The editor-in-chief of the Jackson Free Press never intended to write the story that won her a 2005 AltWeekly Award for Feature Story. She'd assigned it to another writer. And then she ran into one of the subjects of the piece, they got to talking, and over the next six months she developed her heart-rending account of a family that suffered at the hands of a priest. This is the second in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
Nashville TV news reporter James Lewis recently ended a segment on an undercover prostitution sting by claiming that the Nashville police department arrested a McDonald's employee for selling a Big Mac to a hooker, thereby violating a law against "giving nutrition to a prostitute." Turns out Lewis was a victim of Google -- which he used to find the December 2004 Nashville Scene humor column in which the apocryphal anecdote was reported -- and his own credulity, which prevented him from recognizing obvious signs that the piece was a joke. Like, for instance, the fact that the column is called "The Fabricator." Lewis tells the Scene that it all worked out for the best since he wants to get into the real estate business anyway.
Mike Massey's column poking fun at students obsessed with their pickup trucks was rejected by the school paper for being "too liberal," so he decided to start a newspaper of his own. Splat! -- which aspires to be like Rolling Stone magazine in its early years, according to the News & Observer -- is scheduled to debut in November. "You aren't going to see stories about student government votes or trustee meetings in our paper," Massey tells the N&O. "I expect our stories to address the environment, women's issues, minority affairs, sex, student activism, drinking. This is what students talk about, but you don't see it in papers like the [North Carolina State school newspaper]."
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