July 14, 2008

The new issue of the Southwest Journal came out today. It’s full of stories of mine. The stories that I don’t like at all. The biz buzzes, the what’s broken, the landscaping one that I wrote over a month ago, the one where moss can actually clean pools better than chlorine (that one I didn’t actually mind, it was pretty interesting), and the story that I expect to win a Pulitzer Prize for… pet therapy.
The moss one was fine, the part I hated about that wasn’t about the story or topic itself, it was that I had to talk to this guy, and only this guy, to get a hold of David Knighton, and I couldn’t talk to Knighton himself unless he called me. That got really old, and made things difficult.
Pet therapy. So I never wanted to write this story, I told Jake that writing this story would hurt the paper’s credibility as a newspaper and our credibility as responsible journalists. He didn’t care. Assigning me a story about a woman who is convinced that she can relax pets and calm them, which I did not not believe, though after seeing her try to do it… I think that’s b.s. too. Oh, and she thinks she can talk telepathically to pets as well. Let’s just say that after meeting with her twice, the second time where she tried to work on another intern’s dog, failing, I wasn’t the only one who thought she was crazy. But Jake said we had gone so far on the story, we just had to finish it. So I sucked it up and wrote as unbiased as possible.
She called me twice, e-mailed me five other times, along with e-mailing Jake and the editor, Sarah, every time saying how much she loved the story and thanking me for writing it, while asking if we could put her company name and web address at the bottom so she could put it on her blog. That actually made me pretty proud. It proved that, even though I was laughing at her the whole time I was on that story, I was able to put that aside and write totally unbiased.

http://animalbridge.blogspot.com/ check out the post right under the post about my article. “Why is Carmella licking? She tells Elaine…” I like how this is on the same site that my blogs are for this summer.