questions relevant to the topic seemed intuitive, and I noticed that people I interviewed were usually willing to open up.

During my freshman year, I was hanging out with my hallmate Cassandra, a creative, blonde-haired, blue-eyed art major who had attended a prestigious New England boarding school and then taken a year off after prep-school to travel to Indonesia. She grew up sailing and riding horses, and when she showed up to occupy her dorm room, she and her father replaced the dorm furniture with a futon bed, carved dresser and other items they’d brought along. She and I lived directly opposite each other and became good friends during our first semester. One night we were talking about Rev. Jesse Jackson’s visit to Middletown, the town where Wesleyan was located, during his campaign for the democratic presidential nomination in 1984. She called him “Jesse,” which to me suggested that she viewed him as a peer, not as a potential democratic nominee and world-known civil rights activist who deserved the use of an honorific. “Do you also call the white presidential candidates by their first names?” I asked her.

She did not have a ready answer. The silence that ensued gave me a chance to wonder if the sound of crickets chirping was her recognizing that there was no neutral answer. If she said that yes, I would assume that she was lying and trying to save face. If she said No, that would mean her answer was, “No, I don’t call the white presidential candidates by their first names – just the black ones.” 

In college, I was considering journalism as a profession, but Wesleyan didn’t have a department or a major in journalism, and I never involved myself with the campus newspapers seriously with the kind of enthusiasm that would get me a job someday. So, I looked for internships to participate in during summer vacations as a way to get some experience writing articles in non-campus publications. In my sophomore year, I applied for an internship with the Association for Education in Journalism through New York University. I got a spot in the 10-person program, which arranged for me to intern at Macmillan Publishing Company and work for a woman in the marketing department so cold that her temporary secretaries’ stays were usually short-lived. One day, a black woman who had been answering her phones and doing her paperwork for a few days returned from lunch. Then she pulled out a Ziploc bag and took a sandwich from it. As she was eating it at her desk, the boss saw her and thundered, “You will not sit at your desk on MY time and eat a sandwich!” The stunned secretary wasn’t back the next day. The internship program, which was targeted to minorities, required that participants take a summer class called Minorities and Journalism, held at New York University. The campus was in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan, in walking distance from the NYU dorm where I was sharing a studio apartment with another intern in the program. The professor of the Minorities and Journalism class belonged to the New York Association of Black Journalists. One night he invited another member, freelance newspaper reporter Jill Nelson, to come in and talk to our class about her journalism career, which had taken her to South Africa and other countries. A tall, cinnamon brown-skinned woman in her mid-thirties, Nelson had a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. Standing in front of our class in casual clothes and Reeboks, she exuded charisma and confidence. She said that the reporting, writing, researching, and revising she did for her many Village Voice cover stories could be learned. She was the first black woman journalist I had ever seen, besides a few light-skinned local TV news anchors who had struck me as remote and artificial. At the end of her talk, she told us that she was leaving New York to start a full-time job as a reporter at The Washington Post’s new weekly magazine.

After the NYU summer class and the Macmillan internship ended, I returned to Wesleyan, and, charged by Jill Nelson’s talk, I began looking for newspaper internships for the following summer. Not realizing that I should have set my sights lower, since I lacked adequate experience for a summer internship at a major newspaper, I applied for summer programs at The Atlanta Journal & Constitution, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post. With so little experience or printed articles to supplement my application, I got nowhere, and instead spent the summer as an office temp in Manhattan. So did my white high school newspaper friend Chris, who was majoring in International Studies at a small private college in Pennsylvania. While I sat in a JCPenney corporate headquarters cubicle stapling contracts to manila folders and typing labels for them, he was working in the financial department of a corporate bank alongside seasoned employees who managed large sums of money—despite the fact that we had gone together to the same temporary agency and told the same employment counselor our comparable academic backgrounds and work experience.

In my senior year of college, I cut back on writing articles for campus publications to devote more time to completing my thesis on Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. All the excitement Jill Nelson had whipped up in me had by then cooled off, and all the summer internship programs I had applied for had turned me down. There was basically no chance of me finding a reporting job fresh out of college. In the summer after I graduated, I moved to a rent-by-the-week rooming house in New York City’s Greenwich Village and found a job as a researcher at a non-profit organization that advocated for pregnant and parenting students’ rights. Like a reporter, I was out of the office often. Some of the things I had to do included talking to students in schools, meeting advocacy committee members, writing and editing reports of my focus group findings, and testifying before Manhattan policymakers. But it wasn’t what I passionately wanted to do, and I left within a year. I moved with a roommate to Brooklyn and started a job on the journalism sidelines as a publicist at a Manhattan PR firm setting up TV, radio and newspaper interviews for authors who were trying to promote their books.

I was the first black person ever to work at that small Midtown firm, likely making me the first person to notice the racial climate, what academics call a workplace’s “atmosphere that managers or power-holders and majority-group members create.”[2] The climate there was quite black-unfriendly. The firm employed two secretaries, who both supported the entire staff of about ten. But neither of them considered doing things that I needed them to do to be part of their jobs. One night for example, one secretary left the office for the night carrying two of three FedEx packages that the publicity staff, of which I was a part, needed to send out to producers or editors, and dropped them off, like she did most nights, at a FedEx satellite office a few blocks from the office. She left the one that I was sending behind for me to drop off on my own. When I started working there, I initially had to type my own booking sheets (forms that confirmed a client’s newly-arranged interview segment on a TV or radio talk show), although the secretaries typed everyone else’s. When new white men were hired, they were not required to spend a period of time doing their own typing like I was. Also, every publicist but me flew across the country for a bookseller’s convention, and stayed in a hotel for a few nights, all at the company’s expense. The following year, the only black intern that the firm hired during my nearly two years working there quit the internship entirely at the end of her first day. One day, the vice president, a few of my colleagues and I were eating lunch in the president’s office, sitting on his couch and chairs and resting our take-out Chinese or Thai food on his coffee table as we did almost every day. “You’ll appreciate this,” the vice president said, pointing at me. Then he launched into a joke about a black man whose penis was so large that he could hang a towel over it. He beamed at me afterward, like he expected me to nod my head knowingly with a wet smile, reminiscing on my own experiences. The first racist joke I’d experience would be in early 1990, the sort one cannot act offended by, for fearing seeming a poor sport. I’d hear a similarly sublte racist joke in the conference room of a newsroom a quarter-century later.

My job was to call television and radio producers in major cities to convince them to schedule my clients for interviews on the talk shows that they produced. Although more engaging, some days it felt like it was just one step up from telemarketing, and it didn’t take long to realize that I didn’t want to make a career of arranging author interviews. I still wanted to be a reporter. I signed up for evening writing classes and sent out hopeful pitch letters to Manhattan weeklies like The Village Voice and New York Press suggesting freelance articles, but none of the editors I contacted were interested—one slashed through my cover letter with a grease pencil and mailed it back. Meanwhile, I was struggling to cope in a sensory-overwhelming city where constant noise, pollution, impatience, and lack of privacy were becoming too much for me. It was time for me to work on my exit strategy. I started spending lunch breaks at the New York Public Library, flipping through reference books in the pre-Internet era, looking for a way into reporting that would take me to another city. One day I came across a listing for a paid summer program at the National Journalism Center, a Washington DC non-profit organization that trained aspiring journalists -- mainly college students, but also recent grads like me working in other fields and trying to redirect their careers into reporting. Participants got hands-on experience at local newspapers, radio or TV stations, plus a small stipend. I copied down the information and applied. When I found out I was accepted, I gave the PR firm vice president six weeks’ notice. Although my co-workers and bosses said they were happy for me, they gave me the worst publicity projects to handle during that six-week period, as if they were jumping me out of their gang. In the early summer, when I was about to turn twenty-four, my brother and I U-Hauled my boxes and second-hand furniture to a studio apartment I had found in the Adams Morgan section of Washington. I liked it better than New York immediately because of the space, the quiet, the light, and the chance to drive sometimes rather than take the subway everywhere.

Two men ran the National Journalism Center from a house on Capitol Hill. In the first weeks, they sent participants -- about twenty-five of us that sweltering DC summer -- to government hearings inside sleek white-domed government buildings located in walking distance from the Center. We wrote articles about what had occurred in various open committee meetings as practice in getting a story given vague instructions, a situation newspaper journalists faced frequently. In the second half of the program, we were sent out to get real experience as trainees at newspapers and TV stations in the DC area. I interned at The Alexandria Gazette-Packet, an understaffed weekly in a DC suburb about ten miles away. I drove out to the newsroom every morning in my second-hand Honda and spent exciting days reporting and writing my first real stories. One was about an employee assistance program for people whose alcoholism affected their work; another was about a girl with a deadly nerve disease that caused her face to swell. I was loving the craft of figuring out who the best people would be to interview, which experts might have compelling opposing arguments, whom to pursue despite resistance. I was giddy whenever I saw my byline on stories I’d written, usually at least one every Thursday.

Even though I was learning some skills, by the time the summer program was over, I was also finding that even getting an interview for a beginner’s newspaper reporting job in DC was difficult in the early 90s. Entry level reporters had nothing to offer compared to the many seasoned journalists from around the country who wanted to work in DC. But I wasn’t ready to bend: my position at that time was that I would take a job as a reporter or none at all. So while looking for work, I wrote freelance stories—usually earning between $0 and $35 each -- and supplemented that by working as a temporary secretary for days, weeks, or months at a stretch in DC law firms, banks, real estate companies and hospitals. It was a time in the early 90s when, from what I repeatedly noticed in my temp office buildings, the gender and racial division of labor was clear: Most white men had their own offices and their own codependent secretaries; most white women had a range of jobs, running the gamut from entry-level to executive; most black men sat in lobbies as uniformed security guards; and most black women sat in cubicles word-processing and scheduling appointments for their bosses, asking permission when they wanted to leave for lunch.

After dozens of draining and dehumanizing temporary job assignments and dozens of articles published in local weeklies, I realized that I wasn’t able to get enough steady work temping and freelancing to pay the bills long-term. After falling two months behind in rent, I came home one evening to find an eviction notice taped to my apartment door. Reluctantly, I had to look for full-time work, and eventually found a day job as a counselor in a junior high school in a drug-ravaged, $0-income high-crime area of Southeast DC. Thin-skinned and sensitive with no training for any aspect of this work, I was responsible for trying to improve students’ middle-school academic experience. I was supposed to be helping their parents in a variety of ways, from getting their kids to go to school to finding jobs or literacy training programs for them so they could take better care of their children. I was also responsible for coordinating after-school therapeutic horseback riding and art classes for kids from a community that provided little recreation. My emotional nature got me excessively worked up over hearing about one student’s brother’s murder and another student’s claim that his mother and brother were sleeping together. Leaving work at 8 pm, I sometimes saw toddlers wandering around in the nighttime streets, hand-in-hand without grownups, as gunshots rang out.

CHAPTER 2:
METPRO

The difficulties of that job based inside the DC middle school sparked my urgency in reconsidering entryways into journalism that I had rejected before, particularly one called METPRO (Minority Editorial Training Program). It was a well-respected two-year training program launched at The Los Angeles Times in the early 1980s to groom driven but inexperienced or under-experienced young minority reporters for the work of daily newspaper reporting. Of the ten people admitted every year, nine were usually budding reporters and one was a new photojournalist, and most had graduated from college in the past ten years. The program began each June with six weeks of classroom training at The Los Angeles Times, followed by one- or two-month rotations, reporting from police precincts and suburban Los Angeles news bureaus under the supervision of editors and mentors. For the second year, trainees got one-year entry level jobs at daily newspapers in the Times Mirror newspaper chain, which then included The Los Angeles Times, The Sun in Baltimore, Newsday on Long Island and a handful of smaller northeast papers. Often, completing the second year of the program led to a permanent job offer at that paper.

            I had heard about METPRO in college and considered applying then.  But I never did, because I thought that could find a reporting job on my own that didn’t force me to make a two-year commitment or to live in a city I might not otherwise want to go to. But after months of trudging through middle school counseling and absorbing its anxiety, such that no fun whatsoever seemed to be left in my life, I called The Los Angeles Times for a METPRO application. Over a few weeks, I put together the required newspaper article clippings, essays, article critiques, college academic transcripts and references, and sent my packet in. The following spring, I got a letter saying that the judges had picked me as one of 25 finalists from nearly 200 applicants. With 10 slots each year, that meant I had a 1-in-2.5 shot of getting in, less than a 50/50 chance. Half the finalists were from around Los Angeles, and the other half of us were from other areas. The paper flew the out-of-town finalists into LA for a two-day interview. On the night that we arrived at LAX, the current class of METPRO participants who were close to wrapping up their first year—well-dressed, middle-class Hispanic, black, Asian, and Native American aspiring journalists—had just learned where they would begin their second year as full-time entry level reporters. Shortly after getting news of their fates, the first-year completers shuttle-bused us incoming finalists to dinner in two groups of about a dozen each, all at the paper’s expense, so that we could ask them questions about the program we might not want to ask in the more formal setting of an interview.

            Over burritos and tamales at a dark and lively Mexican restaurant, I found out what kind of M the M in METPRO (Minority Editorial Training Program) really stood for. A trainee who was about to begin her second year of the program at The Los Angeles Times was seated at the same table as me. She was an attractive, fair-skinned, slender woman in her late twenties named Alicia. As far as I could see, she looked like a white person. She had a complexion often described as porcelain or peaches-and-cream, and ringlets of naturally curly light brown hair that came to her shoulders. Her ancestors, she told another METPRO participant, had emigrated from Italy to South America before moving to Southern California. This conferred upon her the status of Hispanic, an ethnic group eligible to participate in METPRO. I had been under the impression that Minority, in the case of this training program, meant non-white, so I didn’t see how her Italian ancestry, her relatives’ lives in South America, and her white appearance qualified her for this program. I thought METRPO was trying to reach likely targets of skin color-based discrimination -- aspiring reporters who looked non-white. But later I learned how she fit in: federal ethnicity categories define Hispanic or Latino as “a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American [descent], or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.”

            Alicia’s participation in METPRO foreshadowed a prevalent but unspoken reality at both The Los Angeles Times and The Sun: the mainly white editors tended to prefer working with and grooming METPRO participants and minority staff writers who, like Alicia, looked more like them -- white-appearing reporters whose ethnic groups also included darker-skinned members.

            The morning after the dinner at the Mexican restaurant marked the beginning of the formal two-day METPRO interview. On the first day, every finalist spent half an hour at a conference table across from a team of Times editors and reporters, who asked us tons of questions: what past experiences got us interested in reporting, what we thought we would bring to the training program, and how dedicated we were to the profession. Noticing that my application materials stated that I was now working as a counselor with a non-profit organization and based in a DC junior high school, one interviewer asked me how committed I was to being a reporter. Because of that, I left the conference room doubting I would be a likely choice for the program.

            Another part of the interview was a mock press conference. In it, Times staffers were cast as experts addressing and answering questions from the local media, played by METPRO applicants. We spent half an hour competing with other applicants to get in as many good questions as we could. Then we had to write articles on deadline based on the press conference. I thought that my interviewing skills proved solid and my practice article came out OK, but I returned to DC feeling like a small fish in the huge, competitive, aspiring-journalists-of-color pond. The METPRO director said he would let us know within a week who was in and who wasn’t, so I checked my answering machine every few hours in the days before cell phones, and rushed home after work to see if he had sent a letter.

            Finally, at the end of an anxious week, the director’s secretary called and told me that they had chosen ten participants and two alternates, and I was the second alternate. She said that one person selected for METPRO hadn’t taken the offer, which meant that the first alternate got in, but that everyone else had accepted a place in the upcoming class, which meant I was out. I was crushed. I had nothing else journalism-career-path-oriented to hope for at that point, except a summer internship I had gotten into at a daily newspaper in Santa Barbara, California. If I took it, I would have nothing lined up once the eight-week program ended. At the same time, I didn’t see myself lasting much longer at the middle school, where I was so stressed out that I had asked my doctor for anti-anxiety pills.

            One Friday night a few weeks after hearing the bad news from the METPRO director’s secretary, I got home from the middle school and collapsed on the couch, where I often spent my spare time worrying listlessly. When the phone rang, the METPRO director was on the other end and his voice sounded cheery. “You’re in the program!” he said. An accepted METPRO participant had just gotten a full-time reporting job at a New York daily newspaper and was backing out, which created a place for me.

The nervousness of flying out for the interview, the hell of waiting to see if I got in, the disappointment I felt hearing I didn’t make it, and the eleventh-hour phone call offering me a spot added up to cosmic confirmation that METPRO was part of the path I belonged on, and it didn’t take me long to get ready for it. In the next few days, I hung signs around my high-rise apartment building to sell my furniture, and in two weeks my couch, bed, bike, plants, and bookcases were gone. About a month before the program started, I shipped a dozen boxes to the apartment complex METPRO would be putting us up in. A few days later I loaded my car with my TV and boxes of things that couldn’t be mailed. With AAA maps, I set out for a three-week cross-country drive that included detours to see friends and relatives in North Carolina, New Orleans, Mississippi, and New Mexico. Along the way I broke up the trip with other stops at places I had always wanted to see: the Grand Canyon, the North Carolina Cherokee reservation, the Petrified Forest and some Las Vegas casinos.

One bright and stir-crazy morning near the end of the three weeks, I started seeing signs for the 101 Freeway which would eventually get me to LA. I followed my AAA directions to the gate of the Toluca Lake apartment community where the program was housing us in pairs of two in furnished two-bedroom units. I drove around the landscaped garden apartment complex where I’d later spot nineties celebs who were then all also living there short-term: Garrett Morris, Kid ‘N Play, and CeCe Peniston. This was the final end of a journey which my high school friend Chris, whom I worked with on the high school newspaper, encapsulated in the following poem, which he sent me shortly after I got to LA:

“L.A. Bound”

‘Twas a fair day in June of this very year

When [Elaine] at last shrieked “I’m outta here!”

Now in DC Elaine was having it rough

With a job-ful of boneheads and other dumb stuff.

Her dreams of becoming Miss Writer-Extraordinaire

Were amounting to nothing more than hot air.

Every day to the office she’d trudge with dread

To deal with urchins who wanted her dead.

Things were not peachy; things were not nice.

A change was required, no need to think twice.

To LA would she drive in her bugged-out jalopy

To start a new life that wouldn’t be choppy.

The journey took her through places sweet:

Greensboro, New Orleans, Dallas, Mesquite!

She plowed on with a dream on her mind:

“Good Times ahead, Bad Times behind!”

Just when the trek started working her hole,

The distant horizon revealed her goal . . .

Like Lucy, like Ricky, like Ethel, like Fred,

Elaine was punchy — CA was ahead!

Within days of getting into town, I met the other nine trainees in my group; we were all in our twenties and thirties and seemingly middle class. Nine of us had baccalaureate degrees, and two—both thirty or older, who had worked first in other fields—had just graduated from Columbia University with master’s degrees in journalism. Four of the METPROs were black—three of us reporters, one a photojournalist. There were three Asian reporters of Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese ancestry, as well as three Latino reporters of Mexican, Puerto Rican and Brazilian descent who, like Daniela from the year before, were all pale enough to be considered simply white at first glance.

            One sunny morning in mid-June we showed up at the torpedo-like Times skyscraper building in the city’s smoggy downtown area to begin the first phase of METPRO. It was a fast-paced six-week news-writing boot camp held every morning in one of the paper’s conference rooms. The class was taught by the paper’s black 39-year-old education reporter, Piera Sands, who required us to have read both The Times and another major daily newspaper before her class started every weekday at 9 a.m. I had never taken a college journalism class besides the one summer course at NYU, so I drove into the parking lot every morning blasting a cassette of Robin S’s Show Me Love in my car, wired for lessons on the structural basics of news writing that I had been only guessing at before. The written homework assignments Piera gave us covered basics that were new to me: what to put in the lead and second paragraphs, when to put in the first quote, how to group like information together, when to give alternate perspectives, how to weed out cop jargon and replace it with more natural language, how to determine how much background and context to include. Sometimes Times reporters came to our class to talk about an article or series they had written, or to discuss source-building and narrative style. Reading the reporters’ stories closely beforehand, then hearing those reporters describe how they put the articles together, I started to realize how complex good journalism was. Reporters spent days, weeks or months conducting in-person and phone interviews, collecting and interpreting data, researching, fact-checking and weighing every noun, verb, clause, parenthetical comment and punctuation mark. There was so much more to it than most people would imagine from just reading newspapers. After class, we spent the afternoons reporting and writing practice articles that had very slim chances of ever being published in The Times.

            One morning, classroom conversation shifted from news writing to a new book by Jill Nelson, the freelance reporter who had spoken at my summer course at NYU about seven years before. Shortly after I met her, she had moved from New York to DC to become the first black woman at The Washington Post’s new Sunday magazine. She had documented her experiences at The Post in her memoir, Volunteer Slavery, published around the time that I arrived in Los Angeles. I borrowed the book from my METPRO roommate and raced through it in a night or two. In 241 hard-to-put-down pages, Nelson described her day-to-day encounters with editors who clearly didn’t know what to make of her. And she named her adversaries—some of print journalism’s most vaunted and influential figures—and described how in the late 80s, not long after they hired her as a magazine writer, they bounced her from the magazine section to the paper’s Metro section. Many of the articles she wrote never got printed, and she had frustrating conflicts with editors, some who hadn’t heard of Essence magazine or of Oprah Winfrey. All these experiences led her to a period of work-induced heavy drinking, and finally she quit.

            “It’s shaking up the industry!” our instructor Piera Sands said of the book. “It names names!” As disturbing as Jill Nelson’s account of working at The Washington Post was, I didn’t see it as a forewarning of what I might later endure at The Sun, the paper at which I already knew I wanted to spend my second year. Nelson, I figured, was one person with a unique set of experiences, and The Washington Post was a different newspaper employing different editors than those I would find in Baltimore.

            Most of the METPROs formed a close-knit group, like college hall- mates or sports teammates. I bonded most with the African-American photographer from New York, a Latina reporter from LA and an Asian Columbia graduate from Miami. We laughed at private jokes during lulls in class every morning; in varying combinations we ate lunch together in The Times cafeteria and spent some evenings and weekend afternoons lounging by the apartment complex’s heated pool, reading long, involved Sunday Times stories and gossiping about the newspaper and its employees.

During the week we did our homework assignments at desks left vacant by reporters out on assignments, using their telephone headsets and flipping through our reporter’s notebooks until late in the evenings, often asking each other for help with details. I struggled to grasp the process of writing tight six-paragraph articles, and I agonized about how to find catchy leads. My first evaluation from Piera noted that I “required improvement” but was “making progress.”

            After the classroom phase came the six-week cops phase, led by the METPRO director, a kind, 50ish white man with a graying beard and distinctive lantern jaw, named Richard Kipling. He assigned each trainee to a different precinct in the Los Angeles Police Department or the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Instead of showing up in the newsroom at 9 a.m., we spent a few hours every morning inside our precincts, looking through logs and talking to detectives about recent crimes. From these conversations, we came up with possible crime-based story ideas to propose to Richad, and if he liked any of the ideas, we spent the afternoon writing a short news article usually for practice, not for publication.

            Each weekday morning for about a month or six weeks, I went to the Hollywood precinct of the LAPD, near Mann’s Chinese Theater and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I looked at recent reports to see if any of them could lead to a story. Every day I talked to detectives, and once or twice I went on ride-alongs with cops around their patrol posts. Richard pushed me to step up my game by figuring out what my story was about, then eliminating anything in my copy that strayed from the topic. He taught me the difference between dumping my whole notebook into a story and selecting only pertinent information. He encouraged me to find my own narrative voice, and to make stories more than a recitation of facts. The way he challenged my thinking and composing process gave me a framework of directions I needed.

            Even though the homework we did was mainly for practice, Richard got a few of the METPROs’ police stories into the paper from time to time through relationships he’d built in previous editing positions. My first Los Angeles Times clip, on page B3, was about a white female Michael Jackson impersonator who had bought from a fence a stolen leather jacket, one that the real Michael Jackson had donated to a museum. Hollywood detectives made her return the jacket when they found out that it was stolen, much to the impersonator’s despair. The publication of that story and a few others from my Hollywood precinct reporting helped me gain confidence and evolve from the untrained wannabe that I was on arrival. I hung on to the Michael Jackson jacket story for years and, as I did with most articles thereafter, I clipped it from the newspaper, glue-stuck it to paper, Xeroxed it, and mailed a copy to my mother, who then circulated my stories to my two elderly aunts.

            Within a year I’d learn that The Los Angeles Times’ Metro newsroom resembled The Sun’s downtown newsroom in terms of the 1970s-era computers, the décor or lack thereof, and the racial make-up of the reporting staff. The Los Angeles Times newsroom consisted of mostly white, high-strung thirties-and-over reporters who worked in honeycomb stations with phones, pre-Internet computers and desk surfaces separated from others with chest-level partitions. Most of the Latino reporters and editors were light-skinned enough that they would likely be initially thought of as white. It seemed to me that the paper’s tiny black staff fell into three categories: disgruntled reporters who spoke up about newsroom racism and got shafted for it; pale-complexioned reporters whom editors mysteriously found most useful; and reporters whose skin was neither light nor especially dark, whose skills seemed to have some prayer of mattering. Sandy, our instructor—in that same mid-range skin category I’m in—pointed out to METPROs a likely result of a black Los Angeles Times staff writers’ outspokenness on race issues: “Your career goes nowhere.”

Near the end of the cops phase, a white-appearing Hispanic METPRO trainee named Miguel and I both got a few of our cops stories printed in The Times, which led to some friendly competition between us. In his early 20s, from the Philadelphia suburbs and of mixed Puerto Rican and Cuban ancestry, he looked like a blend of Bob Saget and Freddie Prinze, Jr. One day I shifted our line of chit-chat from crimes at our respective police precincts to a topic I had wanted to ask him about since we’d first met.

            “Outside METPRO,” I began, “do you consider yourself a minority?” He struck me as part of the small proportion of white-appearing minorities I had met at minority training job fairs who accepted spots in competitive training programs like ours that were ostensibly geared towards visible people of color, then operated as white people in contexts outside their work.

            Miguel, an easy-to-get-along-with, hard-working guy who would go on to have a long career in print journalism, quickly shrugged his shoulders and tipped his head to the side. Without meeting my eyes, he said, “Well, I’m white . . .” Then he chuckled uncomfortably. I would notice decades later at the Albuquerque Journal that the Latino reporters there all looked white as well.

            Once the police portion of METPRO ended, our next rotation in the training program split us up into groups of two or three as we started working for the once-, twice- or thrice-weekly insert sections of The Los Angeles Times. Now defunct, the insert sections were reported from, and placed inside, newspapers sold in outlying residential parts of LA County where breaking news was less common. I spent that part of the program in the Westside office, a spacious newsroom with ocean views in tony Santa Monica. The other MEPTRO sent there was a friendly Latina trainee. At adjoining desks, she and I began finding and writing stories for publication, not just for practice like before, alongside a dozen other staff reporters and two editors. Many of the staffers were working in the Westside bureau after running afoul of downtown decision-makers.

I wrote thirteen stories there, including one about poet and memoirist Maya Angelou reading at Pepperdine University – my favorite story of that rotation. During her presentation, she read aloud a poem that had been written by a student. The poem had won a contest, and part of the prize was that Angelou would recite the program to the audience. The poet was standing behind her at the edge of the stage. At one point in the middle of her recitation she turned to him and said, “Very nice.” After the presentation I asked him if her saying that had made his day, and I quoted his answer in the article: “It made my lifetime.” Experiences like that created tactile memories that were so fulfilling that I was constantly chasing those highs. I wrote another story about a free-spirited restaurant owner who had started a local newspaper in one of the hipster canyons in Los Angeles. When I asked him how he characterized his newpapering skills, he told me he was “not in a position to brag about them.” I thought this phrase was so funny and high-purpose that I would occasionally repurpose it in my own conversations. In the Westside office near the beach in Santa Monica, about ten miles from the downtown headquarters, I noticed a pattern, later to be repeated at The Sun and The Journal, in which editors in outlying bureaus like the one in Santa Monica, led their isolated and voiceless reporting staff at a distance from the main nerve center where all the key editors worked, editors wielded silent, unquestioned power over their reporters’ opportunities and reputations, as well as top editors’ impressions of them and their abilities.

            My next six-week rotation took me from Santa Monica back to the smoggy downtown skyscraper building to work in the paper’s Business section. I reported to a 36-year-old black female editor named Linda, rumored to have irked editors senior to her by telling them that they had treated previously underutilized black reporters like “cannon fodder.” This was because editors had been calling on black reporters working less visible beats, often not in the downtown newsroom, to cover the Los Angeles riot in 1992. The riot, whose flashpoint was in a non-white community known as South-Central, began right after the acquittal of police officers who were seen on tape beating motorist Rodney King. The implication the business editor was making was that the lives of reporters of color, in the past not given much to do, were less valuable than the lives of white reporters; That was why editors who usually left non-white reporters out of big stories, suddenly over-represented them in the paper’s coverage of the King beating and its violent, unsafe aftermath. A quarter-century later, the Los Angeles Times would report in 2020, based on its own internal investigation, that the same paper that had created this prestigious minority training program was paying its black reporters less than its white reporters. My new editor was eager to give me good story ideas and help me to develop my own. Under her supervision I wrote about a $108 million sex discrimination settlement against a supermarket chain, and covered the fundraising and production obstacles an independent Ghanaian director Haile Gerima faced trying to release his low-budget film Sankofa. Around the holidays, I covered the trend of office Christmas parties becoming more philanthropic, and on one fast-paced day, I worked with a senior business reporter on an article about Domino Pizza’s dropping its 30-minute delivery guarantee.             My stay in Business lasted until Christmas vacation, and after that we began the final placement for the first METPRO year—we became general assignment reporters in the Ventura County, San Fernando Valley and Orange County regional bureaus of The Los Angeles Times. Since all three offices were at least an hour by car from our Toluca Lake apartment complex, we were relocated to similar Times-financed, short-term furnished apartments close to our new newsrooms. The director sent three other reporters and me to the Orange County edition, about 45 miles south of Los Angeles, while the other trainees were headed to the San Fernando Valley, 25 miles northwest of L. A., or to Ventura County, some 65 miles west. I moved into a Newport Beach apartment a few towns away from the Costa Mesa news bureau in Orange County.

CHAPTER 3:

METPRO: ORANGE COUNTY EDITION

The editions The Los Angeles Times circulated in Orange County, Ventura County and the San Fernando Valley were similar in quality and appearance to the edition produced in Los Angeles proper, but different in content. Each edition had its own Metro section, which carried articles of local news specifically about that area (i.e. the Valley) or county. Our job as trainees was to work as general assignment reporters for the Metro sections of our respective new counties, contributing shorter stories, often written and reported on the same day. Our work frequently appeared on the inside pages of these sections, while the more seasoned reporters, who spent more time on in-depth articles, were more likely to see their work printed on cover pages. We knew that our work was sometimes considered filler that was destined for inside pages, but the thrill of published articles with photos and bylines was still a big deal. Appropriate for our ability level, such stories gave us opportunities almost every day to write articles about various municipal and community issues on deadline and to gain practice in the role of interviewer, researcher, writer and decision-maker. Like having a small part in a play, most of these stories, no matter how narrow the focus, were still important, and I got into most of the towns in Orange County to interview kids and grandparents, doctors and lawyers, victims and heroes.

            The Orange County newsroom was even less diverse than the one in Los Angeles—there was one Vietnamese METPRO alum, one seasoned black female reporter, and about five Latino reporters. One of them was Daniela, the curly brown-haired Italian/South American trainee with porcelain skin from the METPRO class of a year before mine; another was a 20-something Hispanic man. A few editors of color also worked in that newsroom—one of them, an affable Latino man, got called upon to participate in what was the first of many episodes I was a part of in which I saw an unexpected mixing of race and newsroom behavior.

            A few days after I moved to Newport Beach and a few days before the METPRO program formally resumed post-holidays, I called the Orange County edition’s Assistant Managing Editor to see if we could have lunch. In this collegial but competitive environment, I wanted to position myself as an ambitious, serious trainee, and I didn’t want to risk not distinguishing myself. The lunch appointment was with one of the most senior Orange County editors, who was also the bureau’s METPRO point-person. He usually didn’t work directly with reporters, but he supervised the assistant city editors who did.

            When I arrived in the newsroom for our lunch, he shook my hand and got ready for us to go. I was watching from behind as he walked from his office to the main newsroom and tapped the arm of the affable Latino assistant editor. That editor was responsible for editing community-oriented stories that appeared on two inside pages of the Metro section every day. These pages were filled with articles written exclusively by freelancers who got paid a fee per story.

“You free?” he asked, then invited him to lunch with us. The Latino editor didn’t edit work written by METPRO trainees — he edited only freelancers’ stories for the inside community pages — so there was not much likelihood that our paths would cross in our respective workdays. The practical logic of his inviting this editor was equal to the logic in his asking along a graphic artist, a telephone operator or a newspaper delivery driver.

            The Latino editor winced, as if suddenly feeling gassy. From his facial expression I guessed we were thinking the same thing, so when the other editor stepped away to get his sweater, in a lowered voice I asked, “Why do you think he asked you to come?”

            His response came without a reflective pause. “He’s not comfortable,” he said. He shrugged like he was used to shielding the other editor from being alone whenever a non-white person asked him to lunch. The three of us drove to a pricey restaurant in a palm-tree lined upscale shopping mall. The Latino editor’s role appeared to be that of cultural broker, available to fill in the conversational holes that might arise between the top editor and me over our meals, and, I suppose, to help me understand any concepts the senior editor might touch on that would otherwise confuse me. In fact, I had no problem talking with either of them, and wondered why the more senior editor didn’t think that I would be able to hold my own. The three of us had a pleasant meal and went back to the newsroom.

            A week or so later, in January, Christmas vacation ended and the other three METPROs and I started as general assignment reporters in the Orange County newsroom. That workspace had the same honeycomb cubicles and the same computer equipment available in Los Angeles. Reporters got a little more desk space, and the building had an adjacent parking lot and a small gym housed in a trailer. Usually one of the assistant city editors gave me an assignment when I walked in, and I spent the morning and early afternoon going out in a company car to interview subjects for the story. One day I was assigned to report on a decision to not collect tolls on a highway when medics had to come rescue people in danger; another day I went to the Anti-Defamation League to get its reaction to a swastika painted on a public building for the fifth time. Most days after lunch I called sources to clarify information, calculated data, researched facts in the newsroom library and checked with the photo desk to match sources in the photos with sources I wanted to quote in the article. Within a few weeks I developed a routine of working in this way, usually spending no more than a day or two on an assignment.

            The Orange County article I felt most attached to was about a high school boy who dropped dead on the basketball court in gym class. I co-wrote a news story the night it happened, and the next day an editor sent me to the boy’s town to talk to his friends and family in order to write about what his life was like from the point of view of his loved ones. I walked up the manicured front yard of the family’s home and rang the bell. The mother came to the door and poked out her head. It was my first time intruding on a grieving family who had just lost someone, and I wasn’t sure how to act. I expressed my condolences and asked if I could talk to her for an article for The Los Angeles Times. She declined and started to close the door.

            Having just lost her child, the younger of her two sons, of course she didn’t want to be pestered by a stranger. But this was my first sensitive assignment, and I was at risk of returning to my desk without a key interview. Splitting the difference between being too pushy and going back empty-handed, I asked her if she could share a picture of her son that we could print in the paper. That was better than nothing if the reporter from the competing daily newspaper got neither an interview nor a photo. The mother, also a journalist, agreed and went inside to get me a picture, leaving me at her open front door. I ambled into her house while she was looking for the picture and by the time she got back with a school portrait and an artsy monthly calendar that had printed one of his abstract pencil sketches, I was sitting in a chair in her foyer. When she gave me the picture of him, I looked at it—he was adorable, with gentle brown eyes and dark hair. I told her how handsome he was, and within minutes we were having an interview in her dining room. She cried when telling me how much she missed him and about her intention not to hang onto his clothes and belongings indefinitely. While we were talking, a group of his friends arrived, and after they spent time paying their condolences, they agreed to go with me to what they described as his favorite coffee shop, and talk more about him.

            At the coffee shop, the three upbeat girls talked about him like he was their adored little brother. One said she ran screaming out of her classroom when she heard he was dead. After talking with his classmates, I went to the school and talked to teachers and administrators. The school was traumatized by his sudden death and in writing the article I tried to convey visceral details. It ran on the Metro cover the next day with photos of the sketch from the calendar and the portrait his mother had lent me. The morning the story appeared, a reporter leaned over the honeycomb partition separating his desk from mine and told me everyone would be crying in their cornflakes while reading about the high schooler; a few editors sent me thumbs-up messages. I felt like I had delivered, unlike when I first arrived in Los Angeles and got a “Needs Improvement” on my initial classroom evaluation.

            The day that story ran, an editor gave me an assignment that took me to Irvine, the same town the high school boy had lived in, so I stopped off at his family’s home to return the portrait and the calendar from which one of his sketches had been copied in the paper. The mother opened the door, burst into tears, got on her tiptoes and wrapped her arms around me, telling me that reading the article told her things about her son, from the words of his peers, that she hadn’t known before. It gave her an extra moment to love something about him. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that made me fall in love with this work.

            I reported to an Orange County Assistant City Editor named Warren Peterman, a great teacher with an exterior so blunt some reporters called him The Warden. As I discussed my approach to stories, he gave me suggestions. Once, when I wrote about trout fishing in a county lake, he said I should include some trout recipes in a sidebar. The twelve-paragraph stories he sent me to cover were anxiety-provoking because I never wanted to get any facts wrong or have my editor tell me information was missing. Generally, I turned in stories by 5 p.m. and waited until Peterman called me to his terminal to explain the changes he made and tell me what questions he needed me to resolve. I went back to my desk to make the changes and I made more follow-up phone calls if there were holes he wanted me to fill. Then I resubmitted the story and left after he approved my revisions, usually between 6 and 7 p.m. The process demanded I learn a new set of facts and vocabulary for almost every story. It was exciting and fun, with the built-in reward of getting a byline almost every weekday.

While I was enjoying the experience of being a general assignment reporter, I was having a harder time finding a way to love living in predominantly Republican, two-percent black Orange County. Here’s one example: one evening after work, I drove the freeways back to my apartment and changed into a bathing suit and flannel robe. As darkness fell I walked from my building to the complex’s communal outdoor hot tub and stepped in. Animated jets sprayed bubbles all over me and thick steam rose from the soothing water. I rested my head against the lip of the pool. A few people talked around me, but it was white noise that I didn’t pay attention to until I heard one person say, “I’m glad I’m not black.” I got out of that hot tub and into one a few feet away.

            Another time, I was standing at the front desk of the nearly all-white gym I had joined for my six-month stay in Orange County, waiting to ask a question. The desk clerk made eye contact with me, but helped other people, including those who came up after me, until everyone was taken care of. Only then did she ask me what I needed. Another evening on a walk from my apartment to the 7-Eleven, a police car drove past me several times with its lights off, slowing down to the speed I was walking, what one of my METPRO colleagues later called “Walking While Black.”

I started compacting all my shopping runs in order to minimize contact with that kind of thing. While I was at it, minimal contact was best in general with Orange County’s slender, blonde, well-dressed residents who had nice pricey clothes, shoes, pocketbooks and manicures, and whose skittish glances in my direction made me feel unwelcome.

            In February, Black History Month took Orange County editors by surprise, forcing them to pay some attention to the otherwise ignored black population. Earlier that month, I had heard about a classroom learning tool that could make a good Black History Month story. It was a treasure chest packed with visual symbols of African and African-American history, which Orange County volunteers had been bringing to elementary schools for seven years. The purpose: to expose students to symbols of black history. I proposed writing an article about this treasure chest, and my editor, with no other options, rejoiced.

            To report this story, I went to an elementary school in the wealthy Orange County community of Brea. A teacher had set out the treasure chest contents in the media center. It contained a drum, spear, mask and shield from unspecified African countries, along with mentions of the black America-based men who had invented the traffic light and come up with Kwanzaa. A white teacher with fake nails, streaked hair and tailored clothes walked her students into the media center and began her talk by saying, “This treasure chest comes from Africa!” as if a villager had packed up his spears and masks and mailed them right to the school. Written material set up around the display stated that the chest was in fact assembled in Orange County.

“Who can say Af-ri-ca?” the teacher asked soon afterward, as if some youngsters might stumble over the pronunciation of the six-letter word. She waited while the students repeated it, then she continued: “The Africans celebrate Kwanzaa!” Written materials, explaining that Kwanzaa was created in the United States, were on a flat surface a few inches from where she stood.

            As a reporter uninvolved in the action, my job was to be quiet, observe, take notes. I wasn’t supposed to say anything, because any remark could change the course of events and affect the outcome of the story—a no-no for any reporter. But the teacher’s misinforming a mixed-race bunch of privileged kids about black history in a way that trivialized it made me feel like a cold glass of water was getting tossed in my face, making me momentarily unable to follow that rule. “Actually,” I told her and her students, “Kwanzaa was created here.”

            When I sat down to write the article, I decided to open it focusing on the teacher misinforming her students on black history, a juicier twist than just reporting that the teacher had used the treasure chest as a black history lesson that day. I opened the first paragraph with something like: While a Brea elementary school teacher gave a lesson for Black History Month yesterday using an African treasure chest as a tool, she misinformed students about some aspects of African and African-American history. This opening followed the simple principle that reporters should focus on the active part of a story, such as indications of change, impact or unusualness (like a teacher’s giving false information during a lesson) instead of the static part (such as the treasure chest’s being presented in a school as it had been for nearly a decade).

            After writing the opening, I called the school principal to see what he had to say about the teacher’s error-sprinkled lesson. He sounded rehearsed: “I have to admit most of my teachers didn’t have the opportunity to read the accompanying material,” he said. The teacher had already approached him about the lesson, he told me, and mentioned that she felt bad that parts of it were inaccurate. “She said she hadn’t had a lot of time to prepare,” is what he told me.

            I wondered what would have happened if she were a non-white teacher who had gotten caught making up information about European history and teaching it as fact to a class of elementary schoolers. Or, what if I had walked into her classroom to hear her say, “Two plus two is six. Who knows how to say six?” and then got a quote from the principal who excused this by saying the teacher hadn’t found time to brush up on basic math? My guess is that the article would have landed on the front page. TV reporters would follow up and force the school district to get a lawyer or PR firm to spin its reputation back into shape.

            But this article, destined for an inside page, didn’t draw red flags when editors took a look at it and decided what to do with it. The editor who worked on the editing of this article turned the circulation of the treasure chest into the main topic, and moved the section concerning the teacher’s misinforming her students to a two-paragraph mention in the tenth of fifteen paragraphs. And he removed all mention of her name. “She’s probably just an overworked teacher trying to do her best, and she made a mistake,” he told me.

I was flabbergasted. Names were withheld only for specific persons, such as children or juveniles involved in crime, and victims of alleged sexual assault. The law enforcement system assumes older citizens are better equipped to handle finding their names in the paper than are youths and innocent victims of sex crimes. Also, journalists routinely expose those in public positions caught doing wrong – whole careers in investigative journalism are based on this alone. Years later, I would experience white male editors’ similar proclivity for race-based story spinning at The Sun.

Black History Month ended, March came and went, and by springtime, living in Orange County had become so challenging that I proposed writing a first person narrative essay about coping as a black woman in the wealthy, exclusive Southern California county. The Orange County Features section had a weekly column written by a different person every week that would interest readers in a forum more observational and less news-oriented than other stories published in that section.  Sometimes the contributor was a Times staffer, sometimes a member of the community. One day I was working at my desk when the Features editor walked by, the man who made decisions about First Person columns that ran in his section.

I told him I wanted to write about the experience of being a black female newcomer to Orange County. I asked him if he would be interested in publishing such a story as I illustrated it to him. He sounded enthusiastic and told me to write it. If it worked out, he said, he would pay me a $100 freelance fee since I wasn’t on the Features staff and would have to write the story on my own time. The First Person pieces I remembered reading had begun on the cover of the Features section with a picture of the writer, and continued on an inside page. I imagined my piece would as well, and that close to the publication date, a photographer would take a close-up of me for use on the section front, as was done with other column contributors.

Writing about this would let me vent, and venting would have a three-pronged effect: it would make me feel better; it would resonate with the otherwise media-alienated black Orange County readers who had experienced similar treatment, and it would tell the white readers who perpetrated such behavior what it felt like. I intended to describe the sauna and gym incidents, the police tracking me as I walked to the 7-Eleven while black, and something else that happened regularly: Orange County residents that I didn’t know would ask to touch my hair, which I wore in braids at the time. Additionally, I wanted to convey the overall sense of unwelcome that several of my non-white reporting colleagues told me they had also sensed. Two black women reporters—one working in Orange County, another who had reported from there before getting promoted to a reporting position in downtown Los Angeles—said to me at different times that they had moved to Los Angeles from Orange County where they were still working, in order to escape the area, even though it added time (and about fifty miles each way) to their commutes. Another METPRO also stationed in Orange County was a black man from Arizona who would go on to have a long career in newspaper reporting in Boston and Florida. When we were in Orange County, he told me that he routinely heard car door locks clicking as he walked past the cars of white women sitting in supermarket parking lots. In my essay, I included my colleagues’ experiences, including that one, interspersed with my own.

            My first attempts at writing the essay were shaky, but the final draft touched sharply on most of the racist experiences I had endured and heard about since moving to Orange County. I felt sure it was just a matter of weeks before it got printed. That is, until the same editor who’d told me to write it informed me that he didn’t want to use it because according to him, these episodes weren’t expressions of Orange Countians’ racism. It was just their ignorance, he said. Once again, I was at a loss for words, as flabbergasted I had been to learn that the Brea teacher’s name wasn’t going to appear in the paper and that her mistakes were not going to lead the story.

            Abandoning the essay was like agreeing that I was persuaded by the editor’s view, which I wasn’t. Since this was a subjective essay and not a news article, he didn’t need to agree with what it said. The fact that he thought that the behavior I described was ignorance did not negate my view that it was racism, and as the minority, I felt I was the far more authoritative source on this than he could ever be. Ignorance and racism are not mutually exclusive. I wanted a happy ending for the story after all the time and energy I had spent living it and writing it, so I treated his rejection as a setback, not a death knell. Moving forward, I sent a copy to a black Editorials editor who worked in the downtown Los Angeles office. He responded the same day to say he could use it. This was even better, I thought, because both Los Angeles and Orange County readers would see it, not just OC residents. A few days later, however, that LA-based editor did a 180-degree turn when he sent me a message saying he couldn’t use the piece after all because editorials in the Los Angeles edition had to stem from events that happened in LA. This drastic shift smelled fishy: How could he not have known that before? Wasn’t he the editor? I couldn’t think of any other section in the paper the story could be used, so I asked the Features editor if I could propose it to a competing local daily newspaper, or to an Orange County glossy magazine.

            “Don’t propose this story to other publications,” he said. When he didn’t suggest that we salvage the story by his editing it or my re-writing it, my impression was that the content of the piece, not the style, is what kept him from wanting to use it. This editor, whether he knew it or not, was exercising his power and choice to control what readers learned about the black Orange County experience. Perhaps this was because he didn’t want to name these inequities for fear of offending and alienating readers. Perhaps he didn’t feel right about criticizing in print the very behavior he otherwise ignored or even engaged in.

            But no matter—soon I came up with a better idea: I called the paper’s Editor-in-Chief for a suggestion on where he thought the article might go, after explaining my so-far-unsuccessful efforts to get it printed. It was ballsy of a 26-year-old black female trainee to call the Editor-in-Chief of one of the world’s most respected papers and ask for an appointment to talk this over, but I approached setting up the appointment like it was an ordinary activity, like load of laundry to wash or a bill to pay.

            Los Angeles Times Editor-in-Chief Shelby Coffey III was a slim Alan Alda look-alike with white hair, who at the beginning of the METPRO year told us how vital we METPROs were to the paper. From then on, he routinely walked through the newsroom behaving as if he didn’t even see us. Through his secretary, I set up an appointment for a week down the road, and a few days before the meeting, Coffey called METPRO director Richard Kipling to find out what I wanted to meet with him about. Kipling explained what was going on with my First Person story, which he had seen several versions of and thought was worth using.

            On the morning of our appointment, Coffey was way ahead of me. When I arrived at his massive office located on a different floor from the reporters and other editors, he got up to shake my hand, and he listened to me explain why I was there. Then he told me that another editor was editing my piece as we spoke, and that it would be published as a First Person column in the Orange County Features section. He was very matter-of-fact, offering me no information on what had transpired in the interim that got the essay back into the section of the paper from which it had already been rejected. When I got up to leave, I felt happy my call led to this progress, but something didn’t feel right—progress never came so easily. I went downstairs to the office of the editor who was now assigned to edit the story, a woman whose job was normally to recruit and hire reporters. She usually didn’t handle any copy, although she used to years before. She had the essay on her screen and had already begun turning what I thought was an edgy, punchy narrative into a hapless Miss Manners piece that painted me as confused by the behavior of white Orange Countians.

            The story no longer felt like mine, but if I wanted it in the paper, I had to accept that it was going to appear like that or not at all. One thing about the publication of my narrative remained un-discussed: money. I asked the editor working on the revisions about receiving the freelance payment of $100 that the Features editor had mentioned when we had first talked about it, and she looked at me like I had just farted.

“This is not the time to be asking for that,” she said pointedly, implying that I should consider the publication of this essay compensation enough. I never earned any money for the piece, which ran a few days after the editing session at the bottom of an inside Features page without a picture.

            The reason the Features editor had difficulty accepting that I experienced racist behavior in Orange County was addressed by an academic thinker who has argued in a scholarly journal that white men have a hard time accepting non-white people’s accounts of racism, because they have a hard time understanding situations they haven’t been in. “A well-meaning white [person] might say, ‘They probably just didn’t see you’ to a person of color who complains about slow response at a service counter,” wrote Thomas Cummins, who studies whiteness as a state of being, in Management Communication Quarterly. “Not understanding the pervasive and systemic nature of such treatment allows whites to explain away the experiences of people of color. It also lets whites ‘off the hook’ in terms of contemplating their own behavior,”[3] Cummings wrote.

My First Person piece ran close in time to the start of the knuckle-biting highlight of the first METPRO year: Draft Week, when Times Mirror editors flew to Los Angeles to interview those of us finishing our first year. They came to choose among us for our second year placements, determining where we would work—at The Los Angeles Times, the top choice for most METPROs, or at one of the papers on the East Coast. This happened at the same time that the twenty-five finalists for the incoming class flew in for their two-day interviews, as I had done a year before. This time it was my group’s turn to take this incoming class of potentials out for Mexican food so they could ask us questions about the program.

            To prepare for the placement interviews, we turned in our best clips, read and analyzed each of the half-dozen newspapers we might end up working for, and listed them in order of our preference. The director insisted assignments handed out would match our strengths to each newspaper’s needs, but I was convinced that the best trainees went to the larger papers like The Los Angeles Times and The Sun, that middle-of-the road trainees wound up at The Hartford Courant or Newsday, and trainees who showed less initiative or potential landed at the smaller papers in Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

            By the time Draft Week began, I had already set my sights on The Sun for several reasons. Since the inception of METPRO, The Sun had offered all second-year trainees permanent jobs upon completion, while The Times offered METPROs two-year temporary positions, most of which did not become permanent. Also, Sun articles were meatier than the stories I had read from the smaller papers, and, geographically, living in Baltimore was preferable to living in any of the other locations. Having lived in DC before METPRO began, I wouldn’t be in completely foreign territory approximately fifty-five miles away in Baltimore. I started campaigning a month or two before Draft Week by sending the managing editor of The Sun some of my Los Angeles Times writing samples and a letter telling him that I hoped to work there. He told me he wanted a trainee who had picked Baltimore first or second in the list of assignment preferences. I had ranked it first on my list, whereas most other trainees ranked The Sun closely after The Los Angeles Times, which most ranked first.

            The other nine METPROs and I showed up in the downtown newsroom wearing our business suits for a day of interviews with editors from each paper. These were less stressful than the interviews of the year before, but grueling nonetheless. The next day would be the morning of the announcements, the day that would give us news we had all been waiting for. I lay awake that morning as the sun came up, wondering how I’d react to having to go somewhere else if the Baltimore editor didn’t select me. The managing editor from Long Island Newsday gave reporters their assignments in alphabetical order that morning. When he got to Tassy, I was so nervous I was sweating. After a few moments he gave me a piece of paper that said “Baltimore Sun” next to my name in capital letters. The Los Angeles Times, the most popular choice, selected the three Latino trainees, all of whom had skin pale enough that they could pass for members of the non-Hispanic white race.

            Back in Orange County the Monday after the draft, I showed up to the newsroom later than I normally did, goofed off a bit instead of hustling for dailies, and left earlier than usual. I was coasting through the final few days of my time in Orange County when Marty Baron, who at the time was the top editor of the Orange County edition, who, like most top white male editors ignored me most of the time, decided to pull me aside for an unsolicited little chat about my First Person essay.

I had, over the five months I had worked there, worked forty hours beyond the forty hours per week for which we trainees were being compensated. I would have forfeited the time and just kept working until the last scheduled day of the training, but because of my wounded First Person pride and my total shock at what Marty Baron felt to the need to say to me as I was leaving the training program, amidst a landscape of maybe speaking to me on two other occasions, tops, during the five months that I was grinding on almost every single day that I worked in that newsroom, I cashed the hours in and stopped working a week early to prepare for the move east.

            At the end of May, two moving men showed up to box my things and load them and my car onto a Baltimore-bound truck. Later that afternoon, I flew from Orange County’s John Wayne Airport to Baltimore-Washington International Airport, ready to start my full-time reporting career. I was punchy about getting out of Orange County that day, but also sad about separating from the other METPROs—people who’d become the buddies I’d watched Dodgers games with, cooked turkey for on Thanksgiving, laughed with during a game of “Truth or Dare.” Now we had to find fresh grooves at different papers in new cities without the METPRO director to run interference, and without each other for companionship.

CHAPTER 4:

BALTIMORE SUN: DOWNTOWN NEWSROOM

When I got to Baltimore after a six-hour flight, two friends I’d met living in DC picked me up at the airport and drove me into the heart of Baltimore, a city I had visited only once or twice before. From inside the car, I saw none of the lush green palm trees and the deep red Spanish-tile roofed homes of Southern California that I had seen all the time in Orange County. I saw almost no living greenery[jc1]  anywhere around the city streets when I checked in at an elegant downtown hotel.  The newspaper building was part of a landscape visible from the highway, and from the car it looked grim. The Sun covered my stay in the hotel for the first few weeks while I found an apartment. The hotel was staffed by black chambermaids dressed in uniforms like the one Octavia Butler wore in The Help. I noticed them entering the hotel from a back loading dock so they could get inside and spend their shifts changing guests’ bed sheets and replacing their towels. Meanwhile, the white front desk clerks, dressed in fresh green blazers, gave the mostly well-heeled guests their room keys, free daily newspapers and complementary Macintosh apples.

            On most days I spent at the hotel, I bought a copy of The Sun so I would be up on local news by the time I started working. The faces in photos on the paper’s Metro, Business and Features section cover pages were mostly white, clean-cut and middle-class looking. But the Baltimoreans I saw on the streets near my hotel didn’t look anything like them. I saw long-haired, beer-drinking white men in outdated stone-washed jean jackets and scraggly beards; I saw white women in what appeared to be bathrobes and slippers with lank dishwater-colored hair shuffling on the sidewalk. I saw black men who looked homeless and thirsty pushing shopping carts with all their worldly possessions; I saw black teenage girls with big tangerine or maroon hair-weaves, pushing their babies in strollers. Many citizens in Baltimore lived in row homes built close together without lawns or driveways. The drug trade ravaged some areas and turned some poor elderly Baltimoreans into prisoners in their homes. This was a city with a nearly one-a-day murder rate, usually in economically depressed black neighborhoods that editors didn’t venture into. It was on the northern Baltimore streets with front lawns and driveways where the editors who lived within city limits often bought homes. Baltimore didn’t see a lot of new transplants from other cities, and according to one Sun columnist, it was a city happy to forever live in the past. It was not unheard of in the early twenty-first century for a Baltimorean to sport a Jheri curl hairdo, Kazal glasses or a Members Only jacket.

But Baltimore had some distinctive character: it was home to the Orioles and the Ravens and their exuberant fans, and it was full of independent diners, cafes, bagel shops and movie theaters with lots of non-chain store charm. There were spots where, when a waitress retired, the whole block of neighbors and all her regulars talked about it. It was a city authentic enough to be the setting for gritty, engaging network and cable TV shows like Homicide: Life on the Street, The Wire and The Corner.

            While my car, clothes and boxes were on a moving truck, a real estate agent I came across in my apartment hunt picked me up at the hotel and drove me around town to help me find a place to live. I settled on a $500 two-bedroom apartment, ten minutes from the newsroom, in a row house on a sparsely tree-lined block. One afternoon after I had unpacked and before I started my first day of work at The Sun, I drove to Trenton to see my friend Therese, who had told me in our high school summer internship at Rider University that I would make a great journalist because I was so nosy. Now a college graduate and full-time working mom, she said I was the only participant who she’d kept in touch with who was still working in the journalism industry ten years later. This made me stop and absorb the fact that I was about to start living out the goal I had begun to seriously consider during the training program at Rider back when I was in high school.

On my first day, my first stop at The Sun was the Human Resources department, where I filled out paperwork and got an ID card with a photo. In the picture, my lips were shiny with Clinique lip gloss, my tightly-done braids were hanging on my shoulders, and I was smiling with confidence.  I was wearing a mustard-colored pantsuit Therese had given me from her overstuffed closet when I had visited her in Trenton. Once I got done with the paperwork, I took the elevator to the newsroom and walked into my newsroom reception. The editor who had selected me at the METPRO draft wasn’t in, and no one else knew my face, why I was there, or that I was even showing up that day. Reporters are supposed to take initiative and be aggressive in making their presence known, but no one could expect me to seat and enmesh myself in the giant newsroom when I was a stranger to everyone there.

After I squirmed my way through several hotly uncomfortable moments, too excited and nervous to be in disbelief, I was directed by a news clerk to Mike Adams. He was the City Editor – a man of color presumed to be black whom I would be working for in the downtown newsroom for the summer, before the editors involved with the METPRO program decided where to send me for my long-term permanent placement. Reporters fresh out of METPRO usually spent their early years in one of three outlying county offices that published sections available in only those counties, comparable to the Orange and Ventura County editions of The Los Angeles Times. METPRO grads and other rookies made up a sizable chunk of the reporting staff in those bureaus, which were considered less presti­gious than the downtown and Baltimore County newsrooms, and located some twenty or more miles away from center city.

            The downtown newsroom had no vacant desks, so for the first few weeks, I had nowhere to sit, put my purse or leave my Rolodex or coffee mug. Instead, I sat at whatever desk became empty when a reporter left for an assignment. One morning while I was working at a vacant copyediting desk, The Sun’s Managing Editor, Bill Marimow, approached me. He was a newsroom celebrity. Before joining the paper in 1993, he had won two Pulitzer Prizes at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he was a highly-regarded investigative reporter -- one in 1978, another in 1985. He could green-light the major Pulitzer-contending stories that turned reporters into stars, rubber-stamp reporters’ reassignments to better beats, and give the last word on what page a story appeared or whether a risky headline could go on the front page. A middle-aged married father with brown wavy hair, he usually wore conservative suits and wingtip shoes. He saved copies of each newspaper in his meticulous office, which was equipped with two computers, a couch and coffee table.

            In a pseudo-obsequious way, he introduced himself with a firm handshake. Then he tore a sheet from his monogrammed notepad and underlined his name. “If you have any problems, any questions,” he said as he handed it to me, “big or little, I want you to feel free to come and talk to me.” I thought he would truly expect to hear from me when anything didn’t go my way, and I signed him on as an ally in unraveling future messy office politics. But even if he meant for me to believe this, he knew unconsciously that I was not allowed, let alone expected, to approach him with my concerns.

            That’s because of the concept of sincere fiction. The earnest way that Marimow invited me to turn to him if I faced newsroom issues, be they “big or little,” when he in fact never wanted the invitation to be used, was an example of “sincere fiction of the white self,”[4] a theory introduced by sociologists Vera Hamm and Joe Feagin, and interpreted by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The theory says that white people say things that they know are false so they can keep in motion the social dynamics that benefit them in order to justify the privileges that their whiteness affords them. There were social dynamics at play at The Sun, and Marimow had an unconscious need to keep them in motion so that his privileges seemed justified. For example, when he told me that I was welcome to talk to him about on-the-job problems, he wanted me to see him as a high-ranking editor who was nonetheless still open to an allegiance with a new black female reporter.

To be fair, Marimow stood out among most Sun editors because he greeted black security guards, custodians and telephone operators by name and played racquetball with a black reporter. But a quick look around the newsroom showed that he couldn’t possibly have a commitment to the workplace happiness of black female reporters, since The Sun’s downtown Metro newsroom didn’t have any. I was the only black female news reporter besides the interns working downtown on the news side that summer, so if the well-being of black women reporters were in fact important to Marimow, he might have made it a point to hire and/or retain some.

But in telling me this newsroom was a safe place for me, since he’d be there to solve any and all of my big or little problems, he wasn’t consciously lying. “These socially accepted fictions are sincere because the actors usually are genuine and honest in their adherence to these rationalizations and are either unaware or have suppressed the alternative interpretations—psychological, sociological, and historical—of the events or people being fictionalized,” an article on sincere fiction explains. The event being fictionalized in this case was his concern for a black woman reporter’s comfort in a white male newspaper universe. The suppressed alternative interpretation was that he sat at the helm of an organization structured to alienate black women and offer power only to white men. Ignorant of sincere fiction at the time, I eagerly believed him.

            Shortly after I met Marimow, the social services reporter transferred to the Features section, and I got to take over her desk. Each reporter in the news side of The Sun shared a computer with the reporter whose desk was adjacent, swiveling monitors back and forth instead of using the same one all day uninterrupted. Surrounding several rows of adjacent reporters’ desks were private offices that lined the perimeter of the newsroom and were at that time assigned only to white male editors. These editors decided what stories made it into the paper, what page they appeared on, and how many paragraphs long they would be. The Sun’s national, regional, foreign, Page One, Metro, investigative, managing and assistant managing editor, as well as the Editor-in-Chief, were all office-having white men as well. And those who had administrative assistants had all selected white females for the role.  

            The frequency with which white men occupy all the executive-level positions that come with offices, and hog up all the decision-making power at the same time, poses a concern for some journalism industry-watchers. “A major concern of ethnic minorities is that news images are constructed and controlled by white decision makers,” states a University of Texas at Austin journalism professor[jc2]  in a paper that examines the progress made in diversifying the country’s newsroom managers. “At the overwhelming majority of U.S. dailies and broadcast outlets in the United States, those in positions of influence are predominantly white men,” the report noted.[5]

It adds that an American Society of Newspaper Editors survey showed that white journalists dominate in key decision-making posts, holding 90.3% of managerial positions.[6]

            Early that summer, I got my first taste of the disconnect between ordinary work-a-day citizens of Baltimore (many of them black and struggling financially) and the editors who shaped the paper’s coverage of them (nearly all of them white, male, and living in relative economic comfort). One morning an editor gave me an assignment to write about kids opening the heavy metal caps of fire hydrants to cool off by playing in the water that rushed out of the opened hydrants on sweltering summer days. Municipal workers would come around and close the hydrants with giant wrenches as children yelled and booed them, and I was looking to write a slice-of-life story about this. I found a black neighborhood near the office where kids in bathing suits with plastic pails and shovels were spraying themselves and their friends with cold blasts of water, until the Department of Public Works mechanics rounded the corner in a truck to close the hydrants and end the kids’ fun. But the city water department did allow hydrants to stay open if one neighborhood adult took a short safety course, blocked off street traffic and attached to the hydrant a low-pressure sprinkler to limit the amount of water spraying out. This was a new program some parts of town were adopting.

            On my second outing to report this story, I met a grandfatherly black man sitting on a stoop in a straw hat. He had completed the safety class and was watching the kids on his block having fun under the low-pressure sprinklers that the city had supplied. I sat on a stoop near him and wrote a few notes in my notebook about the kids playing in the water. When he saw me taking notes, he struck up a conversation and asked what I was doing.

            “I’m a reporter,” I said, “doing a story for The Sun.” The man fell silent, as if waiting for me to say I was just joking and tell him the real reason I was there.

After waiting for a few seconds, he realized that I was serious, and he lowered his voice. “I didn’t know they had black reporters there.”

            The Sun’s coverage of predominantly black communities, many of them located blocks from the office, followed a national journalistic trend of newspapers’ ignoring close coverage of predominantly black areas in major cities. “There aren’t too many publishers,” said one-time St. Paul Pioneer Press and Philadelphia Inquirer editor Walter Lundy in a journalism industry magazine article, “who come striding into the newsroom demanding more coverage of the ghetto.”[7] That’s often because editors doing the striding are middle-class white men who spend more time focusing on copy at their desks than on exploring the city they had so much sway in portraying for its readers.

            The editor for the fire hydrant story was Assistant City Editor Dave Rosenthal, a mostly desk-bound slender white man in his late 30s.  who would still be working at The Sun twenty years later. A Wesleyan University alum like me, he worked with about sixteen Metro reporters who covered beats such as local government, courts, crime and education. A non-dramatic hard worker with wiry sandy brown hair and a Ron Howard-like un-assumingness, he was second-in-command to City Editor Mike Adams in handling city news, and he often stayed until 9 or 10 p.m. One weekend, he was moderating a panel at Wesleyan for students considering journalism careers and he asked me to be on it. So I rode in the Rosenthal family station wagon with him, his wife and their son and daughter to Middletown, Connecticut. I spent an afternoon with him and other reporters answering students’ questions on reporting as a career. The rosy glow of that road trip soon wore off, though, and I got my first glimpse of how a kind, decent white male editor could display, with no harmful intent, judgments of disregard to black people. I didn’t consider him consciously racist, but little sparks of racist behavior started flying after a visceral, scandalous Baltimore murder that consumed the city that summer.

            On Saturday July 2, 1994, a 30-year-old black asthmatic man named Jesse Chapman, possibly high on cocaine, beat up his girlfriend while she was visiting him in the unfurnished apartment he shared with a roommate in an economically depressed Southwest Baltimore neighborhood -- the same one where Freddie Gray would die in police custody under suspicious circumstances 21 years later. After Chapman beat her, his girlfriend called the Baltimore City Police, and several officers showed up at the apartment to take him to the nearby Western District police precinct. They bound his wrists, and witnesses said that while he was cuffed, at least four Baltimore City Police officers repeatedly struck him until he wound up dead at 11:57 p.m. Then the police threw his body into the back of their van. Witnesses told the paper that at least one of the officers involved was black; rumors were going around that one officer was giggling during the assault. Not surprisingly, the very outraged people of Baltimore called for the officers to get reassigned to desk duty. All of this action created the need for immediate, frequent, in-depth news stories that The Sun was in a perfect position to write. It also created a curiosity about the victim, Jesse Chapman. Details about his occupation, family and personal interests were compelling pieces of the story that had to be gathered while loved ones were still emotional and readers still concerned. Local TV news stations were covering the story aggressively and the city was hungry for as much news as it could get on this beating death.

            The morning after Jesse Chapman’s death, The Sun did not run a story. The fact that he had died a few minutes before midnight would have made it almost impossible for the night reporter to get a story together and into the paper before deadline, because by the time the news had reached The Sun, the pages had probably already been finalized and made ready for printing. So the first story came the day after that, on Monday, July 4.

            But the article, “Investigators Probe Death of Man, 30, Arrested by Police” didn’t appear on The Sun’s front page, or its Metro cover page, where stories on breaking news, politics, high-profile crimes, health, education and communities in and around Baltimore and Maryland normally appear. Instead, the Chapman story began on page 10 of the Metro section, where obituaries and Metro front story continuations usually ran. In virtually every newspaper, the more important a story, the more visible the page it appears on, with biggest stories on section cover pages above the fold where readers look first. Inside-page stories are ones editors consider to be of less consequence.

            I thought the initial Jesse Chapman story had landed inside the Metro section because reporters just hadn’t yet found enough information for it to warrant a front-page spot. I imagined that in coming days, I would see the paper’s investigative reporters probe into this astounding beating death. I thought the newsroom would buzz with excitement, with editors dispatching reporters to the victim’s home to talk to his roommate, to the morgue to look for physical evidence of battery on his body, to the police station to get a statement on the use of deadly force and a recording of the girlfriend’s 911 call. I thought they would have reporters combing the neighborhood to ferret out the conflict between the couple, for starters.

            But the next day, Tuesday, July 5, there was no follow-up story at all.

            On July 6, editors published an article on page 4 of the Metro section. It noted that 100 protestors had gone to the police station to demand that the officers seen beating Chapman get suspended. On July 7, an article ran on page 2 of the Metro section, noting the continuation of the protest. These were the biggest pieces of information readers were getting until July 8, when the story hit the Metro front cover. The Baltimore City Police Commissioner announced that he would support an FBI civil rights investigation if the community demanded one. The next day, July 9, the story for the first time hit the cover of the paper. It said the FBI would do a civil rights probe, that the State’s Attorney’s office would investigate the claims, and that the officers involved would be reassigned to desk duty.

            This reluctant coverage of the killing of a man of color, in a community that saw lots of killings of men of color, was not unique to The Sun. In his book The Killing Season: A Summer Inside an LAPD Homicide Division, author Miles Corwin noted the identical tendency of major daily newspapers to ignore murders of poor non-whites in poor, non-white neighborhoods like the one Jesse Chapman lived in. “There is a great clamor about how the media overemphasize crime news,” Corwin wrote of its coverage in Los Angeles. “But in South-Central, crime news is underemphasized. A home invasion robbery in West Los Angeles or a carjacking in the San Fernando Valley [two predominantly white areas] often will lead the evening news. But in 1993 . . . there were more than 400 murders in [black and Latino] South- Central Los Angeles, and few had received any news coverage, any attention whatsoever. . . . A life in South-Central simply seemed to have less value than a life in other parts of the city.”[8] The same seemed true for Chapman.

For the Jesse Chapman beating coverage, The Sun relied mainly on two white male police beat reporters, both thirty or younger. One of them, Frank Bullock, had a 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. schedule; the other was on duty from 2 p.m. until 10 p.m. Frank Bullock was a few years older than I was, and had graduated from a prestigious Midwestern college. Tall, slender and very alert, he wore brown acrylic glasses and sweat socks with Docksider shoes. He walked on the balls of his feet and had a slight speech impediment. A white male, he was a reporter who chased down every lead and dropped what he was doing when he heard a good tip on the police scanner. He was so dedicated to his work that it was rumored that he returned to the newsroom dripping wet, right after falling into the water of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor one day while he was on an assignment.

            Often, when editors consider important an event like the beating death of Jesse Chapman, they bring in senior reporters to work with Bullock and the night police reporter. They find feature stories and profiles to supplement daily news coverage. But that wasn’t happening with the Chapman story—when it finally hit the front page nearly a week after Chapman died, readers still hadn’t seen any in-depth stories. And even weeks after his death, no picture of him had appeared in the paper, either. While columnists and opinion writers often weighed in with individualized perspectives on big stories like this, The Sun didn’t run any editorials or columns on Chapman. And it hadn’t run a profile telling readers what kind of family he was from, where he worked, whether he had kids or anything about what his life had been like up until his death.

            I wanted to know more about him. His having asthma, being handcuffed, being a repeat woman-beater, and living in an apartment with no furniture raised questions that doing the reporting for a profile would answer. I asked Assistant City Editor Dave Rosenthal more than a week after Chapman had died if I could write a profile on him. He gave me one of the following answers:

1. “You? Write a profile of Jesse Chapman? Uh, no. You’ve been working here, what, one month?”

2. “(Fill in blank with name of any seasoned reporter) is working on a profile, and s/he’s putting together some really good stuff with lots of pictures. The whole project is so involved that it’s taken all this time, and there’s nothing we need you for, but thanks.”

3. “The police reporter Frank Bullock tried to pull a profile of Chapman together, but he couldn’t find enough stuff, so we’re not doing one.”

The answer that Rosenthal gave me was C. And with that, the subject of a Chapman profile was finished and he was ready to move on to other topics. Rosenthal’s rationalization for Frank dropping the story because no one would talk to him was highly unconvincing to me. Police reporters often come across crime victims’ loved ones who initially refuse interview requests. They talk to city officials who won’t give them straight answers; they meet stubborn sources who withhold documents or hang up the phone when they hear questions they didn’t like; they get asked to leave mid-interview. But it’s a reporter’s job to find a way around these obstacles to the story.

            I asked Rosenthal if I could try to work up a profile of Chapman even though the police reporter had struck out.

            “Um, . . . yeah . . .?” he said. He agreed with so little enthusiasm that he might as well have mumbled, “Whatever.” If I had returned a few hours later to say I had given up because no one would talk to me, I got the impression he would shrug his shoulders and end the pursuit right there.

            I got started on my profile of Chapman by phone in the newsroom. I wanted to make contact with people in his outer circle, who could lead me to the inner circle of people who I would interview in person. Since Rosenthal said that the police reporter Frank Bullock had gotten rebuffed trying to do a profile on Chapman, I thought his friends and family would tell me they had already turned away a reporter, and then briskly hustle me off the phone.

My first call was to a woman described in an earlier article by Bullock as a childhood friend of Chapman’s. During our phone conversation, she talked freely and in some depth, and never mentioned turning away a reporter who had wanted to talk to her about writing a Chapman profile. No one else that I interviewed for the profile said that they had turned down the opportunity to be included in a Jesse Chapman profile, either. This, to me, suggested that Rosenthal’s information that Bullock had attempted to pull together a profile and had struck out was inaccurate.

Chapman’s friend reminisced about their enigmatic adolescent friendship and described him as once teasing her by saying he was going to show up on her date with another guy.

            The next interview I lined up was with Chapman’s mother, someone I wanted to meet in person. I called to see if I could come over and she agreed, but by the time I got to her row house in a quiet middle-class black neighborhood the following sunny morning, she had changed her mind. Afraid her son’s life would be portrayed as if it had no value, she had called the newsroom shortly before I showed up and told whoever answered the phone to tell me not to come. But in the days before cell phones, there was no way for anyone to let me know this, and I was already there.

            A plump middle-aged woman in a curly wig and housedress, Jesse Chapman’s mother came to the door and said she was cancelling the interview. I got the impression she had done this at least once before, since she sounded so comfortable telling me. That could’ve been what had stopped the police reporter from pursuing or completing his profile, had one in fact been started. But I thought I could change her mind, so I told her I wanted to portray her son as more than the stereotype he would be remembered as if readers couldn’t learn more about him. After a few minutes, she agreed and she let me in. We sat down on her living room couch and soon, speaking in an earnest, high-pitched voice, she was reminiscing about her son’s academically lackluster childhood and her difficulty raising him as a single teen mother. She said she had seen so much ugliness in her life that she preferred to stay home where things couldn’t get worse. After she shared some memories, I brought up harder questions about reports of her son beating his girlfriend. Her voice lost its certainty and pride and her speech became halting and cautious. She said she didn’t know her son had been beating his girlfriend until the Baltimore police officers had allegedly beat him to death. And she said knowing her first-born child had hit a woman called up shame not only on him, but of herself as well, because she thought she had taught him that all women were precious. She played the video of his funeral which, she told me, she sometimes watched because it gave her comfort. I talked to her teenage daughter, Jesse’s half-sister, who said she saw him as her protector. Her voice was wistful and she rarely looked straight at me. Before I left, I asked his mother if she had any photos of him I could use in the paper, and she gave me a slightly out-of-focus picture of him. He was a dark-skinned man with a low haircut wearing sunglasses and holding a plastic cup in one hand, pointing at the camera with the other.

            After talking with his mother and half-sister for over an hour, I drove across town to see his last home -- an unfurnished room in a row house apartment he shared with another guy around his age. Chapman’s roommate worked in a convenience store near their apartment, so I went to look for him in the store first. The death was on the minds of residents in his neighborhood, so it wasn’t surprising to him or his supervisor that a reporter would come by. The supervisor allowed the roommate some time off to take me to the apartment a block away. He showed me Chapman’s untouched, vacant bedroom with a hardwood floor. It had no bookshelves, posters, dressers or other personal effects. It didn’t have a bed either; Chapman had slept on the floor.

            The roommate was open about what he’d seen happen before his roommate’s death. He said he had seen Jesse beat his girlfriend before, and he knew that he was using drugs. His voice choked in his chest and cracked when he said, “The police, they killed that man!”

            When I got to the newsroom, Frank Bullock, the police reporter who was alleged to have taken a shot at doing the profile, burst from his chair and rushed over to tell me that Jesse Chapman’s mother had called and canceled the interview. He sounded pleased. When I told him we had spoken for an hour, he spun around on his Docksiders and walked away.

            Late that afternoon I got started writing the profile. No editor gave me a signal as to how soon to turn it in, how long it could be, or when it would be in the paper, but I assumed the answer was ASAP, given how much time had passed since his death. But, to my surprise, even after I turned in the profile and Rosenthal edited it, the editors held off printing it until they could use it as a companion article to the next twist that would put Chapman back in the news. So, the profile ran in the beginning of August, about a month after he died, as a sidebar to a story reporting that his family had just filed a $25 million lawsuit against the city.

            The Chapman news coverage was cautious and limited, seeming only to report on the unfolding story for the purpose of getting it on the public record, a longstanding civic responsibility of the printed press. An exhaustive investigative article that explored the 911 tape, a history of Chapman’s previous arrests, if any, or a plausible statement from police on the use of force, never got done. And throughout The Sun’s coverage, none of the articles referred to the Baltimore City Police Department involved in the beating as responsible for his death. According to articles in its archives, The Sun referred to Chapman as:

• “a man who struggled with Baltimore police,”

• “a man who was later found dead in the back of a police wagon,”

• [a man] “police officers pummeled . . . shortly before he was pronounced dead in the back of a police van,” and

• “a Southwest Baltimore man [who] ended up in a coma.”

It reminded me of the article I wrote for the Orange County edition of The LA Times about a Brea teacher misinforming her elementary school students about the origin of Kwanzaa. In both cases, editors chose to downplay the story, thereby imposing on readers their own opinion of its importance, or lack thereof. It was as if The Times was suggesting that the teacher’s behavior was not outrageous, and that The Sun, a year later, was suggesting that this beating death by police wasn’t beyond outrageous -- scandalous, possibly criminal, and highly newsworthy.  If these papers didn’t treat such events as outrageous, the likelihood that others would see them as such became slimmer by the day.

            Articles about the fatal police-involved beating death of Jesse Chapman, the cocaine-using and girlfriend-hitting Baltimore man, appeared mostly on inside pages, and often late. It turns out that was not the only time something like that has happened. About seven years after Chapman’s death, another story made national headlines involving black murder victims in Baltimore. And it was treated with similarly lackluster attention in The Sun. On Memorial Day 2001, about ten people were shot and killed at a block party on a major road in Baltimore in a predominantly black neighborhood. The beef had something to do with an apparent gang feud. Everyone killed was black. The suspected killers were black as well.

The story was making news all over the country, but The Sun didn’t print it on the cover page the next day. Instead, an article about the killings appeared with a one-column headline on the Metro section cover page. It didn’t go unnoticed. Baltimore’s alternative weekly newspaper, City Paper, wrote this about the coverage on June 13, 2001:

The placement of the article caused consternation among journalists who saw it as a race-based demotion of a high-priority crime report—both the victims and the suspected assailants being African-American . . . There is no way on Earth it would have been relegated to [the Maryland section] if it had been eleven white people . . . That is the most outrageous bit of institutional racism from [Sun headquarters on] Calvert Street in quite a while. . .“Everyone knows if there’d been a shooting like that in a wealthy or middle-class neighborhood it would have been on the front,” one Sun vet [said]. I asked this old pro if it mattered that the crime happened a scant two hours before the paper’s midnight deadline. “I don’t think so. . . . Somebody just didn’t think it was important enough. Nobody should make the excuse that it was too late to change the page.”

The apparently indifferent coverage of the Jesse Chapman beating was particularly curious when compared with the coverage of another high-profile killing that occurred about five weeks later, towards the end of my first summer at The Sun. This one was a double murder. And it was different from most murders in Baltimore, because it didn’t involve drugs, poverty or young black men—at least one of which usually factored into most of the city’s murders. Instead, it involved a white 88-year-old retired surgeon, and his 81-year-old white wife. The couple, Walter and Mary Loch, had been roused from their sleep at home in their tony North Baltimore community of Guilford and beaten to death with a baseball bat. Wealthy white doctors and their wives rarely got bludgeoned in the bedrooms of their upper-middle class, predominately white neighborhoods, so this story jumped out in terms of its brutality and its unusualness. “Guilford Couple Slain” ran on page 1A the day after it happened. Then the next day, two articles ran—one was a profile of the couple, published almost a month faster than the profile I wrote about Jesse Chapman, the black man beaten to death while in police custody; the other was a column: “It strains human credulity,” a Sun columnist wrote, “to think that a husband and wife could be found murdered on Stratford Road in the Guilford neighborhood in North Baltimore.” In the next four days, in less time than the Chapman beating death appeared on the front page at all, four successive Guilford murder stories ran, three on page 1A, and two of those on the same day. The first 1A story discussed the police department’s as-yet-fruitless search for clues. In other words, an article appearing on the cover of the paper informed readers, Guess what folks? The cops got nothing.

The next story, on the Metro cover, reported that the couple was killed during an apparent burglary that was still unsolved. The next day, two Guilford murder stories ran on page 1A—one reported that the authorities announced that the couple’s 30-year-old grandson was suspected of beating the victims to death over a money dispute, and that the police had charged him with two counts of first-degree murder. The other story reported that city officials were considering putting up barricades to prevent outsiders from getting into the slain couple’s neighborhood. The attention this story got was well-deserved, given how it took the whole city by surprise—particularly since the grandson was the suspect. But the Chapman story had warranted the same heavy-handed editor involvement that got page 1A-quality stories about the Guilford murders into the paper on successive days.

            One evening at about 7:30, Sandy Banisky, a well-respected twenty-year reporting veteran at The Sun, was leading a team of younger reporters in writing yet another front page story about the Guilford double murder for the following day’s paper. The angle was this: What did Baltimoreans (or at least the ones she reached by phone) think about the fact that the grandson was the suspect, and not a black person? Clearly, this was not a news story. Papers generally do not report on that which did not happen. It would be like reporting that it didn’t snow or it didn’t rain. The slant of the story -- that it was so ground-breakingly shocking as to be newsworthy that a non-black man did the killing equals a justifiable story is also quite alarming. It is a conjectured idea, highly pejorative and speculative on the part of whoever suggested it. Editors usually relied on young police reporters to cover crime, but they decided the story about how the guy who did it wasn’t actually black, begged for extra help, so they picked Bonnie Sandusky, a warm, bright-eyed white woman in her late forties who had worked at the paper for about two decades. Sandusky was so disciplined that while working full-time as a reporter of mainly special projects, she had also completed law school. She often wrote front-page stories that called for lots of interviews, research, analysis and narrative writing skill. Along with a team of three reporters, she was working a few feet away from where I was sitting at a computer finishing up my assignment.

I was still in the newsroom because I was completing a story on a different topic that was set to run that weekend. I had to finish it that night. At around 8 p.m., an editor approached Bonnie and the team working the Guilford murder story to offer to buy them Chinese take-out for dinner, figuring they had worked since lunchtime and were probably hungry. Even though I was working on a lower-profile story, my shift had long since ended. I was off the clock so I was no longer being paid, and feeling hungry, and, like the other reporters, I couldn’t leave for the night until I was done. I had been at work as long as each of them that day, working equally hard. The newsroom by that point was nearly empty except for editors who worked the four-to-midnight shift.

            “Can I order something too?” I asked.

            “They’re working on a story,” the editor said.

            “Well, so am I,” I said, unsure what, if not a story, he thought I was doing there so late.

            He pursed his lips. “Well,” he said, “I guess so.”

            I was sitting close enough to overhear Sandy Banisky doing phone interviews for the Guilford murder story, taking the pulse on Baltimore’s thoughts about the fact that it wasn’t a black person who did this brutal killing, but a member of the slain couple’s family. “Let’s face it,” I overheard her saying. “We all thought it was a black person who did this. Come on.” At first, I thought she was taking a break from interviews to vent her feelings to a friend, but in her next calls I heard her use different words to ask the victims’ neighbors and associates the same question: “Admit it. You thought the suspect was black, right?” Then she admitted she thought so until she had heard otherwise.

            She was breaching understood journalistic rules by posing questions that led sources to a desired answer. She could have phrased her questions to allow them to express their opinions without hearing hers or being cajoled to agree.

            If the races were reversed, things would have been different. If a black couple were bludgeoned by their grandson and a reporter called to ask the couple’s black neighbors: “Come on, you thought it was a white guy who whacked them, didn’t you?” the rippling impact in the newsroom would have been different: junior staffers working on the story and others uninvolved but in earshot would have been taken aback enough to tell an editor. But reporters sitting close enough to hear Banisky didn’t pick up on how she was imposing onto neighbors the presupposition that it was a black man. Her interjecting her own thoughts into questions could have influenced every answer she got, and her saying “Admit it,” and “Come on” could have compelled the victims’ neighbors to give her the answers she wanted. I felt cowardly listening and not saying anything about this. I wanted to point out to Banisky how troubling I found her reporting technique, but I was the new kid on the block with two months of experience at a very clubby place where no one wanted to be the tattletale. So instead, I approached her thrice-weekly columnist friend, Mike Olesker, who sat near her in the newsroom and ate lunch with her often. A hippie-looking bearded white guy who seemed down to earth, Olesker wrote columns that often took a liberal perspective. Near the coffee machines I asked if I could talk to him and I told him what I had heard Sandusky doing. Pouring coffee without making much eye contact with me, he said: “She’s a good friend of mine. I’m not getting involved.”

            Banisky’s article in the next day’s paper appeared on page 1A. The opening paragraph said: “There was relief that the young man arrested in the Guilford murders did not reinforce the stereotypical association of blacks with violent crime. Baltimoreans yesterday learned that a grandson—not a random intruder—has been arrested in the slayings of an elderly couple found dead in their Guilford home on Sunday. The suspect is white.” The article went on to quote city residents and neighbors who said they were surprised the killer wasn’t black.

            Ellis Cose debunked some of the stereotypes about black men and crime in his book, Rage of the Privileged Class, published a year before the murder of the elderly Baltimorean couple. Drawing on FBI statistics, Cose proved that the rate at which black men committed crimes was much lower than what purse-clutching, car door-locking white citizens might have suspected. FBI stats “show that blacks were arrested 245,437 times in 1991 for murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. The country’s total population then was just under 249 million, including nearly 31 million blacks and roughly 15 million black males. If we assume that each arrest represents the apprehension of a separate individual, blacks arrested for violent crimes made up less than 1 percent of the black population in 1991—and just under 1.7 of the black male population.”[9]

            An article in the anti-establishment magazine The Progressive also suggested that some white readers assumed perpetrators of crime were black, even when they had no information about the suspects’ race. The magazine reported on a research study done at UCLA. In it, white people whose television viewing habits were being monitored were exposed to a TV crime newscast. Without being shown pictures of the people suspected of committing the crimes, almost half of the test subjects assumed that the persons responsible for the crime were black. “Even when white viewers, in an experimental setting, watched a newscast that showed no photo of a suspect, 40 percent believed they saw an African American perpetrator,”[10] the article said.

            Banisky’s article – which did not contain any contextual statistics relating to black men and crime in Baltimore -- stirred up one reader, who wrote in a Letter to the Editor: “As if the deaths of Mary and Walter Loch are not tragic enough—allegedly murdered by their own grandson—their family must also suffer through the insensitive statements made by people interviewed in the August 19 Sun, saying that they were ‘relieved’ that the murderer was not black. Where is our humanity? I would find no ‘relief’ to learn that the person who did harm to a loved one was not black, white, male, female, old, young . . .”

            The focus of Banisky’s reporting reminded me of the experience I’d had writing an article for the Los Angeles Times about the Black History-themed treasure chest circulating in Orange County the February before, when editors had refused to name the teacher who made up information about African and African-American history. Editors in both cases had the opportunity to debunk stereotypes and misinformation pertaining to black Americans, and in both cases they chose not to. Balancing these inconsistent, secret rules against so many of my own viewpoints and trying not to say anything about it was exhausting.

One morning in August, Assistant City Editor Dave Rosenthal told me about the murder the night before, which he wanted me to write about. The victim was a 23-year-old Russian immigrant, on his first night out as a delivery driver for a Northwest Baltimore pizza franchise. According to the overnight police reporter’s article, after the driver’s first delivery, a teenager approached the driver with a gun and tried to rob him of the money he had collected. When he refused to give it over, the robber shot and killed him. My assignment was to do a second-day story and elaborate on the murder, getting details of the victim’s life, the crime, and the reaction from the people who knew him.

I started by going to the address which police had gotten from the victim’s driver’s license in his wallet. He had since moved from that address, so I went to the pizza place where he worked. When I asked the man who operated the pizza franchise about the murder, his eyes widened and he burst into conversation. I was probably the first non-police officer to ask him about the crime that happened to his new and apparently well-liked employee. He told me that the victim, Igor Berenshteyn, had begged him to the point of tears to send him out on a delivery—in the past he had only let him assemble pizza boxes because he was new and still learning English. I asked to see the job application that Berenshteyn had filled out. The small manila form had a different address than the one on his driver’s license. The more up-to-date address led me to an attic apartment he had been renting in a white Cape Cod house nearby. When I pulled up at the curb, I saw a foreign-looking middle-aged woman in a shift dress standing on the grass crying. She had to be his mother.

            Trying to interview a woman going through an experience as unspeakably horrible as the loss of her child required a careful touch. She was so far outside a neutral emotional state that how she might react was a volatile unknown. Sometimes reporters become temporary friends to grief-stricken family members who had just lost a loved one unexpectedly. They might get inside the grieving family’s member’s kitchen and get started making coffee and struggling not to cry while letting the subject get so emotional that his or her stream-of-consciousness language makes for the dramatic quotes the reporter is there to collect. Other times, the individual who has just lost someone (who from a reporter’s viewpoint is also a possible mark), pulls away from the invitation to be interviewed, feeling the sting of the invasive reporter-to-grieving-loved-one dynamic, knowing the whole city would read what he or she said. On some occasions the subject goes ballistic, directing rage about the tragedy toward the intruding reporter. It was always a gamble. I walked up to the victim’s mother. I knew getting an interview with her, in my first months on the job, would improve editors’ confidence in me. If I weren’t working the story that afternoon, and if she were my neighbor crying on the sloping lawn next door, I would reach my arm out and touch hers and listen while nodding and empathizing with her pain. But I was there to gather information for a story. As empathetic as I felt, I was also getting jumpy as I gave Mrs. Berenshteyn my condolences, then gently asked if she would be willing to speak with me about her child for the paper. Without any persuading, she agreed. She later told me that she saw sincerity in my eyes that made her feel like talking to me.

            We sat at her son’s kitchen table and she showed me a picture of a slender, nice-looking guy with blue eyes and brown hair who was learning English by recording his thoughts into a computerized journal. He wrote about being bored and lonely in unfamiliar Baltimore without a girlfriend or new friends. I copied down parts of the journal, knowing that the mom might not have let me pillage it if she were stronger and more equipped to decide. As we talked, the 23-year-old’s father paced the back hall of the hot apartment wearing his snorkel jacket as if in a trance, and the victim’s mother’s sister joined the conversation, talking about how difficult the adjustment to the United States had been for her nephew. The mother, a writer in Russia who had only been able to find work babysitting stateside, sobbed into her hand while she told me that she would feel guilty for the rest of her life for forcing her son to leave behind a burgeoning photography career and a girlfriend he was happy with and relocate to this country.

            My primary goals were these: to get the victim’s family to spill exclusive information likely to touch readers, to copy down quotes in their exact language that reflected their accents and speech patterns, and to note distinguishing details of the surroundings and the mood. I interrupted our interview to call the Assistant City Editor, Dave Rosenthal, to let him know what she was telling me, and he was pumped, which made me feel like a winner. These were the kinds of selfish things I remember thinking about while out on assignments, while at the same empathizing with the people I wrote about, often to the point of crying, thinking and talking about it to friends after I left the newsroom.

I finished the call with Rosenthal and returned to the interview in time to take notes on Mrs. Berenshteyn’s berating herself and anticipating a lifetime of guilt. Her pain was so raw that it was hard for me to watch, yet I knew that the more I watched, the stronger my notes, and thus my story, would become.

            After I got back to my newsroom, I spent a few high-pressure hours writing the article about the victim. After I submitted it, Rosenthal spent hours with me that evening editing the story. He even suggested that I call the pizzeria to find out what toppings were on the pie the young man had been delivering. We sat bent toward a computer terminal pointing at words on the screen and evaluating their right to limited space in the story, which was running on the front page. I got home to watch the late local TV news and noticed that none of the channels had an interview with the mother. I felt like I had pulled my weight that day.

            That summer, I reported on more crimes and did some feature stories as well, always trying to be as diligent as possible. When I worked on breaking stories, I watched the 10 p.m. news on FOX and the 11 p.m. local network affiliate news to see if the broadcast reporters had information I didn’t. I thought my rapport with editors was good—when they asked for information I didn’t have, I always said, “I don’t know, but I can find out,” and I made the necessary calls. If I had the answer but hadn’t put it in the story, I gave the material in full sentences instead of sounding wishy-washy and unsure.

            In my first three months, I wrote dozens of articles—one about a gun turn-in program run by a local defense attorney who made a living off drug money, and another about a high school reunion attended by Baltimoreans now in their 50s. With two other reporters, I covered a drug raid on East Baltimore homes and I found for that story a victim of the raid who agreed to talk to me. Other stories I wrote were about a labor program for inmates at the local jail; the United Way overhauling its operation to reverse a five-year decline in fundraising; and a neighborhood’s need for increasing taxes on its residents to cover the cost of private security. One night I rented a video at a neighborhood video store and the clerk saw my name on the slip and asked: “Are you the Elaine Tassy who works at The Sun?”  It was the first time anyone had ever recognized my name that way, and it made me feel proud.

Every reporter, except the most senior ones, had to work a few weekend shifts a year because on Saturdays and Sundays, The Sun operated with a skeleton crew. No reporters were assigned to work every Saturday or every Sunday. For that reason, every weekend, two or three reporters and a handful of editors came in on a rotating basis, having signed up in advance. I worked a Saturday shift that first summer, and during it, I had the first of many experiences seeing how reporters’ race and gender influenced editors’ decisions about their story assignments. Reporters had choices of weekend assignments—they could be the day’s general assignment reporter, covering any light daily news events, or the day’s police reporter, covering major crimes occurring during their shift. On that Saturday, the police reporter was Ed Gilbert, a balding 50ish reporter who during the week worked in a satellite office in Baltimore County about ten miles away. He had watery blue eyes and a kind manner, yet his articles often read like he did only phone interviews instead of going out to the scene to gather information. I had signed up to be the general assignment reporter on hand to cover an ethnic street festival or holiday parade, but since nothing was going on that day, I was working on a story I had begun earlier that week, as reporters were encouraged to do instead of wasting time waiting for something to happen.

            In the course of checking in with the Baltimore City Police spokespersons, Gilbert had learned that a black man had gotten killed in Sandtown-Winchester, a community in Baltimore’s so-called inner city that had recently received a development grant. Normally, a black-on-black murder in a poor area was covered in three paragraphs, if at all. But because the paper was covering the community’s use of the development grant, this murder warranted a full story. Gilbert began his reporting by calling the police spokesperson, who didn’t yet have the victim’s name, and could only give him the crime scene address. Gilbert should have visited the crime scene, then called the police spokesperson later for the victim’s name and new details. But Gilbert considered his story complete with the information from the spokesperson, and, without getting the victim’s name or visiting the scene of the crime as he could have, he turned in the story long before deadline. Later, I noticed him sitting with his feet up on a desk, joking with a Baltimore County columnist who had come in that day.

            While I was typing notes to my story, that day’s editor, who normally worked in the Howard County regional newsroom during the week, came to my desk. “We need you to go out to Sandtown-Winchester,” he said breathlessly. “There’s been a murder!”

            “Isn’t Ed covering that?” I asked, knowing already that he was.

            “Yes,” said the editor, a geeky white man probably in his early forties, who was married to a massage therapist with whom he had adopted several children. “But we need Ed to stay here in case something happens on the police beat. That’s why we want you to go out to Sandtown!”

That wasn’t the way it worked. Normally, a reporter who had begun a story saw it through to completion -- instead of doing part of it, turning it in early and then goofing off while an editor got someone else to finish it.

            “Well something has happened,” I said. “There was a murder.”

            “No, I mean something else,” the editor said.

            “If something else happens, I’ll be here to cover it,” I said. “I’m working on another story. Why don’t you have Ed go? It’s his story, and he’s just sitting back there hanging out.”

            The editor’s blank-faced comeback was: “Yes, but the story you’re working on isn’t scheduled to run tomorrow. This one is.”

            That something else might happen didn’t excuse Ed Gilbert from finishing his own story about something that already had happened, and the fact that his story was running the next day and mine was not, didn’t mean that I needed to drop my work to finish his while he sat around watching the clock. But perhaps the editor figured that my going to the all-black neighborhood to finish up the reporting would keep Ed Gilbert safe. Why should Gilbert have to interact with the scary, poor, violent, loony, crack-head black people, the editor may have thought, when there was a Negress available? She could simply swipe her Black-Person entrance card at the gate of the black community, enter her personal comfort zone, and use her black skin to dig up answers to questions that Gilbert, in his whiteness, couldn’t dare ask.

As soon as I arrived in Sandtown-Winchester and opened my mouth, the people on the limestone steps near the victim’s house knew I was as much an outsider as any white reporter. They weren’t thinking, “She’s not from around here, but she’s black, so we’ll tell her what we know that might lead her to who did it.” The first few people I tried to interview looked at me, then at each other, and then resisted telling me a whole lot. I gathered the victim’s name and age, as well as a few details about him from the victim’s neighbors.         And I was hardly in my safety zone. The gunman, who had just killed another black person, wasn’t going to look at me and say, “Oh, she’s black; I’ll leave her alone.” My blackness, supposedly an advantage here in the eyes of the editor who’d sent me, could actually be a liability in other ways as well, as noted by a journalist of color in a journalism magazine.

            “If you . . . were to go cover a story in the South Bronx,” a one-time Newsday reporter named Wil Cruz told an interviewer in an article, “they would see [a white reporter] as an official and treat you with some respect,” states Cruz, who is Hispanic. “They would be more comfortable with me, but I’m not sure that works to my advantage. They might see me as showing off my success.”[11]            When I got back to the newsroom, the editor who had sent me to the crime scene mumbled in my general direction that he might’ve made “the wrong call” by sending me rather than Ned. Then he cut out all the information that I had gathered in the victim’s neighborhood besides his name and age—the story, he said, had become too long.

            As the summer wore down, I waited to find out where editors were going to send me permanently. In the past, METPRO trainees went to work in suburban zoned editions of the newspaper, in newsrooms some twenty miles from downtown. I was hoping I would go to the Howard County newsroom, which seemed the most interesting location of all the bureaus. The other possible counties producing their own sections, which I could be assigned to, were Anne Arundel County, Harford County, and Carroll County, both part of the Baltimore metropolitan area.

            I found out where I would be going long-term in August, about three months after I began working at the paper. Baltimore County bureau chief Mike, who went by the nickname Whiz. He normally worked in the Baltimore County satellite office about ten miles north and was spending a week downtown, covering for a vacationing city-based editor. Baltimore County didn’t have its own edition; instead, reporters in the Baltimore County office covered only what was going on in Baltimore County, but their work appeared in the main paper, making that newsroom much more desirable than editions in other counties. For a newbie like me, I thought, it was totally out of reach.

            One day, Whiz asked if we could talk, and we went into a downtown editor’s private office. “I’ve had a chance to see how you work,” he said. “I’ve seen how you carry yourself around here.” He described me as aggressive and unafraid, and said he needed more reporters like that in Baltimore County. He said he wanted me to work for him. I was flattered and excited, but I told him I thought it was unlikely the downtown editors would give me such a desirable posting, since Baltimore County was almost as good as working downtown. “I have some pull around here,” he said, “and I can get what I want.” At the end of that month, I started working at my first permanent placement in the Baltimore County office.

CHAPTER 5:

THE SUN: WEST BALTIMORE COUNTY

Baltimore County, a separate municipality from the city, was a donut of unincorporated towns surrounding Baltimore, the donut hole in the middle. A County Executive ran the county as a mayor ran the city. Larger geographically than the city of Baltimore, it was less densely populated and more suburban, white and affluent, with some communities of color. The Baltimore County newsroom was off the Baltimore Beltway, a highway that wrapped through and around the county like a belt. The closest destination to the office was a convenience store thirty minutes away on foot. Like in the Baltimore City newsroom, the offices in the Baltimore County newsroom were filled by white men. The bureau chief who had brought me onto the team, Whiz worked out of one windowless office. Another office was set aside for the assistant bureau chief, also a white man, and a third went to a white male Baltimore city columnist who reported to a downtown editor. He was not a part of the BaltCo team, but he preferred the calmer atmosphere of Baltimore County and was allowed to work from that bureau in an office with a computer terminal and a door he could close. About twenty other people—reporters, junior editors and advertising reps—worked in the bureau as well, and each of us had a spacious area to work in, most with its own computer terminal. But none of us had privacy or personal space the way the white male senior editors did.

Against the Baltimore County newsroom walls were filing cabinets for storing documents from finished reporting projects, a luxury we didn’t have downtown. The carpeting, refrigerator and bathroom were all newer and much cleaner as well. Another difference was that the communities making up Baltimore County were safer and mellower than communities in the city. For every one person murdered in Baltimore County, a whopping five were murdered in the city. Public schools were less violent as well. All of this made Baltimore County newsroom reporters friendlier and less stressed-out than the team downtown. The lack of frequent major breaking news left us time to pursue trend and profile stories instead of always reacting to whatever news was breaking. However, the lack of breaking news sometimes meant days were slower, and the search for stories more deliberate.

            That fall, I was one of three new staff reporters of color to join the Baltimore County news team. The paper also hired a 20-something black male reporter from a Virginia daily newspaper; he covered Baltimore County District Court. (He moved to the city government beat downtown within a year.) Additionally, The Sun assigned the Baltimore County Police beat to a 22-year-old woman originally from Vietnam who had grown up in the United States. She was a recent college grad, and participant in a program bringing young minority reporters from Maryland into the paper.

            My beat was to cover West Baltimore County. This was my first permanent beat assignment, and I was the first reporter ever assigned to cover West Baltimore County (a predominantly black area), although a white reporter had been covering East Baltimore County (a predominantly white area) for about five years. I was responsible for becoming an expert in all things WestBaltCo, developing relationships with local county council members, police stations and schools. I also had to figure out what was going on national institutions like the Social Security Administration located in the Woodlawn community of WestBaltCo. Beat reporters who covered topics like communities, courts, cops, education and government had to come up with ideas to exhaust topic coverage, which was new for me, because in Los Angeles and during my summer downtown, editors had always given me assignments. Now I had to find my own stories, while avoiding West Baltimore County stories that intruded on other reporters’ beats. I trolled for stories taking ride-alongs with police officers and talking with county council members whose districts I covered. I started checking in at the district courts within my jurisdiction to see what I might stumble across, and I hit community meetings after work. When I couldn’t think of anywhere to look for a story, I asked other Baltimore County reporters for suggestions. Sometimes I drove around randomly, hoping to see something that sparked an idea. I also read the community papers covering my areas. Unearthing articles was hard at first, but Whiz started me off with some good assignments. One was a profile of Goucher College’s new president; another was a feature story that had me visiting a few new school buildings on the first day of school in Baltimore County; and another was an interview with the wife of a rookie Baltimore County Police Officer who was suddenly killed in a car crash shortly after he began his new job.

            As I became more familiar with the county, I began finding news and feature stories on my own. I found a story about Muslim children at a local mosque who decided to fast for Ramadan, even though they were too young for it to be required of them yet. By checking in the phone book, I came across a story about a thriving herb farm that sold medicinal and culinary plants. The aunt of the slain pizza deliveryman told me of another story, about an immigrant couple who had come to the United States from Ukraine.  The wife worked in Dunkin’ Donuts and the husband drove a cab until they saved enough money to open up a Ukrainian bakery, where the wife made most of the confections by hand. I also learned, through contacts with sources, about the government’s plans to create a visitors’ center and historical park honoring Benjamin Banneker, who was originally from Southwest Baltimore County.

            I looked forward to going to work and felt busy and appreciated at my job, but not overwhelmed. I had the freedom to set up my days looking for and reporting stories. My confidence started to grow as editors asked me to do big articles, and as my fellow reporters told me in computer messages or phone calls that I was hitting my stride.

One day in the fall a few weeks after I began working in the Baltimore County office, bureau chief Whiz approached me with a flier. “Here,” he said, hovering in my workspace as I finished a telephone interview. “I thought you might be interested in this.” The flier, on a white 8½ x 11-inch piece of copy paper, advertised a charter trip to Africa he thought I might want to take.

            I looked back up at him. “What made you think I would be interested?”

            “I figured you’d be more interested in it than anyone else here,” he said.

            “What made you think that?”

            “Ah, uh, oh, because, ah, because you said you would be interested in traveling to Africa.”

            “When did I say that?”

            “I just thought you might be interested.”

            Since I had started working in Baltimore County a few weeks before, I hadn’t shared any travel interests with him. We barely knew each other, and we mostly talked about articles I was working on. Whenever we veered away from journalism topics, Whiz told stories about his school-aged sons and their teachers, and his fascination with all things technical. If, somehow, I managed to wrest control and steer the conversation to my own interests, Africa-bound charter trips wouldn’t have come up because I hadn’t yet given thought, let alone voice, to traveling there.

            Whiz’s assigning me to cover the black part of the county and offering me a flier about a charter trip to Africa exemplified what sociologists describe as tokenization, a term for the boxing up of people who work in organizations at which people of their race make up less than 15% of the workforce. An article in Social Forces, one of academia’s most respected sociology journals, noted that black women reporting to white men who are in control of a work group’s culture “are treated not as individuals, but instead as representative symbols” and that the stereotype-based assumptions of white male supervisors tended to “force tokens to play limited and caricatured roles in the organization.”[12]

            His assigning me a beat covering the county’s black population was likely based on tokenized thinking, associated with the expectation that I would be more comfortable and effective interacting with black sources than would a white reporter—a staffing decision that presumed that white reporters would need to stretch out of their personal comfort zones to successfully cover the black citizenry and that they would unwilling or unable to do so.

            The Social Forces article points out that tokenism is a workplace stressor which employees face if they find themselves in the minority race-wise on the job. The authors of the study looked at black employees—most of whom were college-educated and middle-aged and had leadership roles in their workplaces, where they also reported to white men. The authors of the study found that those who worked in predominantly white settings had token stress, characterized as “the loss of black identity, multiple demands of being black, having to demonstrate more competence than peers, and a sense of isolation.”[13]

If being the office token represented one of the downsides of my job, there were at that point just as many upsides, and usually those perks came in the form of meeting interesting and colorful characters to write about. As late summer turned into fall, I asked the Baltimore County government reporter if he had any story ideas I could work on. The county government reporter, a long-timer on his beat, told me about a 42-year-old recovering alcoholic from Southwest Baltimore County who had been living in his car since his house burned down five years before. The man wanted to make a swap with the county government, where the county would give him an old, abandoned prefabricated house in return for him working temporarily for the Baltimore County Department of Recreation and Parks, doing gardening on the county-owned grounds.

            The day I met him, Delroy Matthews was living out of his blue ’84 Datsun, parked on a 2.5-acre property where his family home used to be. He was a short and pot-bellied man with sad eyes, wearing blue chinos, a matching tennis shirt and a knit wool hat. His support system included the pastor of a nearby church who counseled him three times a week, and a convenience store owner who gave him leftover food and space in the basement to store his belongings in exchange for odd jobs. All he had to keep warm was a mottled sleeping bag in his battered car—his only source of privacy and warmth for the last five years. At night, he heard people and animals traipsing across his property, which was littered with empty alcohol bottles and lawn mowers he was supposedly planning to fix.

            His important documents were mildewing in a battered refrigerator near the car. He cooked meals outside over an iron pot-bellied stove, and sometimes he used a gas-powered generator to turn on Christmas tree lights so he wouldn’t be sitting outside in the dark. He had stayed with family members intermittently right after the fire, but, not wanting to wear out his welcome, he survived in the car on about $200 a month in public assistance, doing odd jobs, and selling copper and aluminum he collected from trash bins. He was committed to changing his lot before winter fell again, so he asked Baltimore County officials if he could garden in a county park in exchange for the county’s giving him a two- or three-bedroom prefabricated house. The house was boarded up and in disuse, worth less than $5,000. He wrote up a proposal to cut grass, pull weeds, and plant flowers twenty hours a week for three months in exchange for the house, located at that time in a county park. He figured that if he could get the house moved to his property, he could spruce it up and start living in it.

            County officials agreed to Matthews’s barter proposal, but there was one problem: putting steel beams under the house, jacking it up and hauling it to Matthews’ property less than a mile away would cost about $4,000. Depressed and helpless, he worried that he wouldn’t be able to come up with that amount of money before the county changed its mind or disposed of the house altogether. I wanted to write an article about his predicament. My editor was open to it and so was Delroy Matthews, who let me interview him several times on his property. After meeting with the store-keeper he bartered with and the pastor who counseled him, and talking to the involved Baltimore county official, I spent a few days writing the story and turned it in to Rock. “Home Free—Except for $4,000 Cost of Moving It” ran on the Metro cover on an October Sunday. With the story was a photo of Matthews standing in front of the boarded-up house. Stories with pictures on the Sunday cover of the Metro section were always well-read, based on placement and the fact that Sun circulation is highest on Sundays. When I got to work the Monday after the story ran, I had dozens of voicemails from readers, many of whom were calling to ask how they could donate money to the cost of moving the house. One of them was Matthews’ former teacher from decades before, who had recognized his name and image; many others were strangers who were moved and wanted to help. Readers offered a total of $2,300, with one 79-year-old widow pledging $1,000. Other callers, anticipating he would get the house, offered to put in sidewalks and windows once the house was moved, and to give him clothes, boots and dishes. The most exciting call came from the co-owner of a company that moved relocatable classrooms for the Baltimore County school system. He offered to move the house for $1,600—an amount that would cover his costs without bringing him any profit, meaning that he and his staff would kick in the labor for free. By the end of the day, Delroy Matthews knew that if he put the readers’ donations toward the moving costs, he was going to get the house.

            Bill Marimow, the managing editor who’d approached me about coming to him with work-related problems, “big or little” as he’d put it, suggested that I write an article for the next day’s paper following up on readers’ responses to Matthews’ story and the donations that they offered. I phoned Matthews, who told me he had been standing outside his friend’s convenience store the day the story ran. As people driving by the rural road recognized him from the newspaper photo, they waved or blew their horns, which filled him with hope and self-worth, he said.

The follow-up story ran on the Metro cover and generated a lot of local interest from readers who got excited for his success, which everyone felt was a few steps away. After the first two stories ran, the crane operators got permits signed and arranged for some members of the staff to volunteer to do the move for free. On a fall weekend afternoon two weeks later, the team of volunteers maneuvered the structure on cranes to the spot Matthews had picked and set it up in two separate pieces, while Matthews watched, scared something might go wrong before the house was in place.

But everything went smoothly, and he said that it was like Christmas in October. “I just want to be like everyone else,” he said, “to be able to go inside and watch TV.” When the crane team was done, Matthews’ friends helped him take down the boards. They found three bedrooms, a pink bathroom, and a laundry room. The photographer shot pictures of him and his friends removing the boards, and then he shook his hand, beaming with joy for him. I almost started crying watching them share that moment. The transport company co-owner told me he was so gratified by the experience that he wouldn’t care if he never got paid for his costs.

            Less than a week after Matthews got his house, one of the two black male reporters working downtown invited me to speak to his students at historically black Morgan State University in Baltimore, not far from the newsroom. He taught introductory journalism there a few nights a week. He asked me to show up in the classroom and talk about how I became a journalist and how I reported and wrote some of my favorite stories. Wearing one of my usual loose, flowing work dresses and feeling nervous and jumpy, I sat in front of his students and described high school and college experiences that had led to the DC internship, and some METPRO stories, including the one about the teenager who had suddenly died in his gym class. I also talked about the Delroy Matthews stories and about the Jesse Chapman profile – both of which would be among the first to come to mind years later, whenever college journalism students asked me to tell them about my favorite reporting experiences. The professor assigned the students to write a profile of me, and according to their reports I was a tall, glowing, caramel-colored bubbly woman in a denim dress and loafers, filled with undaunted optimism for her job, the journalism profession and The Sun. “Right now,” one student quoted me saying, “I am happy and satisfied with my work.” A few others wrote that I wanted to become a columnist or a national correspondent one day, and that if I weren’t currently working as a reporter, I would be looking for a job in the field. “Elaine Tassy is living proof,” one student wrote, “that your dreams do come true if you strive for them.”

Well, maybe, but at a high cost. Relishing the joy of doing good stories, I was blocking out the racism that soon turned what looked like a dream come true into a long-term professional nightmare. I didn’t discuss any of that with the students because I was still in some level of denial, and my understanding of the reason I was there was to talk about the good things, not the bad, which, at that time, were my perception on reality, not reality itself.

            Early fodder for the downturn: I was under the impression that by the time the Delroy Matthews series ran, that I had earned the right to voice my views when the editing of one of my articles didn’t turn out in a way that I could live with. This was an earned right and I thought – no matter how outrageous it may have seemed to editors – that I had put in enough work to use that right, albeit cautiously.

Generally, in my experience at The Sun, reporters took one last look at their stories before they got printed, in order to catch the errors that editors sometimes inadvertently made -- facts muddled in the editing process, material omitted that led readers to wrong conclusions or changes that they made that rendered the story factually incorrect. But Whiz, who edited most of my stories, didn’t always give reporters that chance.    The Baltimore County education reporter was a woman named Mary, good-natured and fiftyish with white hair. She was very strong-willed about the integrity of her articles, was the mother of two daughters who, along with her husband, sometimes came by the newsroom to visit her. Mary went ballistic on Whiz one day in the newsroom after he reorganized one of her stories so completely that she could no longer recognize it. She ripped him a new one in front of several reporters, throwing her arm in the air as she insisted he start over, re-editing her article from her original.         However, my battling less flamboyantly for the integrity of one of my stories soon proved to be a no-no for me in the eyes of my superiors. About five months into working at the paper, I went looking for a story at a community-based adult GED preparation program located in a brick building in Catonsville, one of the West Baltimore County communities that I covered. I saw a dynamic middle-aged woman wearing red lipstick, her hair in an elaborate braided up-do, sitting in the back of the room. I thought she might be an interesting woman to observe, so much so that I eventually approached her about writing a profile. Over several interviews at the center, her job and her home, divorced grandmother Sylvia Maxwell, 52, told me that she’d quit school at 16 without being able to read well. Then she got married, had two kids and worked occasional factory and day care jobs, while her husband, the chief bread-winner, worked full-time. But when they broke up, she lost the house they’d lived in and moved into the two-bedroom apartment of her daughter and three grandchildren. She needed to look for full-time work, but her choices were limited to low-paying jobs, which led her to the GED class. I quickly got hooked by the open and unpitying way she described her day, which included not just the literacy program, but also working as a dietary aide in one hospital and as a housekeeper in another. Her day started at 5 a.m. when she stepped out into the darkness to her first job, laboring in thankless tasks for people who were often too sick to notice or appreciate her. Then it was off to GED class in a windowed classroom where she sat in the back learning the basics – reading literacy and math to qualify for a high school equivalency diploma. After that, she went to her second job cleaning hospital rooms in a striped smock over a uniform skirt and blouse, pushing a cart that had a bright feather duster. Determined to carve out time for her schoolwork, she studied in the hospital locker room during breaks, and got help from her 14-year-old grandson at home.  She got about five hours of sleep each night before starting the routine again. 

            Once Whiz approved the story, I attended one of Maxwell’s classes, joined her on her rounds cleaning hospital rooms, and sat in on a tutoring session her grandson gave her. “I’m a tough task master,” he told me, describing how he handled the tutoring sessions, when I visited their apartment. “I expect you to know the work.”

            After doing the reporting, I spent a full day writing the story. I opened with a description of her daily routine, hustling from a job to a classroom to another job. Whiz was so enthusiastic about the story that he got the downtown editors interested in printing it on page 1A. The evening before it was set to appear in the next day’s paper, I looked over Whiz’s editing changes before leaving work. Everything looked fine. I thought he was going to send that same version of the story to a copy editor, who would then proofread and correct it for style and grammar, and write a headline, so I was surprised an hour before I went to sleep that night when a copy editor phoned me to tell me that she was going over the story and had a question about the opening sentence. The first sentence of the article now began with the subject of the article, Sylvia Maxwell, saying: “I’m just blessed that I’m a high-energy person . . . inactivity would kill me.” This was a quote that I had used farther down in the version of story I’d submitted and signed off on before departing a few hours earlier.

The revamped second paragraph, also fashioned without my knowledge, now said: “And that’s a good thing.”

            The copy editor’s question was whether I was okay with the implication that it was “a good thing” that inactivity would kill Sylvia Maxwell.

No, I was not.

Editors generally do not make changes to the opening paragraphs of reporters’ articles without telling them. The integrity of editor/reporter trust and agreement concerning opening paragraphs is taken very seriously. When an editor and reporter reach an agreement on the opening paragraphs, the editor doesn’t then change them without the reporter’s knowledge, nor does the reporter find the story in the computer system and secretly change it behind the editor’s back. The role of the opening paragraphs is pivotal, because readers use them to decide whether or not they care to read the whole story. If an editor doesn’t like the opening paragraph that a reporter has decided on, he or she normally arrives with the reporter at a new or tweaked opening paragraph both the editor and reporter are OK with, instead of putting the reporter in a position to be surprised by a new opening paragraph when the article appears in the paper.

            I felt it was ill-advised, if not distasteful, to imply that The Sun favored inactivity killing Sylvia Maxwell. It sounded as if the copy editor shared my interpretation and in fact had been prompted to call me because she read it as I had. But I couldn’t ask the copy editor to change the opening paragraph back to my original version or something more like it—that was a change a more senior editor would have to approve. So I asked the copy editor for Whiz’s home phone number, and while I was at it, I asked for two other editors’ numbers, in case Whiz wasn’t home. Whiz was out, so I left a message. Then I called another editor somewhere in the pecking order between him and Bill “Big or Little” Marimow. He wasn’t home either, so finally I called Marimow, the senior downtown editor who about six months before had told me to come to him with any problem, big or little. By that point it was early December, and I’d already approached Marimow with a number of complaints about Whiz smoking cigarettes in the office and making editing errors in my stories. Marimow always seemed concerned. When another editor didn’t give me a byline for a story I had worked on, Marimow sympathized and said, “I think you should have gotten more credit.” Sometimes he placed a phone call or two on my behalf and usually resolved whatever matter I brought up. I still naively believed that my turning one of The Sun’s Top Five editors into my own personal problem-solver was fine with him, and that it was something anyone would be doing in similar circumstances, based on the sincere fiction he’d fed me during my early days at The Sun.

            I reached Marimow at home to talk about the opening to my profile of Sylvia Maxwell. When one of Marimow’s kids called him to the phone, I began by apologizing for bothering him at home. He said he didn’t mind and asked what the problem was. I told him how my story had been changed and that now it implied that inactivity killing Maxwell would be a good thing. He said firmly: “We don’t have wholesale editing here, Elaine. Editing is supposed to be a collaboration between reporter and editor.” If I didn’t care for the story with those new opening paragraphs, he said, it didn’t have to run that way, and I had his permission to call the night editor and tell him that I was embarrassed about the revision. He sounded indignantly on my side, as if my not bringing this to someone’s attention would have been a mistake. The word “embarrassed” that he used perfectly described how I would feel if I opened the paper to find the Sylvia Maxwell story starting off with Whiz’s new opener. Precision, story integrity, and story ownership were all important to newspaper journalists, so Marimow’s recognition that this mattered struck me as an expected, appreciated and appropriate response.

            After several rounds of calls between other editors and me, and editors and each other, the opening paragraphs went back to how they had appeared before Whiz changed them after I’d left for the day. The next morning the story was on the cover, above the fold, and I felt proud. I thought the matter ended there, that my need to call the Managing Editor to get him to repair a problem would be forgotten. I thought anyone would do what’d I’d done if they were in the same situation. The call I made to Marimow faded into my inactive memory bank, as I thought it would fade into his. It wasn’t until a few years later that I learned not only that it hadn’t, but that he held onto this instance as a strike against me for the bulk of my years at The Sun, even discussing it with another editor in a negative way.

            One of the paper’s few black male reporters, with whom I discussed this and my other reporter-editor conversations, disagreed with my behavior. He said that based on the relatively minor fights I took on—such as this one about the Sylvia Maxwell story—I was coming across as strident, and that I should pick my battles and let smaller things go. It was advice I didn’t give much thought to at the time.

I loved writing about people like Delroy Matthews and Sylvia Maxwell, who led fascinating yet invisible lives, struggling to make their moments on earth count. My goal as a newspaper reporter evolved in a specific direction: to become a Features writer in the Today section, where slice-of-life stories such as those about Matthews or Maxwell appeared alongside movie, theater and book reviews and more human interest and health-related stories. After as few as three or four years, or as many as ten, a news reporter who distinguished him or herself got the chance to work in other sections of the paper besides Metro. He or she might apply to become a foreign or national correspondent, a Sports or a Business reporter, a columnist, an editorial writer, an assistant editor in an outlying bureau, or a Features section writer, which is what I wanted to become.

            Meanwhile, I continued writing West Baltimore County stories, and four months into the beat, Whiz gave me a performance evaluation. For the most part, it was favorable—he checked “Meets Standards” or “Exceeds Standards” for: “Work Judgments,” “Job Skill Level,” “Quality of Work,” “Volume of Acceptable Work,” “Accepts Direction,” “Effectiveness Under Stress,” “Observance of Work Hours,” “Attendance,” “Grooming and Dress,” “Compliance with Rules and Safety Practices,” “Public Contacts,” “Client Contacts,” “Planning and Organizing,” “Meeting Deadlines,” “Appearance of Work Station,” “Operation and Care of Equipment,” and “Innovation.”

            He noted that I required improvement in “Accepts Change.” In the comments, he wrote: Elaine is an enterprising aggressive reporter who finds good stories and gets them into the paper. She has taken the initiative in western Baltimore County and has improved our coverage there significantly. She works diligently on assigned stories and has done an excellent job of coming up with enterprise pieces of her own. He added in the sections for improvement plans: Elaine will continue her good work of introducing more communities to our readers and introducing these communities to The Sun through contacts with civic, neighborhood and business groups. She will also work on improving her writing skills to match her reporting abilities.

            He also stated: Elaine will concentrate on improving and polishing her writing—organizing her stories, writing tightly and finding the right words, phrases and rhythms that transform a good reporting job into a good read. She will also work on developing a more relaxed demeanor with news sources and editors. Whiz recommended the paper hire me permanently, bringing to a shockingly smooth end my years of trying to find myself a place in the journalism industry. And at union papers like The Sun, it was next to impossible to get fired. So now I had a reporting job for life, if I could stomach it.

My ability to stomach things at The Sun was only beginning to be tested. Around the Christmas holidays during my first year, I discovered some of the unspoken rules about how reporters of under-represented minority groups were expected to behave in interactions with their white co-workers and editors. As was the case for weekend shifts, most reporters had to work a holiday or two every year, with extremely senior reporters getting to opt out. Senior reporters took the more inconsequential holidays, and new reporters like me worked major holidays. On Christmas day my first year at The Sun, I worked the day shift as a general assignment reporter. Also working in the newsroom that day was Kate Shatzkin, a 28-year-old white woman who had gotten hired a few weeks after I began working at The Sun. She was covering the cops beat that day. She had worked at The Seattle Times for several years, then completed a one-year fellowship at Yale University Law School on legal reporting, before joining the paper as the state prison systems reporter. Both Kate and I had to write articles for the December 26 paper, an edition always hard to fill because there was scant daily news popping, and few reporters were on duty to fill the blank columns of newsprint. At the suggestion of another reporter, I proposed writing an article for the next day’s paper about Baltimoreans working on Christmas Day. The plan was for me to ride around the city with a photographer and find nurses, shopkeepers, bellhops, tollbooth attendants and other people at work instead of enjoying a day off with loved ones. I’d then ask them what had gone on that day and how they kept their spirits up when most people were home celebrating with their families. When I walked into the newsroom that morning to connect with the photographer so we could drive around looking for interviewees together, I encountered Kate, whose shift had begun an hour before mine. She looked up from her computer terminal to tell me that at least one person, perhaps two, had been murdered already that day.

            Then she said, “So, I might need you.”

            Kate had six hours to report and write her stories about the murders. Both of them would most likely appear as either short stories or briefs on the inside pages, since this was usually how The Sun handled murders when the victims were poor blacks. She would do some if not all of her interviews by phone, instead of leaving the building and reporting from both inner-city crime scenes. I told her that I was on my way out with a photographer to report a story that would keep me busy all day. 

The photographer and I drove around together and found working Baltimoreans willing to be part of the story about being stuck on the job on Christmas. On our way back that afternoon, a few blocks from the newspaper, the photographer got great shots of an elderly man walking home from skating with a pair of skates slung over his shoulder and a Santa hat on his head. He became the lead photo and the first anecdote in my article when I returned to the newsroom in the early afternoon. I signed on to a computer and started to write the story, which had to be about thirty paragraphs long. My deadline was three hours away. I was under the gun and didn’t have time to do anything but focus, but if I had needed help transcribing notes or double-checking name spellings, if I needed a few calls made, or any other sort of support—like Kate Shatzkin felt she needed that morning working on the stories about that day’s murders—I wouldn’t get away with asking her for help, let alone telling her, “I might need you.”

            No one looked up from his or her coffee or newspaper in alarm at Kate’s words, but if a non-white reporter were to say “I might need you” to a white reporter, a painful, awkward silence would probably ensue, and everyone within earshot would look over and register the audacity of that reporter with barely concealed distaste. Kate’s request, however, went unremarked-upon, because she enjoyed white privilege, an advantage that Wellesley College Professor Peggy McIntosh wrote about in her landmark article, “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” which has been widely used in classrooms and elsewhere.

            McIntosh, a white woman, talked about her experiences in her workplace, where she received privileges based on her skin color that her black colleagues didn’t get. “I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious,” she wrote. “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.”[14]

            One of Sue’s unearned privileges was the right to ask for my help, or to inform me that she might require it, while remaining oblivious to the fact that she would never have to return the favor. As a reporter with a few years’ seniority, she could certainly have asked me when I’d be free and if I had the time and willingness to help her out. But she had no real right to tell me she might need me, since it was only the editors, not the reporters, who had directive input on how other reporters used their time.

            Also around the holidays, several reporters of color quit the paper. One of the first to take off was one of the paper’s most senior black reporters. A bespectacled man who looked like Jamie Foxx, he had been covering national issues from the Washington DC bureau. Around Christmas, a dozen or two co-workers gathered at a restaurant to wish him well—he was taking a job at The Washington Post covering local politics. During his decade-plus tenure at the paper, he’d covered a scandal at the Baltimore-based NAACP and worked on many big stories, earning a reputation as a dependable and adept reporter. But when he applied to become a columnist, a step up from his position as a reporter, top editors told him that his “was not the voice The Sun wanted” in its columns.

Newspapers around the country have historically had a hard time holding onto reporters of color. One study showed that around the time that he was changing jobs, a lot of other non-white reporters around the country were too. In fact, for every white journalist who left the newsroom, almost two journalists of color left; journalists of color departed almost as fast as new recruits were hired; and the turnover rate for journalists of color was 7%, compared to 4% for white journalists.[15]

                Around the same time, the Howard County education reporter, an Asian woman who had gotten her position a few years earlier through a minority recruitment program, left The Sun for a two-year temporary reporting position, also at The Washington Post. The education beat she vacated had to be filled by another reporter, and three Howard County reporters applied for it—two applicants were fulltime black staff members. One of the two had joined the staff through a minority training program less than five years before, and the other was a 20-something former Miami Herald reporter with expertise in computer-assisted reporting.

The third applicant was a 22-year-old white guy named Howard Libit, a recent college graduate who had joined the paper the same month that I did. He was hired not as a fulltime permanent reporter, but as a two-year temporary intern—one of four hired that year right out of college. After 24 months, his job was expected to evaporate.

            The Howard County bureau chief selected Libit, the white two-year temporary reporter, over the two black full-timers for the education beat. According to the grapevine, this was because the editor felt he could rely on the temporary reporter without having to edit his work heavily—a euphemistic way of saying he couldn’t rely to the same extent on the two black permanent staff members who had worked at the paper longer. The editor’s decision became an instant scandal with reporters, particularly reporters of color, who were wondering why a temporary white reporter got a job that two permanent black reporters had applied for and were more qualified for. Had it been the other way around, with a black two-year temporary intern receiving a reporting job that two white permanent reporters with more seniority had applied for, perhaps the decision would have been challenged.

            Within the next few months, The Sun’s long-time night re-write editor wanted to be taken off his 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. shift so he could start working a different editing job. Being a re-write editor was a difficult post, not only because of the hours, but because of the duties: updating news stories and editing and pitching in on breaking news as the status of a story changed after the reporter who had written it had left. For example, the re-write editor might need to keep tabs on the condition of someone who’d been shot and was in critical condition in the hospital, since the patient’s condition could change at midnight for example, to stable. The re-write editor was also in charge of adding weather and lottery numbers and doing other editing tasks required before the paper was printed and distributed. The current re-write editor had covered the isolated, high-tension, detail-oriented, unpredictable job for twenty years. Instead of sending out a message to see if anyone wanted to take over his job, downtown editors requested that a succession of reporters temporarily abandon their beats and work 4 p.m.–1 a.m. shifts as fill-in re-write editors for stretches of one or two weeks until a permanent replacement was found. One of the first substitutes was a black male reporter who had worked at The Sun for seven years. After him, another black male reporter spent two weeks filling in. After a while, as the position remained open, Whiz eventually asked me to temporarily cover what I began to call the Chocolate Desk, since every reporter I was aware of being asked to fill in on it was black. He tried to sell me on taking the shift with the lure of an extra $20 a week. By the time he asked me, none of the white Baltimore County staffers had filled in, nor could I recall any white staffers from downtown or other bureaus having taken a turn on the Chocolate Desk.

            “I have a lot of things lined up for the evenings,” I told him. Shortly after I resisted this assignment—an action probably considered inappropriate given my position within the paper’s hierarchy—the editors were ready to force the job onto someone permanently, still without checking within the staff (let alone outside the paper) for any voluntary takers. They selected as the next permanent re-write editor the black male reporter/adjunct journalism professor whose Morgan State University class I had visited. He was married with two young daughters, one of them newborn, and he had no interest in the position or its time slot. The succession of black people covering the re-write desk for no other obvious reason than their race fits a routine characterized by “differences in career outcomes by gender or race/ethnicity that are not attributable to the differences in skills, qualifications, interests, and preferences that individuals bring to the employment setting.”[16] In other words, all a reporter needed to do to get the unwanted career outcome of re-write desk editor was to be black.

            The reporter forced onto the beat stuck it out for a few weeks, then went to Bill “Big or Little” Marimow, with whom he sometimes played racquetball, to tell him he didn’t want the job. Marimow told him to try it for a little longer and if he couldn’t bear it, he would get him taken off the beat. A few months later, the black reporter was taken off the beat and eventually became an obituary writer. A little while later, a half-Hispanic, half-white male METPRO alum working in the Anne Arundel County bureau volunteered for the job of re-write editor.

            While some non-white staffers were either defecting to The Post, missing promotions that went to two-year temporary reporters, covering the re-write desk or doing tasks no one else wanted to do, Bill “Big or Little” Marimow was filling all of the rarely vacant, powerful, senior editing positions with white men. Most of these men came from The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he and many of his hires had worked together years before. Marimow filled two regional editor jobs, one Metro editor job, and one front page editor job—all with white males, three of them from The Inquirer.

CHAPTER 6:

THE SUN: NEW MANAGEMENT

One senior editor hired on Marimow’s watch was a man who soon became my new boss. And he changed many reporters’ lives, turning what was once a pleasant work environment into a panic zone. Mike Connelly was a 38-year-old, bespectacled workaholic with sandy-brown hair. He had a gap between his front teeth and the same paunchy stomach that many other editors had. Before joining The Sun, Connelly had worked at The Wall Street Journal and The Miami Herald. He was rumored to have had a working relationship with the paper’s publisher and to have gotten the job, for which no other candidates were publicly considered, as a result of that connection. He became the Regional Editor responsible for overseeing news from the Baltimore County newsroom as well as the newsrooms in Howard County, Anne Arundel County, Carroll County, and the tiny newsroom in rural Harford County which produced a weekly insert section. This made him the new boss to the Baltimore County bureau chief, Whiz, and to everyone who reported to him, including the Baltimore County reporters.

            As racist, sexist and unfair as it seemed for Connelly, a white male, to have been in contention for a plum slot because of his relationship with the editor, such decisions would be seen as typical in many workplaces. Research in a sociology journal showed that white male executives in powerful positions felt at ease working amidst people who reminded them of themselves, and that they surrounded themselves with those employees. And when high-ranking employees picked colleagues from previous jobs, the range of contenders tended to shrink, leaving those outside a largely white circle ineligible. “Besides facilitating the impact of stereotypes, highly subjective personnel systems also reinforce the impact of segregated informal networks and personal ties in hiring and internal selection decisions,” stated an article published in the journal Contemporary Sociology. “Word-of-mouth recruitment typically reproduces the existing gender and ethnic composition of a workforce. Subjective and highly discretionary internal selection systems favor those with personal ties to decision makers and fail to provide an opportunity for those outside of informal networks to have their qualifications considered.”[17]

            Although his office was in the downtown newsroom, Mike Connelly drove his late model white Saab to each bureau to see where reporters went to check and cover their beats. This occurred shortly after he joined the staff. Like the other reporters, I went with him on a driving tour of my coverage area, pointing out institutions and scenes of noted events in West Baltimore County. Some of his short-term goals were to turn the Baltimore County bureau, which tended to produce more feature stories, into a bureau more oriented around harder news, and to shake up the staff so it would crank out harder-hitting stories. Even though he hadn’t edited stories by, or worked with, any of the Baltimore County reporters, he already felt he’d accurately determined who was pulling his or her weight and who was not. This was by relying on his personal impressions and instincts, and by reading reporters’ articles that were saved in the computerized archives.

            Mary, the Baltimore County education reporter who had gotten upset with Whiz for editing her story until it was unrecognizable, was one of a handful of working moms at the paper, and she was one of the first casualties of Mike Connelly’s shake-up. One spring day in May a few months after Connelly began his job, Mary took a pre-planned day off to celebrate her daughter’s birthday. While she was at home late that morning, the Baltimore County School Board fired its superintendent. This was a huge story on her beat, but rumors that the superintendent would be sacked had been circulating for so long that it didn’t catch anyone by surprise. Even if she were the natural first choice to write the story, other Baltimore County reporters familiar with the issue were in the office when the story broke, and they were equipped to cover it in her absence. Nonetheless, the deputy bureau chief called her at home and said that he needed her to come in immediately to work the story. She declined, committed to spending the day with her daughter. She added that they needn’t pester her by phone throughout the day, as she would accept whatever punishment they imposed on her for her decision.

            When she got back to work the next day, Connelly hopped into his Saab and sped out to Baltimore County. He told Mary that she “should have salivated” at the news of the firing, and that as of that moment she was no longer covering Baltimore County schools. He reassigned her to cover state school board issues, and the paper later hired a 31-year-old single white woman without children from a Florida daily newspaper to replace her.      Connelly also ousted Whiz. He sent him to work downtown as the paper’s computer-assisted reporting czar. To replace him, he selected the downtown Assistant City Editor, Dave Rosenthal who I had reported to and visited Wesleyan University with the year before. Some reporters were wary when they heard Rosenthal was coming to Baltimore County as our new bureau chief. “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t,” one said. I was happy he was coming, his indifference to the profile story of the police beating victim Jesse Chapman notwithstanding. Although I respected Whiz, I felt, based on working with Rosenthal the summer before, that my chances for getting a sense of ownership and satisfaction with my stories would rise working under Rosenthal, who always paid close attention to detail, even when he could have stopped at less.

            His new position was the highest yet for him. He had started his newspaper career at a Virginia daily, then joined The Sun as a business reporter, working his way up to the position of Assistant City Editor that kept him in the office until 9 or 10 p.m. most nights. As Baltimore County bureau chief, he would supervise reporters and drive coverage of Baltimore County news. He would keep reporters at work late into the evening perfecting their stories and talking downtown editors into using them on cover pages. He would be as excited as the reporter when an electronic message from Marimow came in the next day applauding a story he had edited.             Although my impression of Rosenthal was generally positive—I saw him as a kind, well-meaning editor—he soon began behaving in ways that made me believe he had an entrenched, unconscious need to keep a distance from and withhold needed support from female reporters, and from reporters of color. When he arrived in the Baltimore County newsroom, I noticed that the dynamic we’d had working together downtown soon changed. Downtown, he was the one sending me out on breaking news stories, whereas now, I was approaching him about stories I planned to cover, and they were likely to be trend and news feature stories, since West Baltimore County didn’t see a lot of daily breaking news. When I’d worked with him downtown, I responded to him quickly and under pressure, but in Baltimore County, the much-less intense pace made the conception and completion of every story a much slower process, because finding stories became as much a part of my job as reporting and writing them. I got the sense that he was less impressed with my output in Baltimore County than he was in the city, but a real source of concern for me was something else entirely. His willingness to interact with me and other female reporters of color in a supportive manner sometimes seemed less than forthcoming.

            The first time this stunned me was during the summer that he joined the BaltCo team. One day around lunchtime, I was driving back from checking out a possible story about a summer camp for children who had diabetes, located in the affluent northwest Baltimore County community of Reisterstown, a neglected, predominantly upper middle-class part of my coverage area. Talking to campers and counselors all morning, I didn’t find much of a story, so I drove back to the office in my Honda with my window down because the air conditioner wasn’t working. That presented an opportunity for a lanky teenager with greasy hair and a red-sleeved baseball shirt to walk up to my car when I was at a stop sign and ask me for the time. I looked down at my watch, and when I looked back at him to tell him it was 12:40, he was holding a gun and pointing it at my face.

            “Get out of the goddamned car, now, bitch!” he shouted. Right before my eyes he seemed to morph into a comic book madman: his teeth grew to take up half his face and his eyes bulged with red veins. He pulled on my car door handle, but it was locked. It was in first gear and my foot was on the clutch. Without thinking, I pressed the gas and eased up on the clutch and moved off. It felt less frightening to do that than to take off my seatbelt, get out of the car and turn it over to him. I rolled forward with the gun still pointing at me and then picked up speed. For a few blocks I drove without the capacity to fully register what had just happened. I was just thinking about returning to the newsroom to tell Rosenthal there was no story at the camp. I got to the corner and went through a green light at a major intersection, but then I had to pull over because my legs were shaking too much to shift gears. I was sweating, and even though I wasn’t shedding tears or making any noise, I felt myself crying inside and shaking. I drove back to the office with my hands vibrating and went into Rosenthal’s office to tell him what had happened. I found him in his office, discussing a story with another reporter. “This guy just tried to carjack me!” I butted in to say.

            “Elaine!” the reporter said, standing up. “You should call the police!” Usually she had a squeaky, girlish voice, but there was no humor in it now.

            Rosenthal slowly pulled his eyes up from the article. “Yeah,” he said, “why don’tcha call the police?” Then he returned to his conversation with the reporter.

            I went to my desk and made the call to 911. I was starting to feel a little less panicked, but I was still freaked out. A reporter I was friends with who covered the Baltimore County seat of Towson overheard my end of the conversation with the Baltimore County Police Department and rushed to my desk to ask what happened. She volunteered to make me a cup of tea and to sit with me when the police arrived to ask me questions and lift fingerprints from my car. Her response got everyone else in the newsroom aware, and soon the other reporters, the receptionist, even a few people from the advertising side of the building came to make sure I was OK.

            Before Rosenthal surfaced, I got a phone call from a black woman I had met a few times who was the secretary of an author I was profiling for the paper’s now-defunct Sunday magazine. I told her what had just happened in Reisterstown, and included Rosenthal’s reaction at the end of my account. Her response was instant: “He thinks whoever did it is a black guy,” she said. We were still talking when Rosenthal sauntered over to my desk in a preppy pair of khakis and waited until I hung up to ask what happened. By now, between thirty and forty-five minutes had passed since I had returned to the newsroom. I took personally what appeared to be an extended and voluntary interval of time between my telling him a gun has just been in my face and his dropping what he was doing to check on me. His indifference should have warned me to lower my expectations, but I didn’t anticipate the returning nature of his behavior.

            That’s probably what took me aback later that July, when a major story that got worldwide coverage broke on what was both my beat and the Baltimore County police reporter’s beat, and Rosenthal couldn’t be bothered to make sure we got credit for it. Just as I was getting up one sweltering Thursday morning not long after the attempted carjacking, Rosenthal called me at home. Earlier that morning, he told me, a group of people had been waiting for a bus in Woodlawn—a West Baltimore County community that I covered—when a motorist trying to pass another car had veered onto the sidewalk, killing four children and a 25-year-old woman, all of whom were close relatives.

            Rosenthal sent me to meet another reporter at the scene of the crash. She was a 22-year-old recent graduate from a Maryland college, originally from Vietnam, who had joined the staff around the same time I did. She covered the Baltimore County police beat, and an accident such as this fell on her beat and on mine, so we teamed up to report the story. Just a few days before the car accident, we had collaborated on a double murder that left two men floating in a county reservoir, a story that had run on page 1A. When I got to the accident scene crowded with appalled witnesses and motorists, there was more than enough for both of us to do. She headed in one direction and I headed in another, focused on making reporterly observations, interviewing witnesses, police officials and family members, and taking extensive notes. The impact of the red Mazda being driven by the 30-something man who had caused the accident was enormous. One child’s body, once struck by the Mazda, flew almost 300 feet. Pair of sandals and sneakers got separated from the children’s bodies, and they landed on the grassy hill some distance away. Police left the bodies where they landed and tried to cover them with sheets, but I saw a skinny leg clad in a squashed sweat sock, a chilling sight I remember vividly decades later. The children’s babysitter, who was also their great-aunt, got out of the passenger side of a government car driven by an escort, most likely a law enforcement official who must have just broken the news to her. Even before she was fully standing, she clung to him and fell into convulsive sobs, picking up on the trauma of death in the air before even seeing the bodies of her little nieces and nephews. “It’s the most tragic thing I’ve seen in Baltimore County,” the Baltimore County fire chief said. “It doesn’t get any worse than this.”

            She and I spent the morning interviewing witnesses and piecing together how the 32-year-old driver had veered off the road, passed someone in traffic and slammed into the woman and kids at the bus stop. Meanwhile, police took him to the precinct to question and charge him. By the time the questioning was over, reporters from all over Maryland and DC were waiting outside with questions of our own. When the motorist walked out of the precinct, he didn’t pause to talk to any of the reporters swarming the police station, but tears were streaming down his face and his eyes were glazed as he tried to get to his car. She chased him on foot and he disclosed to her that he had been rushing, late to his job and trying to pass another car when the accident occurred. About an hour later, at least a dozen journalists and I staked out the apartment complex of the husband of the woman killed at the bus stop. He was the father of several children who were killed in the crash as well. His participation in the story was vital, and as reporters, we didn’t have the luxury of considering his need for privacy, let alone his grief. Realizing we weren’t going to go away, the crying husband came out of his garden apartment building and walked toward us carrying a framed studio portrait of his kids. His older brother, also crying, walked at his side, his arm around his shoulders. Even the state’s most aggressive reporters were so moved that they struggled with how to begin interviewing either man. The cameraman from FOX-TV’s Washington DC affiliate tried to give the father, a chef’s assistant in his late 20s, a hug to express condolences. The hug lasted five full minutes, and it looked like the father would’ve lost his footing and slid to the pavement if the cameraman weren’t holding him.

            When the father faced the crowd, wiping tears with his head bowed, he could barely speak. “They said my family had been hit down the street. I don’t know how it happened,” he said. “I don’t know how he hit them . . . I just want to know why.” His brother sobbed that his little nieces had been the flower girls in his recent wedding. Later that day, he passed out.

            By then I was shaken and emotional, which, research shows, would be expected. One study examining how covering tragedy impacts journalists reported: “[J]ournalists and their employers give little attention to the terrible accretion of the affects of such work. Indeed, the culture of daily newspaper journalism resists such attention. While firefighters and police in most large cities routinely are debriefed after a shooting incident or a fire, and frequently undergo counseling, reporters and photographers routinely pick up the next assignment without so much as a nod to the lingering and accumulating psychological costs of their work.”

Auto crashes are among the hardest to get over, the study found. “The auto crash, respondents said, produced powerful images of injury and death, images that return unbidden to the awareness of the reporter.”[18]

                I drove back to the office at 3 p.m., ignoring my emotions in order to remain focused on figuring out how to turn pages of notes into a story before the evening deadline. There wasn’t time to talk about how upsetting it was to see the children’s dead bodies, to imagine what both the surviving family members and the motorist responsible for the accident must have been going through, to wonder whether the witnesses at the bus station would have survived if they had been standing a few feet to the side.

            As soon as we got back to the newsroom after over six hours of gathering information, Dave Rosenthal said that neither my co-worker nor I would be writing this story. Instead, a white Mexican staffer who had participated in the METPRO training program a few years before me, who had accepted the position of re-write editor would be the one to write it, based on a day’s worth of reporting we had conducted. His statement was a complete and total jaw-dropper. That was my first, and only, time hearing of a re-write editor writing from scratch a story that other reporters had spent the day reporting. She and I were best equipped to write the article, having spent the day gathering information it would depend on, and the job of the re-write editor was not to write first drafts of stories from other reporters’ notes, but, as the title implied, to re-write edited stories when news changed after journalists who wrote earlier versions had left.

            The re-write editor, a harmless, friendly 30-something guy with curly brown hair, had been on his way to the priesthood when he changed paths and participated in METPRO, completing the program two years before I did. He was the guy one might barely notice on a golf course, spewing canned, good-natured conversation. As was the case for some of the Latino METPROs in my class and the classes before mine, nothing about his physical appearance or speech pattern would make anyone likely to think he was the member of a minority group. Anyone making his acquaintance would in my opinion, be much more likely to think of him as white. His re-write shift began in the downtown building at 4 p.m., an hour after we had finished reporting the story. When he arrived at the downtown newsroom at least ten miles away from where we were working in the Baltimore County bureau, editors asked him to call a woman who had also been at the bus stop but had only sustained minor injuries. She was well enough to do a telephone interview with him. From that phone call, he culled a few paragraphs, including the detail she recalled of the kids singing aloud while waiting for their bus moments before the crash. With no other firsthand information, he began writing early that evening. At Rosenthal’s instruction, we supplied him with information from our desks in the Baltimore County office by typing scenes, quotes, facts and details into files, which we sent him via computer. We condensed and typed everything we had witnessed and taken notes on so he could organize and present our material. He misspelled names and gave misleading interpretations of our information, so I sent him messages correcting him, and he sent us messages as well, asking questions he would have known the answers to had he reported from the accident scene that morning. In some sections he didn’t include intangible details my colleague and I could have been making our own choices about. But I figured she and I would still share a byline. I was sure we would get the byline, since the only task the re-write editor had was framing information we had spent the day gathering and then giving him—perhaps because editors assumed without checking with us that were too wiped out to write. The act of supplying him with our reportage was actually more time-consuming than if we had written the story ourselves. Later that evening, Rosenthal told us the story was running on page 1A with only his name. Under the headline, as if we had not been involved.

            This statement was a like a thunderclap. Rosenthal was not only OK with that decision, he seemed to expect us to be as well. I told him we should get the byline. Only after my complaints, he said I could add my name to the byline after the re-write editor’s, which implied that I had contributed less to the story than he had. My co-worker, who didn’t raise a fuss, saw her name nowhere in the byline, but instead at the end of the story in italics as a contributor, when she was the only one to get a key quote from the driver who had inadvertently caused the accident that morning. As every stage of this byline decision unfolded, I became increasingly displeased. This was not what I signed on for. No one told me things like this would happen and that nobody would really care.

            Perhaps editors asked the re-write editor to write this story instead of us because they couldn’t envision this article being written well without input from a staffer they felt comfortable with. And since all the editors in the food-chain this story was feeding were white and male, perhaps involvement of a male reporter whose race looked like theirs seemed to them appropriate. A book on the then-burgeoning area of workplace diversity, published around the time of this car crash, bears out this possibility. “When workgroups are diverse but the power structure is heavily concentrated in one group, it is difficult for members of minority groups to be perceived by others, and even to perceive themselves, as leaders or potential leaders,” wrote Taylor Cox, Jr. in Cultural Diversity in Organizations. “Because of the predominance of one group in the power structure, it seems natural or more legitimate for majority group members to be leaders. By contrast, a member of a lower-status culture group never has a ‘natural’ basis for authority and will have to struggle for legitimacy.”[19]

The fact that this crash happened both in my West Baltimore County territory and on the police beat gave us a natural basis for authority to write this story, second only to the fact that we were the ones who had gone there to report it. Had two white men spent six hot summer hours viewing dead children’s bodies and interviewing both a man whose family had just been killed and the man who did it, I can’t imagine a black female re-write editor being fed the story over the computer, and then receiving a one-name byline for it. There was more going on here than the fact that she and I were neither white nor male. We were both also recent alums of diversity programs—me of METPRO, her of the Sun Scholars program, which brought in Maryland college students of color to write for the paper during college summers and holidays. When they graduated, they got entry-level reporting jobs that they, like METPROs, would otherwise probably be considered too inexperienced for. Getting a job through minority hiring programs carried a stigma like the stigma associated with a new employee or a college student getting hired or admitted thanks to an Affirmative Action policy. Some colleagues and superiors often saw employees hired through those programs as sub-par in terms of ability. Their main function, such employers might think but never admit, was to mix it up color-wise.

            The tendency for editors to expect that our youth and dependence on those programs would prevent us from being vital to our jobs can be compared to the stigmas attached to affirmative action hiring programs – a topic of study about which scholars have published articles in academic journals. The two have in common the fact that they both give people of color a set-aside quantity of job opportunities not made equally accessible to white candidates. “If someone is thought to be hired or placed as a result of affirmative action efforts, then that supplies onlookers with a plausible and compelling explanation for the selection decision independent of the job incumbent’s qualifications for the position,” wrote New York University professor of psychology Madeline E. Heilman in a business ethics journal article. She added that women carried a heavier burden. “[S]ince it typically is assumed (on the basis of stereotypes) that women are not very well equipped to deal with the rigors of important traditionally male jobs, this assumption inevitably leads to another one—that the job incumbent does not really ‘have what it takes’ to do the job well. After all, the reasoning goes, if this woman really were up to the task, she would not need help from affirmative action.”[20]

By the time the tragic car crash happened, I had been covering West Baltimore County for about nine months, and when something major like the accident wasn’t happening—which it usually wasn’t—I struggled to find fresh stories. I was often nervous when I couldn’t find one, and then, after a few days of desperate looking, I would come across a few that kept me busy until the next drought. One trick I used to find stories was to troll the West Baltimore County District Courts. After finding some good stories this way, Rosenthal asked me to substitute for the Baltimore County Circuit Court reporter when she took vacation time shortly after I covered the Woodlawn car crash.

            Covering Baltimore County Circuit Court took me to a more prestigious, cutting-edge, competitive level. Covering West Baltimore County communities, I dug up most stories pounding the pavement, so it was unlikely that TV reporters would beat me to them. But on the Circuit Court beat, bigger crimes were tried, creating true competition between TV and print reporters. On the courts beat, there was a real risk of not having known about a story that a TV station had. In Baltimore County, about 75 murders happened every year, and those that made it to trial were heard before Circuit Court judges and juries. The dates of the trials and sentencings stemming from these murders were accessible to anyone who checked dockets in the Clerk’s office. This meant that I had to keep up with all the trials, lest a competing media outlet have a court-related story I didn’t know about. Even as a substitute during the summer when trials slowed down, getting to cover Circuit Court was a big deal.

            When her vacation began, the Baltimore County Circuit Court reporter was already in jeopardy of losing her beat. Editors considered reassigning her because of her lack of output. The Sun archives show that during the full calendar year that encompassed the few summer weeks that I filled in for her, she had written seventy stories—about three articles every two weeks. Eighty-six percent of her articles were short, maybe between six and twelve paragraphs, about the outcome of a portion of a trial. She was likely to have daily articles about the preliminary hearing in a high-profile case, followed by articles reporting on the testimony from a key witness, closing arguments, the verdict and/or the sentencing. These were stories one could plan for based on the court schedule published in advance. These stories were no-brainers. Typical output on the court beat would be closer to two stories every week. She rarely supplemented her trial coverage with longer, multi-source enterprising feature or trend stories that take more time and creativity to write – stories that would be unique to The Sun.

            One enterprise article I proposed while subbing on the courts beat piqued editors’ interest. It concerned law enforcement officials coming up with new ways to convict wife-beaters, even when the wife they’d victimized refused to testify at trial. The article won the Maryland State Bar Association prize for best legal reporting. I did another story about funny pickles Maryland couples got into when they got married in county courthouses. Another that was well-received was about jury assembly rooms around the area, with anecdotes that compared the spaces where potential jurors from different counties sat waiting to be picked for a trial. Rosenthal took the courts reporter off the beat shortly after she returned from vacation, and assigned it to me. Now I had an essential beat, and my days of driving around trying to fire up a West Baltimore County story from nothing were over. I had somewhere to go every day, a base from which news was imminently available, and a set of prosecutors and public defenders to rely on as sources. The change was announced several weeks in advance of it happening, so the departing courts reporter and I both finished stories we were already involved in. She became the Baltimore County general assignment reporter, then a community reporter in the Carroll County office.

            Before taking over as court reporter, I had a few West Baltimore County stories to finish, one of them about a naming ceremony featuring Ghanaian traditions that a West Baltimore County couple had planned for their infant daughter and their 8-year-old son. The parents invited a hundred family members, friends and community leaders, including the Baltimore mayor and the Baltimore County executive. The son’s classmates arrived in neat slacks and shirts, treating the ceremony with the same solemnity one would show at a church service. The Baltimore County Executive showed up, and a representative for the mayor proclaimed the date of the ceremony “African Naming Ceremony Day in Baltimore.” Drummers and dancers performed and guests spoke about the importance of the occasion. Then the room quieted down and the baby girl’s aunt whispered her new name, Yaa Adoma (which means “born on a Thursday” and “blessed by God”) into her ear. A friend of the family whispered in the ear of the boy, who learned his new name was Kofi Nkokele Muata (meaning “born on a Friday,” “leader” and “seeks the truth”). Then the parents asked the guests, including the kids’ doctors and teachers, to help guide them to live up to the meaning of their names. A few guests I interviewed were so touched they looked ready to cry.

            “New Names, Out of Africa” ran on the Metro front the next Monday. When I logged on to my computer that morning I saw a message from Bill “Big or Little” Marimow, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning Managing Editor downtown. “Good Morning, Elaine,” his note began, and he mentioned enjoying reading the story. He signed off with: “It called to mind Kunta Kinte. Is he from Ghana? Regards, Bill.” He wrote notes like this to me and to other reporters on an infrequent basis in response to our bigger stories. Many of us strived to get to them like a donkey strives for a carrot on a stick.

            Kunta Kinte’s life was detailed in the book and TV miniseries Roots. He also had a similar naming ceremony at the time of his birth. I wondered why Marimow thought I would know where Kunta Kinte was from. It’s not like I had studied and memorized the book, which I’ve never read in full, or the miniseries, which first aired when I was nine or ten years old. I had no known special link to Kunta Kinte, or knowledge about his nationality of origin. No American-born blacks of non-immigrant descent that I know have any idea the country in Africa their ancestors came from. So in my opinion it’s even less likely that any black person unrelated to Alex Haley would know much about Kunta Kinte’s personal story or country of origin. From my point of view, Marimow’s behavior was bizarre and inappropriate. There’s an argument though, that while problematic, it may have also been unconscious. “Because race is not a salient experience for most whites, racial issues often do not register for them,” according to the authors of the book Leading in Black and White, which examines the relationship between race and workplace behavior. “Even when whites are trying to be sensitive, they cannot draw from the same frame of reference as their black colleagues.”[21]

            Stories like the African naming ceremony, as well as other feature stories that included black subjects uninvolved in crime or sports, were rare for The Sun. Many readers would argue that the frequency with which positive feature stories about blacks appeared was low when accounting for their percentage of the population of the potential target reading audience. To see how well it represented its readership, the paper got some staffers to commit to examining The Sun’s coverage over a one-week period. They tabulated how often people of color and women showed up in a range of newspaper articles, and they reported in their findings that “blacks and other minorities were usually portrayed as needy or in conflict” and that the daily “features and business sections practically ignored non-whites.”

            One auditor wrote that “it would appear that minorities rarely travel, eat, or get married.”[22] The audit’s recommendation: “We suggest that editors and reporters consciously look for ways to include women and the non-white citizenry in our coverage of universal topics . . . These are the stories that provide balance to the litany of crime and tension and poverty and government stories.”[23]

            Editors didn’t feel inclined to portray minorities doing creative things in the arts pages either. The hit film Love Jones, featuring an all-black cast, was reviewed on an inside page in an eight-paragraph article with no pictures, although new films are often reviewed on the Features cover with photo stills from the movie. The movie Soul Food, which also featured an all-black cast and later became a successful Showtime TV drama, was not reviewed at all.

CHAPTER 7:

THE SUN: BALTIMORE COUNTY COURT

Soon after covering the African naming ceremony, I wrapped up on the West Baltimore County beat and turned it over to METRPO colleague Lisa Respers. An African-American woman originally from Baltimore, she was joining the Baltimore County reporting staff after completing her first METPRO bootcamp year in Los Angeles and one summer downtown. She was in the METRO cohort one year after mine, and I had met her when my class took her group of interviewees out for Mexican dinner about 16 months before.

            From the beginning, covering courts was a jolt to my senses that ranged from fresh and exciting to tear-jerking and nightmare-provoking. Most trials I covered were murders, but sometimes I found offbeat civil cases, like one about a male caretaker who had kidnapped the elderly woman he’d been hired to take care of. Then, after getting a hefty prison sentence after being convicted for her kidnapping, the former caretaker decided to sue his victim from jail because she didn’t pay him on the day that he kidnapped her. He felt that he should be paid for that day, and the lawsuit, which he wrote by hand, sought to recover those lost funds.

When I first started the beat, I tried to introduce myself to five people every day, and as courtroom employees got used to me, they gave me tips that led to stories I otherwise would have missed. One story that stemmed from a clerk’s tip was about a civil suit that a couple filed after a humiliating experience in a clothing store: while they were there, security guards checked inside their body cavities for stolen goods. Another article was about the Clerk of Courts walking to the Baltimore County Sheriff’s office a few blocks away to file a complaint because an unknown assailant had thrown a paperclip at her in the courts building.

            When I wasn’t covering trials, I found court-based news feature stories based on topics such as the increased use of divorce mediation to resolve child custody disputes and trends in prosecution of death penalty cases. I also wrote a handful of profiles: one of the state’s top courtroom sketch artist; another of an Assistant State’s Attorney who worked on cold cases; another of a judge who made a video intended to inform potential jurors of what to expect when they served on trials; and another of an investigator who tracked down people who abused the elderly. Every morning before going into the newsroom I made my rounds at the courthouse, chatting with clerks, looking up new civil cases in the computer, checking dockets.

            Around the time I began the courts beat, The Sun launched a long-anticipated redesign that changed the paper into a snazzier one; it became a visual combination of USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. Now, on the front page of every section and throughout the paper, readers saw capital-letter bylines, narrower columns, intellectual-looking typeface, edgier graphics and modernized headline fonts.

Most importantly, the redesign created a new entity that had not existed before: the City/County Page. It was a news page that appeared every day except Saturday, laid out on the third page of the Metro Section. It was the new home for shorter articles, some of which took only a few hours to report and write. The City/County Page contained only stories from Baltimore City and Baltimore County that didn’t make the Metro cover, but still needed a distinctive place inside the section. Before, the paper didn’t always have space for shorter stories that weren’t worthy of the Metro cover, but with the advent of the new page, not only was there a place for those stories, there was also a requirement that someone produce them, lest that page be blank. When a reporter invested a lot of time and effort reporting and writing a story, it was maddening to open the paper and find it on an inside page such as the City/County Page, because placement there suggested it didn’t rise above a nebulous threshold that made it worthy of a spot on a section cover.

            Rules for which stories got printed on the City/County Page were specific: each day there were three stories: either two stemming from Baltimore City news and one stemming from Baltimore County news, or two from the county and one from the city. As the name of the page implied, stories that concerned another Maryland county such as Howard or Prince George’s, or the state as a whole, didn’t belong there, and would instead appear on the Metro cover or on another inside page. To make the City/County Page visually uniform, the longest story, placed in the center of the page, was always a mid-length sixteen paragraphs. Another rule was that each City/County Page story had to begin and end on that page—no stories appearing there were continued onto other pages, and no stories beginning on other pages were to be continued there. Additionally, for the page to be appealing to the eye, at least one story, sometimes two, had to have a photo to illustrate it.

            Factors like a story’s importance or well-craftedness were not the only issues determining that story’s placement on the City/County page or elsewhere.

Race was a factor as well. The newspaper’s online archives showed that non-white reporters’ stories appeared on the City/County Page significantly more frequently than articles written by white reporters who covered the same or comparable beats. The paper’s archives indicate an indisputable relationship between the page on which a story appeared and the race of the person who wrote it. Placement of stories written by four non-white reporters was compared with the placement of stories written by four white reporters, all of whom worked in either the downtown Baltimore newsroom or the Baltimore County newsroom. The four minorities, all under thirty, were the only non‑white reporters whose articles had a chance of appearing on the City/County Page. The rest of the minority news staffers worked either in a regional section or, in the case of the black reporter who was initially forced to become re-write editor, in self-imposed exile on the obituary staff.   

The reporters whose articles were compared:

• A black male Baltimore City Hall reporter who worked in the downtown office, compared with the white female City Hall reporter with whom he shared that beat;

• Kate, a white woman who was at that point covering Baltimore City Circuit Court as well as Maryland prisons, compared with me, covering Baltimore County Circuit Courts;

• Lisa Respers, the black female METPRO alum who took over West Baltimore County when I began covering courts, compared with a white male in his 50s who had covered predominantly white East Baltimore County for about seven years; and

• TheVietnamese Baltimore County police reporter, compared with the white male 20-something Baltimore City police reporter who couldn’t pull together a profile of the man police beat to death.

First, the placement of the work by the black male Baltimore City Hall reporter was compared with the placement of the work by the white female Baltimore City Hall reporter, checking to see the frequency with which it appeared on the City/County page. Theirs was one of only a few cases at The Sun where two people were dedicated to the same beat. The City Hall beat produced so much news that two reporters were required to cover it. Bylines were counted on The Sun’s archives page of its website, which also notes the page on which the article appeared. Results of these analyses show that in that year, 32 percent of the black man’s stories were printed on the City/County Page. In the same year, only 7 percent of the white woman’s stories were printed on the City/County Page. More remarkable: the black man wrote 140 stories that year, the white woman wrote 76 stories. That means that he had nine times more stories—45—on the City/County Page than she did with just five. He saw one of his stories appear on the City/County Page almost once per week, while hers appeared there less than once every other month. Since all of their beat stories were about city government issues, it would make sense that their work would appear with some regularity on both the City/County and the Metro cover page, with the white female having an advantage because she was the senior of the two. But the huge discrepancy in the frequency with which each reporter’s work was printed on the City/County Page was most certainly connected with factors besides seniority.

            Next, the percentage of my Baltimore County court stories appearing on the City/County Page for the same one-year period was compared with the percentage of court stories by Baltimore City courts reporter appearing there over the same period. According to the archives, 33 percent of my stories that year wound up on the City/County Page, while 17 percent of Kate’s appeared there. Often stories selected for the City/County Page concerned the outcome of a courtroom trial, because it could be covered within the limited length allotted to stories appearing on that page. And since Baltimore City had over 300 murders a year-- five times more than in Baltimore County -- it would seem that she would have had more, not fewer, stories on the City/County Page about the disposition of court cases—a big part of the courts beat.

            When comparing the other two pairs, that same sample year could not be used, because neither West Baltimore County reporter Lisa Respers the nor Baltimore County police reporter would remain on the Baltimore County staff until the end of that year. The work of the Baltimore County police reporter was compared with the white male reporter who had been covering Baltimore City police for about a year longer. Counting stories between when the City/County Page emerged and when she was transferred five months later, 31 percent of her articles were published on the City/County Page, while the downtown police reporter had 26 percent of his articles published there, making that the narrowest of margins.

            The widest margin was between the white and black Baltimore County community reporters. The black METPRO alum-turned West Baltimore County reporter Lisa Respers’s beat was compared over a ten-month period in the same time frame with the work of a white male reporter covering East Baltimore County. The Sun’s archive shows that in that period, 51 percent of her stories were printed on the City/County Page, and 19 percent of his were. Given the number of stories each reporter wrote, each time one of the white male reporter’s stories appeared on the City/County Page, about ten of Lisa’s stories did. This ratio seems surprising, since he had covered his beat for five years longer than she covered hers, and would presumably turn stories around faster, having had more time to develop both sources and familiarity with the area.

            The reason for the disparity could be connected with the thesis of one educator’s essay, which is that society offers white people assumptions of competence and worthiness simply because they’re white. Cris Cullinan, one-time faculty member and employee trainer and doctoral candidate in educational leadership, technology and administration at the University of Oregon, wrote an article, “Vision, Privilege, and the Limits of Tolerance,” published in The Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education. In it, she talked about presumptions that the larger society makes about her as an able-bodied, heterosexual white woman—specifically that she enjoys “the presumption that I am . . . deserving and good enough to receive attention, services, respect, and the benefit of the doubt,” and that “I will be taken at face value as a good candidate for a bank loan, a desired applicant for a job, a sought-after buyer of a house, and a customer who should be served as soon as possible.” She also noted that her life experiences demonstrated that as a white person, she enjoyed society’s assumption that she would be able to perform well at her job. “In all of the jobs I have ever had, I was always treated as if I was competent, and then given the autonomy, encouragement and feedback to prove it.”

            Articles regularly well-placed in the paper reflected competence on the reporter who wrote them. This good placement happening regularly wasn’t just an ego boost, it was a catalyst to gaining a positive reputation with downtown editors, which could lead to faster promotions to better beats. This sunny, ego-boosting, catalytic reputation was available, as explained above, more to white reporters than to non-white reporters. The disparity could not be attributed to the fact that the white reporters were in each case more seasoned than the minority reporters to whom they were compared. That’s because no reporter, black or white, young or seasoned, wrote an article and then found it in the paper unchanged. Quite the contrary: depending on the topic, an editor and a reporter had conversations before the reporting began to decide what the reporter would focus on and how he or she would write the article. After the reporter did interviews and wrote a first draft, the editor made changes and often gave the article back to the reporter for more polishing. Depending on the length and depth of the story and the state it was in when initially submitted, this process went on for several rounds until everyone involved was satisfied.

            Sometimes I wrote articles unsuitable for the City/County page that appeared there anyway. To me, this exemplifies editors’ preference for the work of reporters of color to appear on the City/County page, logic be damned, as illustrated in the above byline comparison. This was a regular occurrence. For example, I proposed writing about how attorneys dressed for court, during a time when I was between court trials to cover. As soon as Rosenthal approved the idea, I got started interviewing Maryland defense attorneys who came to court decked out in wildly patterned ties, ponytails and cowboy boots. Because I included attorneys who practiced law all around Maryland at long distances from the Baltimore area, the story was too broad to fit the bill for the City/County Page. It was also far too long. Even when the printed version was cut back to 23 paragraphs, that length exceeded the maximum 16 paragraphs by almost 40 percent. Nonetheless, it appeared as the only story on the whole City/County Page.

Another time, I profiled the state’s most in-demand courtroom sketch artist who drew judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, witnesses and defendants for use as still photographs on TV, since cameras weren’t allowed in Maryland courtrooms at that time. The story didn’t in any way conform to the rules of the City/County Page, as the sketch artist worked not only in Baltimore and Baltimore County, but also on the Eastern Shore, in the DC suburbs, wherever Maryland court trials were taking place. But the story wound up on the City/County Page as well, and when I asked why, Rosenthal’s unconcerned and vague reply was: “It didn’t make it onto the Metro front.”

            Many young journalists of color feel similar uncertainty in relationships with editors who sometimes come across as indifferent to their growth, progress and fairness in the use of their work. The magazine Editor & Publisher printed a story based on a survey of 531 newsroom professionals, almost half of them white, the rest black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American. Seventy-one percent of the minorities, as compared to ten percent of the whites, reported sensing a lack of commitment from supervisors. “They hire a lot of young minority journalists, myself included,” one black respondent said, “pat themselves on the back and then virtually ignore us until they require your assistance.”[24]

When I wasn’t asking editors why my stories were on the City/County Page, I was vocalizing my disappointment about other topics, matters like the departure of several reporters of color and the two-year temporary reporter getting the education beat two black permanent reporters had applied for. Brash, reactionary and unaware of workplace behavior rules, I was surprised to learn much later that with my lack of restraint, I was alienating my editors and damaging my relationships with them.

I was afflicted with a raging case of what academics have labeled job socialization failure, defined in an article examining its impact on professional black women’s mental health as “the lack of fit between the organization’s implicit and explicit demands and the individual’s needs, values, and perceived sense of role.”[25] In other words, workers such as myself were supposed to follow trends in office behavior and would be considered job socialization failures in instances where they didn’t. For me this was often. “When new members do not learn the culture of the host group, a series of severe consequences ensues,” explained the authors of the article, one a therapist and organizational consultant, the other a professor in the Department of Education and Human Development at the time of its publication.

            My job socialization failure reached a peak when I was covering the murder trial of a 26-year-old Baltimore County plumber named Brian Nalls, a man who had fatally shot his wife the previous August, then confessed killing her to a 911 operator. At his trial, Nalls testified that his wife had come home late from an evening which she said she had spent out with her girlfriends. He suspected she was lying and had been out cheating on him, so he ran to their basement in a rage and grabbed a 12‑gauge shotgun which he regularly used for hunting. He came back upstairs and hit her in the face, then started firing the shotgun at her until he killed her.

            Once the testimony and closing arguments on both sides were complete, the judge read aloud to jurors a set of state-recognized jury instructions. The instructions went over how much consideration they should place on various pieces of evidence presented during the trial. In reading the instructions, the judge told the jurors that Maryland law stipulated that the husband’s suspicion of infidelity was a legally recognized provocation—even if the suspicion turned out to be wrong—that would rule out murder, which could carry a sentence as long as life. If the jury believed that the husband thought she was cheating, even if she wasn’t, this crime would instead be manslaughter, which carried a maximum ten-year term.

On its third day of deliberations, the jury returned a verdict of manslaughter, which meant that because of that law, Nalls would be out of jail in ten years or less, faster than someone who’d been convicted for stealing a TV. As newsworthy and shocking an outcome as this was, my first report on this case ran on the City/County Page; the next article with the verdict appeared in the paper as a three-paragraph brief. The victim’s father called me in the newsroom a few days after the trial to tell me that he was going to lobby to have the state law that made his daughter’s killing manslaughter repealed, and asked if I could write about what he was doing. The opportunity to expose this arcane, anachronistic rule mattered to Maryland law enforcement officials as well: Baltimore County prosecutors were planning to lobby state legislators to change the law, and a state delegate who had tried to have it changed in an earlier legislative session had already gathered support to try again. Those were threads of the story I could follow up on, and I could also describe the case in more detail with trial coverage that had gotten cut from my earlier articles.

            I proposed the story and Rosenthal approved. In fact, editors pegged it to run on page 1A on a Sunday—the paper’s largest circulation day. One day, when I was about midway into working on this article, research for the story took me to Annapolis, the state capital, to interview the delegate trying to repeal the law. On my way back, I decided to finish up the day downtown, instead of driving all the way to Baltimore County, a trip that would be longer from where I was coming from. Before I left Annapolis, I had asked the delegate to fax me a document I needed for the story, and I gave her the fax number of the downtown office. Shortly after I got back, the man who ran the fax room sent me a message saying it had arrived. While I was in the fax room, the recently-appointed Page One Editor called Tony Barbieri came in. Another white male editor in the hierarchy of white male editors, Barbieri ranked slightly above Rob Rosenthal. He spent his workdays selecting and editing articles for the paper’s front cover page. He talked with city and county editors about stories reporters were working on that might belong on page 1A, and sometimes he did extra editing to bump those stories up to the highest quality. A long-timer who had been a reporter and foreign correspondent before becoming an editor, Barbieri was particular about Sunday articles running on page 1A. He was the one who would make the final decision on whether my article would run on the front page.

            When Barbieri walked into the fax room, I was standing near the fax room operator, a man named Kofi who was originally from Africa, I’m not sure which country. His was the same name that was given to the boy in the Ghanaian naming ceremony that I covered right before beginning the courts beat.

            “Hi, Coffee!” Barbieri said when he came past the room.

            Kofi responded with a quiet hello.

            A few minutes after picking up my fax, I walked by Barbieri’s large office a few doors down the hall. He was sitting at his desk. Next to his door were several chairs at least five feet from him, and I stood beside one of those chairs and said: “Ah Tony? You know, um, Kofi? His name is pronounced Kofi. It’s not Coffee.” I dumbed down the inflection in my voice to eliminate any misconception of hostility in my tone, which I made soft and subordinate. What compelled me to correct Barbieri was my imaging myself in Kofi’s place. I didn’t like it when people called me Eileen, Lorraine or Ellen, and I felt it was disrespectful for one person to continuously mispronounce another person’s name after having been corrected.

            “Oh, yes, it is,” Barbieri said confidently, looking up from his desk. Was he arguing with me that the pronunciation was actually “Coffee?” If I hadn’t been sure how the name was pronounced, I would’ve never gone in there, but I went back to the fax room to double-check anyway, and the fax attendant confirmed to me that Barbieri had indeed mispronounced his name. When I asked why he didn’t correct him, Kofi had an explanation, which he told me while stapling together the pages of a fax. When Barbieri was a foreign correspondent, he used to telephone Kofi from abroad with administrative tasks, he said, and during those conversations he always called him Coffee. Kofi used to correct him, but Barbieri continued calling him Coffee, and after a while, Kofi simply gave up bothering to correct him anymore.

            I returned to Barbieri’s office. Again remaining near the door, in a voice I tried to make friendly and non-confrontational, I said: “I just double-checked with him and he said it’s pronounced Kofi, not Coffee.”

            Barbieri grumbled, “Oh, I see,” in a voice that meant, “Oh, I see, now get out.”

            By doing this, I was showing the vivid failure in my job socialization skills by violating unwritten rules—one of which was that a black female reporter new to the industry and a graduate of a minority training program at that, didn’t go into the office of a senior editor to correct him, not once, but twice, on the pronunciation of another subordinate’s name. The consequence of my display of job socialization failure, as the scholars would predict, was that tensions between Barbieri and me were quick to ensue. And they did, in the form of a sudden swerve in his support of my work. The article about the man who got ten years in prison for shot-gunning to death the wife he thought was cheating on him didn’t run on Sunday on page 1A as planned, but on the Saturday before, when thousands fewer people saw it. It seemed like a stretch to think that Barbieri was so offended by the comment I made about his mispronouncing Kofi’s name that, instead of bringing it to my attention, he punished me by having a change of heart about the worth of a story touted for the Sunday cover. But my correcting him was the likely catalyst for the page change, and a thorn in his side so bothersome, I later learned, that he was still licking his wounds and discussing my having corrected him with other Sun staffers a full sixteen months later.

            I went to a conference a few months after I corrected Barbieri’s pronunciation of Kofi’s name and had another experience that in retrospect seemed retaliatory. I wasn’t keeping track of every time I spoke up about something that editors were or were not doing that didn’t seem fair to me, so the retaliation in question could have been for any one of my transgressions, recalled or forgotten. I won a trip to the annual convention of Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. (IRE), an organization for reporters who wrote investigative pieces and editors who worked with them. The conference was in Providence, Rhode Island. To increase minority participation, IRE was offering scholarships to print and broadcast reporters of color who had five years of experience or less. Candidates had to submit investigative pieces they had worked on as part of their applications, so although I hadn’t yet done a piece that technically qualified as investigative, I sent in some in-depth articles I had written. I found out that I won one of the IRE scholarships, which covered the $300 convention admission fee, plus up to $1,000 for the cost of a plane ticket, a hotel room and some meals.

I was excited about the chance to get away from Baltimore and learn computer-assisted reporting techniques at the conference. I also wanted to meet investigative reporters who would be speaking about how they conducted their research. I signed up for a critique on an article that I was in the process of writing about a man who had killed his brother and had tried to kill his wife and his children – all for thousands of dollars in life insurance proceeds. A few days before I left for the conference, I asked Rosenthal if I could put the cost of cabs to and from the Baltimore and Providence airports on my expense report. This question should have been answered with an immediate Yes. That’s because when reporters took work-related trips, the paper paid for housing, transportation and meals. I was phrasing my request as a question in order to let him know that he should expect to find my cab receipts attached to my expense report. However, recently, editors had taken to scrutinizing reporters’ expense reports in an effort to contain costs. A few days later, Rosenthal told me that he had checked with downtown editors and they said I couldn’t bill the cab fare to The Sun. He didn’t tell me who said this or why, and I didn’t ask—I sucked it up, figuring that my having to cover the cost of paying for my cabs would be worth it because I was getting a break from covering murder trials, which turned out to be a lot more emotionally demanding than I thought. In comparison, the IRE convention would be like a vacation, because even though my new assignment as Baltimore County Court reporter was a meaty beat and a step up in action from West Baltimore County, I was too green and sensitive to create enough distance between myself and the events in the murders I was writing trial stories about. Sitting through days of testimony on cases where jurors decided the fate of people accused of violent stabbings, shootings and acts of child abuse, I started getting headaches a lot more often than usual, and away from work, thoughts of the cases intruded no matter how I tried to distract myself.

            I took a cab to the airport on the morning of my flight, and for the ride from the Providence airport to the hotel, I split a cab with other reporters from The Sun that I had bumped in to at the airport. The panels at the conference were packed with information sessions and featured seasoned reporters who shared their investigative journalism war stories. I had a helpful critique of the article I was working on about the fratricide case. On the second day of the conference, I bumped into Kate “I Might Need You” Shatzkin, the Sun reporter who covered Baltimore City courts and Maryland prisons. We didn’t usually talk much, but that day she had something interesting to share: the paper, she said in response to my asking, was paying her conference registration fee, airfare and hotel. All of that added up to about $1,000, close to the value of the scholarship I had won from IRE, and about twenty times more than I was trying to get The Sun to spend on my cab fare. She and I had an equal chance, with both of us covering courts in different jurisdictions, to find new ways to approach hard stories as a result of this conference. It made equal sense for both of us to be there, and for the paper to invest equally in our participation.

            Until I bumped into Kate, I was all set to forget about the editors’ refusal to reimburse me my cab fare, but not anymore. As soon as I got back from the conference, I went to Rosenthal to find out why the paper was willing to cover Kate’s conference costs, but unwilling to spend a dime on my cabs—for a trip I won free entry to and was attending for professional, not personal, gain. Rosenthal acted surprised to learn of this disparity, and claimed to plan to find out. I figured in a few days he would say I could get my cab fare back, but he never brought it up. When I approached him about it again, he alleged to have checked with downtown editors whose names he did not offer, and said they told him that I wasn’t allowed to expense my cab fare because the paper hadn’t budgeted ahead of time for the $45 that I had spent on cabs.

            He said this with a straight face, as if he were not just repeating it, but believing it. I wasn’t. As surely we both knew, an expense as minor as $45 was too minimal and inconsequential for the paper to “budget for.” Editors had lunch for that amount almost every day. My 30 cents-per-mile gas reimbursement request every two weeks, never pre-approved, was usually more than $45. Nonetheless, Rosenthal seemed to feel his answer—that the paper had not factored the $45 into its overall budget—was a viable explanation. I never got the money back for the cabs, and I felt that after already broaching the topic with Rosenthal, I had no other choice but to carry on as if it had been fairly resolved.

For a meritocracy to work, everyone had to have an equal shot at succeeding. But at The Sun, some reporters didn’t have an equal shot because of certain attributes. One, clearly, was being a person of color. Two others were being female, and being the mother of young children. As the spring of my second calendar year covering court approached, I saw almost every Baltimore County female reporter’s job change to something less desirable, with Baltimore County Bureau Chief Dave Rosenthal, and/or Regional Editor Mike Connelly behind each unwanted shift.

            First, Mike Connelly, the 38-year-old new regional editor, shipped the Baltimore County police reporter to the Anne Arundel County regional office to cover the city of Annapolis. Connelly decided that new reporters like her, Lisa Respers, the METPRO grad who covered West Baltimore County and me belonged in lower-profile positions than the ones we currently had. More suitable, he felt, were beats that demanded more quantity and less in-depth reporting—a signature characteristic of the regional offices in Anne Arundel, Howard, Harford and Carroll counties. Regardless of how well we had reason to believe we were holding our own, he felt we needed to establish a firmer base of reporting skills in the less visible county offices. He was also reassigning some reporters in the Baltimore County bureau, and encouraging others to take a voluntary buyout designed to thin out the staff and cut costs. And in these decisions, he used articles he saw in The Sun as a measure of where reporters stacked up against one another. He relied heavily, if not exclusively, on the newspaper articles in his few months on staff, seemingly without considering the context in which they were reported, written and edited. For example, if he saw the article about the Woodlawn car crash prominently displayed on The Sun cover, he would likely think more favorably of the re-write editor, because his byline was attached to it. Given his limited involvement with the story, Connelly would be giving him more credit than he deserved. Her new assignment was considered a step down from the more prestigious Baltimore County police beat. Covering Annapolis, the state capitol and Anne Arundel County seat from a satellite regional office far from the downtown nerve center meant that many of her stories would be seen only by people who lived in Anne Arundel County. Most of the stories reporters wrote from the county offices like Anne Arundel had about a ten percent chance of making it into the main edition of the paper, if they covered information that would be of interest to all Baltimore-area readers.

            Connelly filled the Baltimore County police reporter position with Kris Antonelli, a reporter who had previously worked out of the Anne Arundel County bureau. Kris was a hysterically funny white woman in her early thirties whose personality livened up the office, and soon the rip in the fabric created by the switch smoothed over. Meanwhile, Connelly seemed unable to conceive of an upward trajectory for female reporters with newborns at home. As women reporters came back from their maternity leaves, they needed to pass through the Connelly-beat-reassignment hoop. Three out of three reporters returning from maternity leave found this hoop disadvantageous, returning to beats less prestigious than the ones they had vacated before giving birth. One woman who had previously worked as a general assignment reporter in the downtown newsroom was the lead reporter on a series of revelatory articles investigating Baltimore’s city government having given out shady city no-bid housing contracts. She was about to return from her second maternity leave. She already had taken maternity leave once when her daughter, by then a toddler, was born. When she returned from her second maternity leave after the birth of her son a few years later, she was reassigned out of the prestigious Baltimore City newsroom and onto the slightly less prestigious Baltimore County staff. Depending on the reporter and the beats involved, going from a beat in Baltimore City to a beat in Baltimore County was either a lateral move or a small or medium-sized step backward. In this reporter’s case, though, it was a sizable step back, because now she had to cover the previously ignored area of North Baltimore County. She also was given the responsibility to write a weekly transportation column called Intrepid Commuter, which featured notes about the absence of a traffic light at one intersection or the presence of a pothole at another, for which she got no byline.

            Shortly after that, Connelly arranged a step down for another Baltimore County female reporter. Lisa Respers had spent about a year on the West Baltimore County beat, when editors decided to close the office in Harford County, a moderately developed area northeast of Baltimore County, from which five reporters had been producing a weekly section. That bureau was among the least visible, because the section came out only once a week, and was seen only in Harford County. Editors decided that instead of having a five-person office there, that one reporter could cover the whole county from the Baltimore County office, a burdensome twenty-five miles away. Whoever got this position would have all of his or her stories edited by a Baltimore County editor who knew little about what was going on in Harford County.

            Sensible choices for a replacement included a reporter who lived in Harford County, or a reporter who had already worked in that bureau. If editors had sent out a computerized message to all reporters checking to see if anyone was interested in the new post, an ideal candidate might have surfaced. Instead, they dispensed with checking for interested candidates and picked a Baltimore County reporter—one whose beat, they believed, could be left abandoned, since no replacement was going to take over. The newsroom was abuzz and tense as we waited to learn who was to become Harford County reporter. I was putting my lunch in the refrigerator one morning when I saw Lisa standing near the sink in the newsroom kitchenette with tears in her eyes. A positive black woman with a wicked sense of humor, she told me that Connelly had just given her the Harford County beat, which meant that her WestBaltCo beat—the only one regularly yielding news about Baltimore County’s black communities—would be left open.

Lisa was the most vulnerable because she was the youngest, newest, and also black and female. With her reassignment, my position in the Baltimore County office was hanging by a thread, since Connelly had already made it clear that felt Lisa and I were overmatched for our beats. Once Lisa got reassigned, I was living in limbo, afraid I was next.

The same year that Lisa started on her new beat, the Baltimore County reporting staff got two new reporters, both of them in their early thirties, white, hard-working, and hired from large Florida dailies. One was a 31-year-old woman coming aboard to replace the education reporter who didn’t cover the Baltimore County school superintendent’s firing because it coincided with her daughter’s birthday. The other reporter, a 32-year-old male, was hired to join the long-term Baltimore County government reporter on his beat, then to possibly eventually take it over. Other reporters joined the staff as well: one from the downtown Business desk; one from the Metro staff who’d asked to be reassigned to Baltimore County because he didn’t get along with the City editor, and a third who had transferred in from another bureau after another reporter poured coffee on her desk. Now being in charge of a much larger staff placed two major decision-making and problem-solving demands on Dave Rosenthal: one was how to allocate computer terminals now that there weren’t enough for everyone to have his or her own. The other was how to decide who to send out to cover breaking crime stories when the Baltimore County Police reporter, Kris Antonelli, was out on another story or otherwise unavailable.

            Tackling of the computer distribution issue was done out of necessity, as there were twelve computer terminals networked to the main downtown system, and fifteen people vying for their use. Rosenthal had two—one in his private office, the second at his desk in the newsroom, where he spent most of his time. Evan Butz, the former downtown re-write editor who had been promoted to the job of Baltimore County assistant bureau chief, worked from his own computer in the newsroom as well. A Baltimore city columnist who preferred to work in Baltimore County had his own terminal in his own office. That left eight computers for the twelve-person reporting staff of four men and eight women.

            Rosenthal set up the new Florida transplant covering county government – a white man -- at a private terminal as soon as he joined the staff. Down the corridor from him, another white male reporter who had worked at the paper for forty years had a computer to himself as well. A third white male used to share a computer with my predecessor on the Baltimore County Circuit Court beat, but after she was transferred to a different newsroom, her seat remained open, leaving that computer as his alone. Across the aisle, the fourth white male reporter who covered East Baltimore County had a desk with a terminal he refused to share. He set his notepads and other belongings beside the monitor, making it impossible to swivel, so he didn’t share with Lisa Respers, whose desk was adjacent to his. All four of the male reporters never needed to leave their desks to work on stories at another computer, and none of them had to share.

            It was a different story for the eight women reporters in the Baltimore County office. We dealt with the following breakdown of terminal-to-female-reporter distribution: New Baltimore County police reporter Kris Antonelli shared a terminal with another new transplant to the BaltCo newsroom -- a woman from the downtown business department who had recently begun to cover Baltimore County economic development. Lisa, who now covered Harford County from the Baltimore County office, couldn’t share the terminal at the desk adjacent to hers because the man who sat at it wouldn’t let her, so she doubled up with a woman who covered Towson, the Baltimore County seat. I shared a terminal with the former Baltimore County education reporter, Mary, who’d been taken off the education beat because she wouldn’t come in on a pre-planned day off to celebrate her daughter’s birthday. The woman who now covered Baltimore County education, after recently joining the staff from a Florida daily, shared a terminal with the Intrepid Commuter transportation columnist/North Baltimore County reporter who had joined the Baltimore County office from downtown after her maternity leave.

To sum up, in all, the eight women reporters shared four terminals.

For men to have better access to computer terminals was not unique to The Sun. A Providence Journal reporter I had met at the IRE convention told me that when a new computer system was ordered for her newsroom, only the men were trained to use it, since editors believed only they would understand its workings. She added that the women reporters were included in the training only when they threatened to sue.

            Along with the sexist distribution of computers, another trend was emerging in the Baltimore County newsroom: the subliminal racism and sexism associated with whom editors tapped to contribute to breaking news stories. When a murder or car crash happened and the police reporter was out on another assignment or in need of an additional pair of hands, editors had to interrupt someone in the Baltimore County newsroom and ask him or her to pitch in. While covering Baltimore County courts, I noticed that whenever a fire broke out or a bolt of lightning struck someone, it seemed that editors turned to Lisa or me—the only two black women in the bureau—and asked one of us to get involved. I also observed that the two new Baltimore County reporters—both from Florida dailies and white—never seemed to get asked to drop what they were doing and chip in on a fire or hostage situation.

            Pitching in on breaking news was exciting the first few times. The Woodlawn car crash and the Russian pizza deliveryman’s shooting were fascinating stories, both in spite of, and because of, the tragic nature of each incident. But after a few years, what wore off for me at an increasing pace was the thrill of being one of the first or only people to watch the story unfolding and getting to describe it in all its shocking gore or glory. Reporting on breaking news, depending on the nature of it, often devolved into an anxiety-provoking, distracting interruption that promised hours of high-tension reporting while feeling the stress of being under the gun. Tasks often included waiting for word from a hospital or pestering survivors who were out of control with grief. No one wanted to drop everything to rush out to what might or might not be an actual story. This would mean missing the return of phone calls placed for beat-related stories, and needing to reschedule face-to-face interviews. But usually, I thought, editors were tapping Lisa or me to pull on our coats to race to a site. They behaved as if the two new Florida transplants weren’t even in the newsroom or in contention for any rushed breaking news reporting assignment.

            To find out how often Baltimore County editors asked the two white newcomers to stop what they were doing and pitch in on breaking news, on-line archives were examined for their bylines, headlines and opening paragraphs. Stories they wrote that were on topics other than their beats (County government for one reporter, Baltimore County education for the other) would likely be stories they were interrupted from their normal beat coverage to report. According to calculations based on their newspaper articles archived on The Sun’s web site, the new Baltimore County education reporter wrote 124 stories, six of which were unrelated to her education beat. She wrote four of the non-education stories on mandatory weekend shifts that she served. One of the two others was an elaborate summer project she and two reporters did while schools were closed for summer recess, which ran on page 1A. The other article was a story she had lobbied to write from Maine, where she spent a Thanksgiving vacation.

            The other reporter, who joined the staff in July of the same year, wrote 53 stories by year’s end. Four of those stories were off his beat—three were obligatory weekend duty stories; the fourth was an article he went to Atlanta to write. In all, according to the archived articles on the website, not once in the new education reporter’s first year did editors tap her to chip in on breaking news, and not once in the new county government reporter’s first six months did they ask him to contribute to breaking news, either.

            One evening when Rosenthal was sending me to help the police reporter cover a crime-related breaking news story, I asked him why he didn’t send either of the two newer reporters from Florida.

            “Because,” he said without a moment’s pause, “they’re working on more important stories.” To defend an unfinished Baltimore County education or government article as more important than an unfinished Baltimore County court story was to wade into murky waters—there was no universal standard for importance, and no one knew how important a story-in-progress could become. His answer would probably have been the same, however, regardless of what beat or what story they were working on, because whether Rosenthal knew it or not, he was practicing what scholars call aversive racism, racist behavior that can plausibly be attributed to something besides race. An article in an organizational studies and leadership publication reported that “one of the greatest challenges facing Black [professionals] is aversive racism, a subtle but insidious form of prejudice that emerges when people can justify their negative feelings towards Blacks based on factors other than race.” [26]

            According to that definition, Rosenthal justified giving Lisa and me the breaking news assignments that no one else wanted by rationalizing that it wasn’t because of race, but because our stories were less important. “A growing number of behavioral science and legal scholars recognize that racism in the workplace today has become more subtle, indirect, covert, and less overtly negative than traditional forms of racism observed in the past,” states a behavioral science journal article. “This negatively involves discomfort, uneasiness, disgust, and sometimes fear, which tend to motivate avoidance rather than intentionally destructive behaviors. Legal scholars call this form of racial discrimination ‘aversive racism’: turning away from others in a way that isolates and undermines.”[27]

                Ancella B. Livers and Keith Caver studied some hard-to-identify pitfalls black employees faced when working in white organizations. They describe them in their book, Leading in Black and White: Working Across the Racial Divide in Black America. One of them was the cluelessness white supervisors have about the many racist slights, however subtle, that black people deal with all the time at work. This would explain the resistance I faced whenever I brought up any of the issues that to me appeared racist.

“When blacks discuss race, they are often not seen as credible if they are pointing out flaws in the system or racist behaviors,” Livers and Caver wrote. “Non-blacks often assume that blacks doing this have ulterior motives or are being hypersensitive, consequently their credibility suffers and their points are often ignored.”[28]

CHAPTER 8:

THE SUN: MIGRAINES

In the Baltimore County newsroom, I was living with a sexist distribution of computers and a racist layout of City/County Page stories. I was aware that there were tasks I had to perform that my white co-workers did not, and aware that I couldn’t depend on my editor for support when it concerned anything from my personal safety to the credit I got for my work. On top of that, my consistent vocalizing of my thoughts about such issues was earning me a reputation as difficult. For me, The Sun was losing its shine.

As unpleasant as the office dynamics were, coping with emotions aroused by watching murder trials was sometimes worse, and the more gruesome the details surrounding a murder trial, the more likely the story would be to interest editors. Some of them were horrid. One man in a crack-induced rage had beaten a priest to death; another man had beaten his wife so badly that her eyeball fell out of its socket. Still attached by a few membranes, it had been dangling on her cheekbone until her neighbor pushed it back in. Those images stayed with me for weeks.

One of the worst trials I covered was of a Baltimore man accused of murdering his wife less than three weeks after she had given birth to their infant daughter. At the trial, people in the courtroom learned that the victim, the mother of two girls, had recently informed her 27-year-old physical abuser of a husband that she couldn’t take it anymore and that their marriage was over. He got drunk and high, and, he claimed at trial, lost his senses. In that state he stabbed his wife eighty-three times. While this was taking place, the couple’s 19-day-old daughter and the woman’s 10-year-old daughter from a previous relationship were in the next room. The older daughter heard her mother screaming in the bedroom, so she forced her way in and saw her stepfather stabbing her mother. In a state of hysteria, she called 911. The husband left the knife embedded in his wife’s body. Then he called the police and said, “I just killed somebody . . . Please come get me,” and asked them to go easy on him because he had made the confession voluntarily. At the trial, the prosecutor called the 10-year-old girl to testify, and she confidently held her hand while she walked her up to the witness stand in the front of the courtroom. Sitting with her torso turned away from her stepfather, she testified that she heard loud noises coming from the bedroom, and struggled with the door to open it. The prosecutor asked if she saw him doing anything, and she said, “He was stabbing my mother.” The prosecutor played the 911 tape for the jury, and the 10-year-old girl’s screaming, hysterical voice brought at least five people in the courtroom to tears. The jury took little time convicting the man of first-degree murder and sentencing him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

            A trial of another stabbing murder, equally horrific as the one the victim’s daughter had to witness, gave me nightmares. Benjamin Scott Garris, a 16-year-old boy from Frederick, Maryland, had mental problems so severe that he was put in a well-known Baltimore County residential mental health facility. The staff was apparently not getting the results they were looking for in terms of improvements in his mental health. The staff was about to transfer him from a ward where he had some freedom, to the more restrictive setting of a locked unit. He didn’t want to be stuck in lock-down, so he asked his 15-year-old depressive, chronic runaway girlfriend who attended school on the grounds of the mental hospital, to bring him a hunting knife and some gasoline in a soda container. She agreed.

            One night not long after Garris got the knife, a 26-year-old single mother arrived at the mental hospital for her first shift, working overnight in Garris’ building as a low-skilled overseer. That was the night Garris put his secret plan to avoid being barricaded the locked facility into action: to create a diversion that would preoccupy everyone and allow him to sneak away, Garris, whose mental illness clearly influenced his logic, stabbed the woman repeatedly with the knife that his girlfriend had given him. He did it so viciously that he almost beheaded the new counselor. During the stabbing, the woman offered him $11 she had in her pocket, thinking money was what he was after, and he took it. Then he continued stabbing her, all the while reciting lines from the book A Clockwork Orange and feeling annoyed with the fact that it took her longer than expected to succumb. When she was dead, he poured gas on her body and jumped up and down on it. Then he lit some wicks he had set up around the common room and set them on fire. He had already given several of his male housemates, asleep upstairs, sedative pills in their fruit juice. He anticipated their burning to death in the building that contained the dead body of the woman he had just killed. Once it was over, he changed out of his bloody clothes. Then he called his girlfriend to tell her to pick him up in the family car she had agreed to steal. It was normally driven by her father. Although the young girlfriend could barely drive, she somehow managed to navigate herself to the murder site. From there they began a southbound road trip. They made it as far as Virginia Beach and were on the lam until about three weeks after the murder, when they got arrested when they were trying to steal gum, candy and cigarettes from a convenience store. The police arresting them did a computer check that showed they were wanted in Maryland.

When they got back and met with Baltimore County detectives, they both gave confessions so detailed and graphic that the victim’s brother sought counseling after reading excerpts of the confessions in the newspaper. One day during a break in the trial, I went into the bathroom in the courthouse and saw in the mirror to my right side the killer’s mother and on my left the victim’s sister. Their eyes met in the mirror and they hugged and cried in each other’s arms.

            Garris’ lawyer was unable to convince the jury of his defense theory: that Garris suffered from a behavioral disorder motivating his crime. After the three-day trial, the jury convicted the 16-year-old of murder and robbery for the $11 her took from his victim while killing her, and later sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Had he been two years older, he would have most likely faced the death penalty. At the sentencing, the judge said she would remember this testimony until her dying day because of how vivid and horrid it was; she told him he had squashed the victim’s life like she was no more than a bug on the ground.

            I was in the courtroom for virtually every minute of the trial. Then when testimony for the day was over, just about every day, I rushed back to the office to write a story about the trial in the one or two hours between the end of the court session and my deadline. I tried to treat the Garris case as a distant, surreal episode happening in some other reality. I wanted it blocked out by the time I got home after work, but that ended up being wishful thinking: I woke up one night in the middle of a nightmare in which Benjamin Scott Garris was standing close to my face, stabbing me in the cheek under my left eye.

            After sitting in an impersonal but emotionally charged courtroom by day, I went back to a small satellite newsroom a few blocks from the courthouse—a different office than the one the rest of the Baltimore County staff worked in—and wrote daily stories in isolation, communicating via computer and phone with editors. When the story was done, I took the elevator to the parking garage and drove into the darkness with no way to rub off the accumulation of depressing information. I didn’t realize this job was approaching, if not exceeding, the limit on what I could handle, or that the nightmares were signals from my body which I was ignoring.

So, my body resorted to sending a harsher message.       One day, while driving on the beltway, I recognized a severe headache that wasn’t new, but was becoming too powerful to ignore as I had been doing in recent weeks. The pain was building up slowly enough that I could brace for it and tolerate it, but the intensity was starting to surpass my defenses. It broke through that day on the beltway, when I finally admitted to myself that I was in overpowering pain almost all the time. As it got worse, I sometimes woke up and couldn’t get out of bed. As soon as I sat up I had a vertigo-like sensation that made me too dizzy to stand up for long, and sometimes my vision got jagged. I couldn’t exercise because using the StairMaster aggravated the pain in my head, and driving a stick shift hurt whenever the car lurched as I changed gears. I couldn’t wear clips or rubber bands in my hair because any pressure was too much, and some mornings after getting dressed I needed to lie down on the couch. At times it felt like a tight belt was squeezing my head; other times the pain was concentrated only on the right side. I felt cranky and prickly, like I could go off at any moment.

            Unable to make a connection between the headaches and job stress, I started going to a chiropractor because I had heard that headaches were sometimes caused by muscle problems in the alignment of the back, sending pain up the spinal column to the skull. I’d had a car accident over Memorial Day weekend and there could have been damage associated with that, I rationalized. I also saw an acupuncturist, thinking something could be wrong with my body’s energetic pathways. Neither treatment made the headache go away, so I went to my eye doctor to see if my contact lens or eyeglasses prescription was out of date, causing a strain on my eyes that could be to blame. The doctor found nothing wrong with my prescription. Then, in a sober voice he said: “You might have a brain tumor,” and he sent me to a specialist. I was too numb to let the gravity of his statement register until a day or two later, when, reacting to some unknown impulse, I asked Lisa Respers, who covered Harford County from the Baltimore County office, if she would make sure my dying wishes were carried out if I died from the possible brain tumor. When her eyes widened and she said, “Of course,” I realized I could actually be in danger.

            I made an appointment with a headache specialist in a clinic at Greater Baltimore Medical Center, a massive hospital in Baltimore County. My initial appointment lasted for three hours, and during the session, I had an EKG and neurological and reflex tests while the doctor and nurse practitioner asked me questions designed to elicit a description of the feel of my headache—choices included hot, boring, throbbing or stabbing. The doctor diagnosed me with chronic migraines and had me check into the hospital a few days later for a three-day stay.

            On my first day, I checked into the modern hospital and a nurse hooked me up to an IV with liquid headache drugs that were supposed to break through the initial siege of headache pain so doctors could determine an appropriate long-term medication. The doctor also ordered physical and psychological therapy to see if the cause could be detected that way, and I had a nutritional consultation to see if I had food allergies that were triggering the headaches. One day a technician laid me flat on a thin, high-tech board and slid me slowly into an MRI machine that scanned my brain for tumors. None were found. For about five seconds after I heard that news, I was disappointed that the tumor possibility no longer presented me with a way out.

Meanwhile, the nutritionist told me not to eat onions, avocados, raisins or certain cheeses and to avoid drinking coffee and red wine. Those were all foods that could cause headaches due to some of their biochemical make-up. One night a hostile nurse came into my room without speaking to me, woke me in the middle of the night, and tried to give me a shot, which missed my vein and made my forearm swell up like an eggplant. Even though co-workers and friends called or visited, I was depressed, lonely and unable to use my right hand without discomfort because of the swelling from the shot. Making matters worse, the headache ward was alongside the psychiatric ward, where an elderly woman who had attempted suicide was screaming incessantly. The hospitalization proved a lot to cope with, especially in the weakened emotional state I had allowed my job to leave me in.

And the state I was in probably had to do with not only the content of the court trials I was covering, but also with my blazing case of job socialization failure. Research shows that job socialization failure can lead to headaches and other physical symptoms. “[T]he experience of job socialization failure stems from an initial feeling of excitement and intense interest in a new job that rapidly becomes emotionally overwhelming due either to overstimulation or the consistent short circuiting of the employee’s energy,” according to an article in the journal Women and Therapy, on the topic of counseling black women on job socialization failure. The article states:

Realization of the negative situation is usually followed by initial feelings of fear, denial, and suppression of the gravity of the occupational problem. The feelings smolder and emerge as alienation, exclusion, defeatism and impotence, anger and rage, futility, conflict, non-support, fear of losing emotional control, depression, performance anxiety, amotivation and dissociation from one’s assigned tasks, and increased likelihood of error and performance failure . . . There also appears to be an increased tendency towards physiological [symptoms], i.e., headaches, digestive ailments, lower back and neck pain, self medication, and over use of such substances as alcohol, tobacco, food, over the counter medications, and other substances . . . Eventually, clients wonder how things escalated to such a serious level of abuse. Many poignantly ask, ‘How did things get so bad?’[29]

I wondered how I didn’t know that things were bad enough that I landed in the hospital with an IV lock in my hand and a hospital gown fluttering open behind me. The inertia of spiraling so far downward had snuck up on me. One day, a friend stopped by with a “Get Well Soon” balloon. That was one of my lowest moments, because I didn’t see any way to get well soon. The chronic migraine diagnosis meant I either had to take daily medication or suffer excruciating pain—possibly for the rest of my life. The medicine I was taking intravenously during the hospitalization curbed my headache down to just a flickering light I could cope with, but I couldn’t stay hooked up to an IV forever. So one day a nurse taught me how break open a tincture of headache medicine similar to what I had been getting through the IV. She taught me to load it into the syringe and plunge the needle into my thigh, something she anticipated my needing to do on a daily basis upon my discharge and return to work.

            When I started giving myself shots once I got home, I could feel the texture of my thigh muscles when I pressed in the needle. It was like sticking a one-pronged fork into raw steak, but knowing it was actually my thigh flesh I was poking, the whole procedure made me feel sick. And soon I began having strange side effects. At least once, I walked into the brick wall next to my apartment door, and I started sweating profusely all the time, staining even the heaviest denim fabrics without having made any physical exertion. It was very obvious to other people as well. A day or two after I got discharged, neglecting to give my headache hospitalization the focus and attention it deserved, I drove a little over an hour to Washington to see a friend and co-worker from the Orange County edition of The Los Angeles Times who was on the East coast visiting his mother. When I arrived at his mom’s place dripping wet, he took one look at me and, in clear disbelief, asked if I needed a towel.

            When I went back to the headache specialists for a check-up, they took me off the shots because of the side effects and switched me to low doses of Beta-blocker heart medication and an antidepressant, both to be taken in pill form. This blend was routinely used to fight chronic migraines, since at that time there were no pills for chronic migraines that were safe to take daily. I had to start taking these pills every morning, ideally at the same time. They left me logy and sluggish, but I returned to work after a weeklong absence, trying to simply move forward as if nothing had changed.

            The day I returned to work began like any other. I intended to press ahead with the same work-oriented readiness to attack my articles as I had relied on before. For my re-entry I wore a floral print dress and loafers, one of my standard work ensembles. I thought that now that the headaches were under control, my ability to engage in my work would be too. But on my first day back, groggy from the medication, Rosenthal greeted me with a newsflash: the editor who had sent me to the ghetto of Sandtown-Winchester, on a weekend shift to cover a murder which the reporter on the story had turned in undone, was now the Baltimore County assistant bureau chief, taking the place of the previous one Connelly had demoted while I was in the hospital. This editor, joining us from the Howard County bureau, was now second to Rosenthal in command. And from now on, I reported to him.

            Mark Bomster was his name. He had reddish-brown hair, often uncombed in a bed-head swirl, and a beard so full he looked like he had just come in from the wilderness. His inverted buttocks left fabric hanging down his legs and he walked hunched over in a cowardly stoop. He wanted to be included in reporters’ jokes, but his inserting himself invariably ended the joke in its tracks. As an editor, he struggled unsuccessfully to assert his authority, overdoing it in a way that alienated reporters. He gave us patronizing, almost ritualistic praise for the smallest story to make us feel like he was on our side, while making poor editing judgments or giving one set of story instructions, only to change them when a more senior editor had a different idea.

            While I was on medical leave, Rosenthal had divided the staff into two teams, one that reported to him, and the other that reported to Bomster. Rosenthal’s team was 100% white and half male, half female (although the reporting staff was two-thirds female), while Bomster’s team was 60% white and 40% black; it was also 20% male and 80% female. I doubt that Rosenthal made a conscious decision to divide the staff up so he wasn’t working with any people of color or too many women. Instead, he attributed his choice to journalistic reasons alone, such as his desire to edit the work of the two county government reporters, both of them white men, instead of just one.

            Rumor had it that Bomster was a below-average reporter turned junior editor who lacked the clout with downtown editors that Rosenthal had. Therefore, chances of reporters on his team getting their stories on the Metro cover promptly nose-dived. Kris (the BaltCo police reporter), Lisa (the METPRO alum covering Harford County from the BaltCo newsroom) and I bonded around the knowledge that we were now left in the hands of a lesser editor. Again, Rosenthal wasn’t outwardly doing or saying anything racist, but limiting access to him was one more sign suggesting his potential for aversive racism.

            Upon returning from the hospital, I had to consult with Bomster (whose desk was about five yards away from mine), not Rosenthal, about all of my articles. Bomster came around to reporters’ desks with his hopeful, annoying input that pierced the unspoken barrier that kept reporters from having to share with editors details of non-breaking stories well in advance of turning them in. I had to discuss with him the minutiae of any article I was working on before I started it, during the reporting of it, and while I was writing it—much more hands-on interaction than I had ever had, even at The Los Angeles Times as a METPRO trainee. For example, one day I mentioned to him that I was thinking of doing a story about whether lawyers were spending small portions of their time offering free legal services. I was about to do a phone interview with a lawyer who had signed up to do pro bono work but had not yet put in any hours. Bomster rushed to my desk the minute I hung up to ask what the source had revealed. It felt like having a stranger watch me use the bathroom.

            When Lisa, Kris and I weren’t in the newsroom, Bomster paged us constantly—sometimes to ask questions as irritating as what we were presently doing or why he hadn’t heard from us so far that day. One morning, I felt I came close to losing my temper with him. I had found a seat in the file room of the Baltimore County courts building. After looking up cases I was interested in reading more about, I found a seat and set up my notebook. I was deep into reading files and taking notes for a possible trend story when Bomster paged me. This was in the days before cell phones, when I had to abandon all of my documents to find a payphone. When I called him back to see what he wanted, he said that the county government reporter needed my help on a story for the next day’s paper, and that I had to put away everything and help him. This is despite the fact that there were two county government reporters, the second of whom could have helped. In general, the county government reporter, a curmudgeonly long-timer, usually preferred to work alone.

            When I arrived at the newsroom I asked the county government reporter what needed my help with.

“What? I don’t need any help!” he snapped. “I’m just about done.” He hadn’t asked for help—Bomster was so thrilled to have the power to issue commands that he didn’t check first to see if they were good ones. This obsessive checking and inappropriate over-involvement indicated distrust in our ability to steer the ships of our own stories without his navigation of every wave, despite his not having worked with any of us long enough to form opinions of our work or our needs.

Making matters worse was the fact that Bomster was responsible for Baltimore County’s contribution to the City/County Page, and, without easy access to or control over the stories produced by the county government and education reporters who reported to Rosenthal, Bomster depended on his reporting team’s output to keep the City/County Page covered. It wasn’t unusual for someone to propose a story idea worthy of the Metro front that he rejected with: “I already have a story for tomorrow’s City/County Page.” Meanwhile, the two Florida newcomers reported only to Rosenthal and could spend an entire day in the office and never once have to speak to Bomster.

            Lisa, Kris and I dreaded the moments when Bomster came to our work stations to ask about stories we were working on. When he approached Kris’s desk, she would look up in distress and ask, “What do you want?” hoping to create as unwelcoming an atmosphere for his annoying presence as possible. When I’d notice him shifting his attention to me, I would grab my purse and try to make it to the parking lot so I could head for the courthouse, whether I had any business there or not. One time, when I tried to abscond, he pursued me out the door, breaking into a trot behind me in the parking lot, his goofy limbs splaying every which way as I tried to start my car before he caught up with me. Lisa was more direct. “Getting multiple pages,” she snapped at him one day, “is not like getting multiple orgasms!” The room erupted in hysterics, but it changed nothing: we were now tethered to him and his inquiries.

            We on Team Bomster pleaded with Rosenthal to talk to him, but he defended him by saying Bomster was new and getting to know us. When I told Rosenthal that Bomster constantly asked me dumb questions, he said, “You asked dumb questions too, when you started out on the courts beat.” We gave him examples he found troubling enough that he would verbally commit to us that he’d soon be talking to Bomster, but he never seemed to get around to it. Sometimes, I tried to talk about my stories with Rosenthal on the sly by poking my head into his office when Bomster was out to lunch or by sidling over to him by the coffee machine to chat about what I was working on, trying to make it look like coincidence. Usually, I had to interact with Bomster though, and editing sessions, formerly challenging and inspiring with Rosenthal, became unnerving tests of patience, especially while dealing with headache management. The pills I was taking were less effective than the shots—they reduced the headaches, but they didn’t come near wiping them out. They left me fatigued and irritable, and the heart medication was also slowing down my metabolism.

It took about three months before I realized I couldn’t go on living this way. The energy involved in showing up at work with headaches, and dealing with both Bomster’s interference and the drama of the courtroom trials became unmanageable.          

            For help with figuring out how to get out of this predicament, I made a lunch appointment with the managing editor who had hired me out of METPRO at the draft in Los Angeles, the same one who hadn’t come in to work on my first day or told anyone to expect me. I didn’t want to talk directly with either of the Baltimore County editors—I was too irritated by Bomster to feel comfortable talking with him about anything personal, and I didn’t think Rosenthal, who had shown so little interest in my well-being before, would be sympathetic. So over lunch, I confided in the managing editor as openly as I could, giving him enough information about the headaches combined with the court trials to show the importance of me being reassigned to another beat that wasn’t so stress-provoking, given the headaches. He said coming to him was the right thing to do and that my reasons were valid. He promised to make sure I got taken off my beat. He occupied an Oz-like position where his word went unquestioned. I looked forward to news of reassignment and assumed I would still work in Baltimore County, where the general assignment reporting position was vacant.

            On the day my reassignment was to be announced, Regional Editor Mike Connelly drove to the Baltimore County office in his Saab and escorted me into Rosenthal’s office. As soon as we were seated, he told me that the managing editor had brought him up to speed on my situation and that he was there to give me the new assignment that editors had come up with for me: starting in mid-February, I was leaving Baltimore County to cover Central Anne Arundel County communities in the Anne Arundel County office.

            It was like he had just spat in my face and then smiled. This was a beat assignment usually given to rank beginners. I had never been given a job evaluation on courts, so I had no reason to think something was wrong with my work. I had only missed one big trial. Editors’ feedback on my work never made make me think I risked being booted from Baltimore County. As undeserved as I felt this reassignment was, it was not entirely surprising, since the two other female reporters of color had also been taken off their beats without having done anything wrong. At the time, I wasn’t able to see my demotion as one in a long line directed mostly at non-whites and women. Instead, still clinging to the beliefs I was raised on at home—that I should be able to excel anywhere by doing my job—I saw it as a repudiation of my performance despite Connelly’s effort to convince me it was a lateral move. “We wanted to get longer enterprise stories from the court beat, and you’ve done that,” he explained, “and now it’s time for you to spend time writing lots of shorter stories.” This was so I could get grounded and reach the 1000-story mark, at which point he felt I would no longer be a beginner, he said. This logic, of course, made no sense, but I felt that I could not hope to question it and get a sensible answer.

            This reassignment was like being dumped from a network TV channel to a cable station taped in someone’s garage. I would have to crank out short, meaningless stories in a county office whose edition had three times more space for news than the downtown edition. It could be years before I would get sprung from that office and scrape my way back to a beat downtown or in Baltimore County again. Chances of that weren’t high—in the four years I worked at The Sun, I only saw one black reporter make it out of a regional office. In Baltimore County, the circulation was at least 200,000, whereas in Anne Arundel County, it was approximately 20,000, so anything I wrote would be seen by a fraction of the readers who had seen my work before.

            After my last Baltimore County trial ended, I said my goodbyes to the courthouse staff and told them I was going to the Anne Arundel County office. At least three people asked: “Who’d you piss off?” and one Baltimore County reporter asked me, incredulous, “You’re OK with it?”

            In some ways, I was. In the interim of my getting the assignment and finishing the last of a series of court cases before moving on to Anne Arundel County, I began to dread the change less and less. Baltimore County relationship dynamics in the aftermath of Hurricane Bomster were getting so bad that a human resources consultant was eventually brought in to restore that office to professional harmony. Also, covering a less visible beat such as communities, a less graphic and disturbing topic than courts, would mean less pressure and tension. There didn’t appear to be a lot of tension in the articles covered in Anne Arundel County: I noticed that one day, the lead story in that edition concerned two people who had gotten stuck in an elevator.

            The Anne Arundel office I would be working in was undergoing major changes, the biggest of which was that Rosemary Armao, the former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, whom I had met at the IRE convention in Providence, Rhode Island, was joining the staff as the new Anne Arundel County bureau chief. At the IRE convention, where she’d had a very visible role, she came across as a fun, down-to-earth, kick-ass journalist. I was looking forward to learning computer-assisted reporting and other investigative reporting techniques from her, and in my final days in Baltimore County, she and I started communicating via computer messages. Based on what I knew about her, I thought working with her would be fine, but working with Rosemary Armao for the next painful fifteen months made the months with Bomster seem like fun.

[1] Roderick J Watts and Robert T. Carter, “Psychological Aspects of Racism in Organizations,” Group & Organization Management 16, No. 3 (September 1991): 328-344.

[2] Watts and Carter.

[3] Diane Susan Grimes, “Challenging the Status Quo?” Management Communication Quarterly 15, no. 3 (2002):381-409

[4] Vera Herman, Joe R. Feagin, and Andrew Gordon, “Superior Intellect? Sincere Fictions of The White Self,” The Journal of Negro Education, 64.

6 Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, Federico A. Subervi-Velez, Sharon Bramlett-Soloman and Don Heider, “Minority Journalists’ Perceptions of the Impact of Minority Executives,” The Howard Journal of Communications 15, no. 1 (2004): 42.

[6] Rivas-Rodriguez, et al.

[7] Brent Cunningham, “Across The Great Divide – Class,” Columbia Journalism Review 43, no.1 (May 2004):1.

[8] Miles Corwin, The Killing Season, (New York: Random House, The Ballantine Publishing Group, 1997), 9.

[9] Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Are Middle-Class Blacks Angry? Why Should America Care? (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 94.

[10] Susan Douglas, “Body-Bag Journalism,” The Progressive 61, no. 4 (April 1997).

[11] Cunningham.

[12] Pamela Braboy Jackson, Peggy A. Thoits And Howard F. Taylor, “Composition of the Workplace and Psychological Well-Being: The Effects of Tokenism on America’s Black Elite,” Social Forces 74, no. 2 (1995):543-58.

[13] Jackson, Thoits and Taylor.

[14] Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peace and Freedom (July/August 1989): 10.

[15] Lawrence T. McGill, Newsroom Diversity: Meeting the Challenge (Washington DC: The Freedom Forum, 1999), 4.

[16]William T. Bielby “Minimizing Workplace Gender and Racial Bias,” Contemporary Sociology 29, no.  1 (January 2000).

[17] Bielby.

[18] Bielby.

[19] Taylor Cox, Jr., Cultural Diversity in Organizations: Theory, Research & Practice, (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1993), 190.

[20] Madeline E. Heilman, “Sex Discrimination and the Affirmative Action Remedy: The Role of Sex Stereotypes,” Journal of Business Ethics 16, no. 9 (June 1997): 877-889.

[21]Ancella B. Livers and Keith A. Caver, Leading In Black and White: Working Across the Racial Divide in Corporate America (San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, 2003).

[22] David Shipler, “Blacks in the Newsroom: Progress? Yes, But . . .” Columbia Journalism Review 37,no 1 (May/June 1998): 26-32.

[23] Shipler.

[24]Jodi B. Cohen, “Race Colors Newsroom Views,” Editor & Publisher 129, no 44 (Nov. 1996): 8.

[25]S. Alease Ferguson and Toni C. King, “Bringing Organizational Behavior and Therapy Together: Counseling the African American Female on ‘Job Socialization Failure,’” Women & Therapy 18, no 1 (1996): 47-58.

[26] Jennifer L. Knight, Michelle R. Hebl, Jessica B. Foster and Laura M. Mannix, “Out of Role? Out of Luck: The Influence of Race and Leadership Status on Performance Appraisals,” Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies 9, no. 3 (Winter 2003): 85-93.

[27] Leroy Wells, “Consulting to Black-White Relations in Predominately White Organizations,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 34, No 4 (December 1998): 392-396.

[28] Livers and Caver, 152.

[29] Livers and Caver, 152.

 [jc1]The architecture and foliage discussion seems disjointed from the phrase about what is “going on inside the hotel.”  Perhaps separate them into 2 sentences, or move the greenery comparison just before “I checked in at…”

 [jc2]Author? It is much easier to reference a work using the writer’s name. This goes for other quotations in previous pgs too.