Copyright 1998, Thomas L. Mangan
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| James Romenesko covers the tech beat for the Pioneer Press in St. Paul, Minn., but he's also had all sorts of odd jobs in his previous reporting days (like covering the Jeffrey Dahmer trial). His voracious media appetite is in evidence at The Obscure Store, his site devoted to helping zine editors sell their wares and helping the rest of us keep up with current media craziness. | 9 August 1998 | |
| 1 | If you could travel back in time, what technology would you disinvent (other than the most obvious choice, the atom bomb)? | Back to the 7Q index |
| The Clapper -- so I wouldn't have to watch those ads during the holidays. | ||
| 2 | Who is the smartest person you have interviewed? | |
| One top candidate was the ad man who created George Bush's "Willie Horton" prison ads; the creative guy -- who, by the way, was spending time in the House of Correction when the Horton ads were running -- ended up killing himself, unfortunately. My magazine article on him, which ran a few years before his death, was all too appropriately titled "The Dark Side of Success." | ||
| 3 | What's the most eggregious editing error inflicted on your copy | |
| It wasn't an error, but an outright fabrication added my story by a rewrite man. As a cub reporter, I turned in a story about a 12-year-old girl arrested for prostitution. When the front-page piece came out, it had a description of the girl ("rouge-cheeked") and quotes from an arresting officer. All were made up by a veteran reporter who was subbing on rewrite. I complained to him and he replied, "Oh, who's going to care?" I then went to my senior editor. He told me not to tell the city editor. | ||
| 4 | What's the strangest thing you've ever done in pursuit of a story? | |
| A police reporter colleague and I suspected a young guy in a murder and we hatched a plot to take him to dinner for an "interview," then hoped to somehow get to his home and check his silverware drawer for a certain kind of knife found at the crime scene. We successfully got to his home, but couldn't make a good move to the silverware drawer. Years later, the crime remains unsolved and my accomplice is a legal affairs editor at The New York Times. | ||
| 5 | If you could correct one bad habit of the news media, what would it be? | |
| Trying to localize USA Today-discovered "trends." At the old Milwaukee Journal, an editor instructed a reporter to come up with the finding -- which came out of a USA Today article -- that Latin was hot in schools again, even though the reporter's evidence was to the contrary. | ||
| 6 | Where there any facts you deliberately left out of your coverage of the Jeffrey Dahmer trial because they were too sick to print? | |
| I left out the fact that photocopies of Dahmer's Polaroid snapshots of victims' body parts were floating around the courthouse during the trial, and didn't publish a detective's observation that Dahmer should have been a floral arranger. (The pictures showed arrangements of various body parts.) | ||
| 7 | What's the most bizarre zine you've seen? | |
| Singin' Dose Anti-Psychotic Blues, written by a Brooklyn psychopath who contends he's going to commit a massacre this decade. The zine is genuine; not written by a poseur. | ||
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Copyright 1998, Thomas L. Mangan |
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