A man’s reputation is as valuable to him as it is fragile, just ask David C. Wiesner.

Mr. Wiesner, who lives on County Road in Bourne, has the misfortune of having a name very similar to David L. Wisner, a frequent flyer in the Bourne Police Logs.

Mr. Wisner was arrested earlier this month after he allegedly discharged an AK-47 during an argument with his neighbor over the whereabouts of his vehicle. Police said he then ran off to his mom’s house and hid in fear that he had actually killed the guy.

Mr. Wiesner is retired, and according to him, has a clean criminal record. He spent a career working in law enforcement, he said. His father was a game warden and “very involved in conservation issues.” There’s only one Wiesner family with roots in Bourne, he said, and since 2000 David L. Wisner’s actions have been throwing mud all over that name. Nearly a decade ago, Mr. Wiesner said, he received notification that “he” owed more than $26,000 in unpaid child support. The mail, meant for Mr. Wisner, was accidentally sent to him instead. “It took about three months and a hundred dollars to get the documents I needed to prove I wasn’t him,” Mr. Wiesner said.

Mr. Wiesner’s friends won’t talk to him anymore, old fishing buddies won’t return his calls and his step-son was briefly under the impression that he shot an AK-47 at somebody in a dispute over a freaking car. They think he’s a criminal. It says so in the paper.

So, what does that have to do with me? The report handed to me by the Police Department two weeks ago misspelled Mr. Wisner’s name as Wisener. Now, that’s nobody’s name, but it’s close enough to Wiesner for discomfort. I make mistakes sometimes, it’s a painful part of the job that I try not to lose sleep over. However, when things go haywire over something we’ve written in the paper, and it’s not our fault, I find myself getting even more frustrated.

It shows that, even when we as reporters are on the top of our game, the things we print will cause collateral damage. That’s the power of misinformation.

Wednesday, June 17, marked the 30 year anniversary of the crash of Air New England Flight 248, an event that I had never heard about until I was assigned to write a story about it this week.  In my defense, it both occurred and seemed to have vanished from most people’s collective memories about five years before I was born.

Of course, for some, the memories of the Twin Otter’s crash into the woods at Camp Greenough in Yarmouth would never really go away. Those are the nine people who survived the crash and the employees or Air New England who were close to Captain George Parmenter, the one person aboard flight 248 who did not survive.

The memories of the former group are captured in Robert Sabbag’s “Down Around Midnight: A Recollection of Crash and Survival” a 214 page non-fiction novel released this month through Penguin Publishing.  As for the recollections of the latter group, the employees of Air New England; they’re conspicuously absent.  That’s what provided us with our angle for our story about the crash’s anniversary.

As he blogged about earlier this week, Enterprise sports editor Dan Crowley was one of those employees of Air New England who thought that Mr. Sabbag’s book come up just short in its attempt to truly capture story of Flight 248.

I spent an hour talking to Mr. Crowley about what he remembered from the night Flight 248 went down. It was pretty much like any other interview I’ve ever conducted, even though Mr. Crowley is a fellow Enterprise staffer.

I wrote the story up Thursday morning, careful to make sure I interpreted Dan correctly. Of course, that’s what every reporter tries to do when they write.  However, I felt like getting anything wrong here would have been acutely embarrassing. I mean, how can you screw up a story when your source is working only a few steps away from you and is perfectly willing to help you get it right?

Anyways, the writing process was, admittedly, stressful, and so was having Mr. Crowley scan through the piece. Not that he’s a hard case … not in the least bit.  Let’s put it this way; aviation issues are not exactly my strong suit, and I knew that was going to be exposed more than just a little bit by what I had written.

I think the experience I had writing the 248 piece kind of encapsulates what it’s like being a reporter for a weekly newspaper. Of the fields I cover, I have expertise in exactly zero of them.  There are also myriad off-beat assignments we’ll come across during a year of which we are absolutely ignorant. It’s humbling.

Donald M. Murray’s “Writing to Dealine” expresses a sentiment about what it’s like to be a reporter and to always feel like a novice in one area or another that I find encouraging. I’m paraphrasing, but Mr. Murray essentially refers to a reporter as a professional ignoramus. Essentially, it’s not our job to know everything; it’s our job to be humble enough to be willing to let people smarter than ourselves teach us things. Once we start making assumptions about what we do know or what pieces of information we feel we can take for granted — that’s when things can go terribly wrong.

I think the story I worked on with Dan came out pretty well. It was a humbling experience, but once the piece was filed, I felt pretty confident that I hadn’t screwed things up too terribly. For a reporter, that’s just about the best you can hope for at the end of the day.

What do reporters eat? What powers our brains and bodies as we strive to produce high quality news on a strict deadline? Many films about reporters depict them typing away in smoke filled newsrooms occasionally taking a discrete pull from a bottle of scotch concealed beneath a pile of old newspapers on their desk. Maybe every once in a while they’ll take lunch with a high influential source at a fine dining establishment in the heart of a bustling metropolis. Maybe, I’m thinking of lawyers.

Anyway, here’s what’s truly the latest in haute cuisine in the Enterprise newsroom.

That’s a nearly empty FOUR POUND jug of animal crackers. Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of the communal cracker trough when it was filled less than a week ago.

This is second jug of crackers the newsroom staff has devoured in as many weeks. In addition to providing sustenance, I like to believe these crackers have also served as  a sort staff-wide inoculation. Whatever germs are dwelling in the cracker tub, which is frequently dipped into by ink stained and sweaty hands throughout the day, odds are everyone who works at the Enterprise is immune to them by now.

Save for, perhaps, myself, as I haven’t been so bold as to dip into the jar yet.

*cough*

The Bourne and Sandwich High School classes of 2009 graduated last weekend. Yours truly was not only responsible for covering both commencements, but also providing most of the written content for the supplements that the Enterprise produced to commemorate the events. They both look excellent, by the way. I got a chance to peep copies on Wednesday and the colors on the photo pages just popped off the page, especially in Sandwich.

Graduation is a challenging time of year for reporters. It’s not the assignments themselves that stress the reporting muscles, though. In fact, as most high school administrations provide electronic copies of all the speakers’ addresses, there’s really no need to frantically scribble notes like you would at, say, a planning board meeting. The challenge is to resist the temptation to sleepwalk through the writing process. It would be easy to do, in order to preserve your mental energy for more challenging pieces, but that wouldn’t be a service to the folks in the community for whom receiving a diploma is, in fact, a big deal.

What I try to accomplish with any graduation story is to show the readers that, at the very least, I was paying attention to what the speakers were talking about during their addresses. If there’s a common theme that arises throughout the speeches, I’ll try to weave them together and, hopefully, present the event as a cohesive narrative.

The graduation story presents an important lesson to weary reporters who probably write between 500 and 600 stories a year. It’s that no matter how inconsequential a piece may seem to you, there’s at least one reader in your community for whom it’s the most important thing they will read all year. I don’t know if it’s possible to write a truly transcendent story about a high school graduation, but I think that it’s important to write ones that are at least attentive enough to show the audience that you realize that reporting, especially for a weekly newspaper, is about serving the community, not yourself.

Perusing my copy of the Bourne Police Logs each week always reminds me of the unique privileges that are given to reporters. The logs are public information, and anybody who wants them is free to walk into their local police station and demand a copy. I can’t think of anybody who does, though. I also can’t think of anybody besides reporters who has a fresh copy of the previous days logs waiting for them every morning when they walk into the police station.

Side Note: What documents are members of the press privy to that that any other private citizen isn’t?

Answer: Absolutely none. We’re just the folks who’s job it is to exercise the right to information which                        every citizen  possesses.

In addition to providing the insight into just exactly what it is that the members of the police force do to earn our tax dollars, the logs also provide an overview of the nature of crimes that are committed in a community and, in a small way, provide public service to those who wish not to become a victim of such crimes.

For example, ever read one or two or fifteen items in the police logs describing the theft of valuable electronics from an unlocked vehicle? Did that perhaps encourage you to lock your car doors, or at least keep your goodies somewhere out of plain site, when exiting your car? I hope it did.

However, the real reason are the logs are second only to the comics on the “pages I flip to first after scanning the headlines”  list is so simple. They’re funny and appeal to the voyeuristic nature in each of us.

PS: The Enterprise does not have a funnies section, so the logs are actually first on the “flip” list, by default! Woohoo!

Now, what you read in the paper is the reporter’s attempt to make some sense of the raw ( … and I’m talking rawer than  geoduck scooped from the banks of a lake in Norther Oregon) data presented in the police logs.  The logs are presented as a series of narratives with associated dates, times and a number that links them to a more in depth report by an officer who was at the scene of the incident. Those narratives are what indicates to the reporter whether or not it is worth the effort to ask the police department’s public information officer, often the lieutenenant, for further detail.

That narratives are written by dispatchers and are brief because they have to be, which can often have consequences that are either misleading or hilarious.

Here’s a taste

1051 Disturbance General

Narrative:

CALLER REPORTING SHE WAS INVOLVED IN SOME TYPE OF DISPUTE REGARDING A WASHING MACHINE

Custody battle? Maybe somebody forgot to separate the whites and the colors?

Sometimes the lack of proper care to syntax leads to me innapropriatley chortling to myself at my desk before realize that a situation is, in fact, quite serious.

1609 Public Service Other

Narrative:

Health/Welfare Check

Narrative

INVOLVED PARTY STATED THAT IT WAS JUST A FIGURE OF SPEECH WHEN SHE TOLD A COUNCIL ON AGING REPRESENTATIVE THAT SHE WISHES SHE WAS DEAD. ALL IN ORDER.

Initially, I gleaned from this narrative that a caller to the COA had made a murderous threat against a representative, leading police officers to investigate and resulting in the caller using  the “just kidding!” defense. Which, when you think about it, is really more ludicrous then funny.  However, after using a little deductive reasoning, I figured this was more likely a case of a caller confiding to a member of the COA that, they themselves, no longer wished to be alive. Which is, honestly, very sad.

I’m a terrible person.

This last one, though, epitomizes the occasional near-lunacy of the blotter in its raw form.

1005 Disturbance General

Narrative:

911 CALLER REPORTING UNKNOWN DISTURBANCE BETWEEN “JOEY CRACK”  AND                               LANDLORD.

I wonder what “JOEY CRACK” does for a living. Insurance Claims adjuster?

Anyways, these are just a few pulled from this week’s logs that probably won’t even find their way into the newspaper. It’s only the tip of the iceberg.

As more hilarious, weird and unsettling stuff comes my way, I’ll be sure to share it with y’all.

I figured I’d use this introductory post to write a little something on why, I feel, people find blogs so useful. Before I get into that, though,  I want to write something more general about this particular form of media – Blogs. A blog, in essence, isn’t really any different from a column in the sports’ section or an editorial  on the back page of of your newspaper. In fact, as far as I see, there’s nothing fundamentally bloggy about blogs that separates them from any other outlet that folks use to express themselves.  That’s why I found it sort of confusing about two years about when the bitterness among members of the mainstream press toward blogs reached critical mass.

Their argument, distilled, went something like : “These bloggers don’t even work for a newspaper! Who are they to disseminate information!”

That kind of chatter has diminished with many of those reporters lodging such complaints (Stephen A. Smith and Tony Marriotti come directly to mind) have moved their own content online. Yet, I still believe there is a basic misunderstanding about what a blog is. Quietly, I think that reporters like Smith and Marriotti quietly feared that, perhaps, a varied information landscape would further push them and their work toward the margins. The Internet has given basically anyone with a computer and a form of connecting an outlet to express themselves. The results have been varied. There are brilliant Blogs and Bloggers. There are also disastrously bad Blogs and Bloggers. Seems like the same can be said for … everything else that … um … exists.

If there is something that distinguishes blogs from other types of media it’s how people have overwhelmingly chosen to use them. While newspapers write about things that happen, bloggers, often, tend to write about  what’s been written about what has happened.  And, from what I’ve observed, the appeteite for that kind of information is voracious.

Knowing that Selectmen voted X or that the school committee approved Y simply isn’t enough for curious people anymore.  More, even having all the intricate details of what lead to such a vote laid out meticulously won’t satisfy many. Readers now want to know a little something about what goes into providing such information, and, they want an outlet to discuss and challenge the information that is presented to them as absolute.

I think that that’s just awesome.

I’m going to continue to do what I do for the Bourne and Sandwich Enterprise, which is try to cover stories that matter to locals in a responsible manner. What I hope this blog will offer is some insight into how I try to do that, and a little bit of what I think about what is going on in town. As a reporter, I’m lucky enough to have access to many of the folks who’s decisions have a direct impact on the lives of folks on the Upper Cape. And, as news lovers of all of all ages already look to web for information, some of them exclusively, I think it is my responbility to deliver some additional content to them in a form they find meaningful.