One mystery Solved

[bogwitch]

So that police tape incident I mentioned a couple of days ago? I found out what happened.

Turns out it wasn't a boring break in as surmised. Nor was it a grisly murder of a marine or air cadet, but it was close! It was a stabbingI probably heard it, but as I was trying to tune out the row, I don't think I heard anything at all useful

Comments

[quinara]

Oh dear! Glad to hear the victim's probably OK.

(There's nothing quite like regional reporting, is there - 'possession of an offensive weapon, namely a knife' is a line of pure gold.)

[bogwitch]

I think he needs to pick who he hangs out with better.

(It makes me wish I'd had a stab at journalism) ;D

[quinara]

Well, by your description this doesn't sound like the expected norm for the locals...

You'd have been good at it!

[bogwitch]

I'm not saying the locals are a lovely bunch, but not a lot happens in this town (except for the place blowing up). I think they export the trouble into Watford on a Friday night.

Nah. I realise now I would have been terrible. The writing wouldn't have been the problem, it's the interviewing and sniffing out stories (if they actually bother to do that for the local paper). I can be such a mouse sometimes - especially when I was younger. Plus I'm not nosy enough.

[quinara]

I think they export the trouble into Watford on a Friday night.

*nods* Wouldn't surprise me; Revs is where it's at...

It's definitely true you could be nosier. I always assumed most journalists got their news from press releases and PR phone calls though, if they weren't investigative - though this may be because my mum's in marketing and used (when she was in pressy stuff) to essentially send out articles to the local press, which then got three words changed and attributed to someone else...

[bogwitch]

Revs? Where's that? (I haven't been into Watford for a long time). I witnessed a rather bloody punch up outside the town hall once, I tend to avoid the town at the weekend after that.

Am I noticeably un-nosy then? I suspect so.

I got that impression too, certainly of the local press. I think you call them up and they send a photographer round if they can me arsed. I will never forget one frontpage of the Gazette that had a woman's stolen birdbath as the main headline - doubt they tramped around Hemel to find that one. My one journalism interview (for a fishing magazine!) was very much a regurgitate press release thingy. They didn't have any original content at all. Very much like part of my job now, translating accident reports from site language into readable reports, funnily enough.

I think the national press (and especially the TV) are a bit more proactive though.

[quinara]

Vodka Revolutions? It's a bar/club/chain thing that I've only ever been in the bar part of, but there's one in Watford and I think it was meant to be dodgy (we never really did that sort of going out in school; all my friends lived in inconveniently different places). It's probably not cool at all any more.

I don't know about nosy, but you definitely seem like less of a gossip-hound than me, and I think of myself as hardly being desperate. So to me you aren't nosy. :D

You see, you'd have been great!

National press, probably, but that's the sort of thing you can get into by learning how go about it on the job. I assume.

[bogwitch]

Oh is that the Russian place by the pond that's always empty (well it is in the week when I'm likely to go in it)? When I was 15 it was hanging out in the park or Macdonalds (the shame!), but at 18 or so, I was already hating the music and refusing to go to crap nightclubs (Paradise Lost once and never, ever again)

I often wonder if I just don't ask enough questions and this is why I'm always the last to know anything.

I noted that the report in the free paper was word for word what was on the website. A lot of investigating went on there!