Explaining it would require a very long, detailed piece that will have people still scratching their heads and wondering what the hell I'm talking about.

All I can say is: something about it gets under your skin. It poisons your blood with printers' ink, or at least that vegetable-based ink they use now that comes off and stains your hands on a hot summer day. It makes you want bad black coffee at 5 a.m. because you've been up all night writing about that car accident that took out three local 15-year-olds while they raced away from the cops in a stolen car.

Times like this, with the DNC is Boston, I'm not thinking about the screwed up traffic or worries about "terrorist threats" or...god help me...those god awful "free speech" cages set up for protestors outside the Fleet Center. (Someone please tell me what that fucking judge was thinking...)

All I want is to be a reporter again for just one more day.

There is nothing so sweet as getting your byline above the fold on the front page. There's nothing so heart-poundingly wonderful as lucking into a hell of a story, whether it's a tragedy or something good. There's nothing better than meeting all sorts of people under all sorts of circumstances. The fact that you own nothing of what you write, the fact people might not even know your name even if they see it every day...none of it matters.

And then I remember the bad black coffee at 5 a.m., the daily deadlines that never stop, and the heartless jokes about some pretty gruesome stories. When I was an EA at the Boston Herald waaaaay back in the late 80s, there was a December housefire where two children were burned to death. A freelance photographer brought in pictures, some of which included shots of dead children.

One editor, upon seeing the pictures, stood up on his desk and began singing at the top of his lungs, "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire..."

All of that sticks with you. And not always in a good way.

Last year when the body count started building about The Station in Rhode Island, where 96 people were burned to death at a Great What concert, guess what image popped in my head?

Go on. Guess.

Sometimes you have to find the funny otherwise you're going to cry.

See, that's the thing about local reporting: There's nothing blow-dried and perfect about talking to someone that's watched their neighborhood spiral out of control because of a riot. There's nothing uplifting about watching someone crumble as a five alarm fire destroys everything they've ever owned at two in the morning. And there's nothing worse than interviewing a 12-year-old cancer patient that'll be dead in less than two weeks.

What I'm trying to say: working the local, small-town press is nothing like the movies and nothing like television. It's different than life at the Boston Globe, I'm sure, the place were all local newspaper reporters in Massachusetts want to go when they die. I spent more than a year writing obits at the Boston Herald while still in college and I remember the controlled chaos that went into putting out a Sunday and Monday editions...I'm sure it's nothing like it once was.

Really, when you get down to it, reporters at the small and medium-sized papers tend to see life at extremes because that's where we (I mean they) work.

You either see people at their high-flyingest best, or at the lowest of the low. There is no in between. The story is not in the in between; it's always at the extremes because that's where you find out who people are.

Okay, maybe an overly romantic view: I try not to think about the endless city and town meetings where people argued over a single line in the fiscal year budget, although I remember more than a few Conservation Commissions and Zoning Boards that resulted in near fistfights.

So you see why I weep when I see how the media has sunk so low. I've watched journalism descend from the fourth estate to little more than a cheerleading squad for the rich and powerful. This is not the thing I was once part of. I don't know what it is, but it's not the thing I once loved to distraction.

That's why I thought it would be different this year: proximity of the DNC aside. I WASN'T GOING TO MISS THIS!

But I do...I really, really do.

Then the election will happen and the ache will go away for another four years. I hope.

I just want the media to be better when it happens.

Anyway, I'm jonesing at work for newsink and I find this cool article in the New York Times about independent bloggers getting press credentials to the DNC and RNC. I knew it was going on, of course, but it's interesting to see just how widespread it's becoming.

Look to the left at the links on my (new look) LJ and you'll see some political bloggers (must feed the beast after all).

And for people who are interested, here's the New York Times article:



( Web Diarists Are Now Official Members of Convention Press Corps )

I'd do him.

Seriously.

Aside from that, good speech. GREAT speech.

Maaaaaan, I missed you.

And key: Clinton talked about what the Democratic Party is, rather than what it isn't.

Duuuuuude, did he always talk like a preacher?

Lots of good lines there.

I'm verklempt. Seriously.

My little political wonky self is fanning herself....