Another H.L. Mencken/Fred-Area Journalism Award, With a Few Caveats

That Was the Week That Was

By Steve Watkins

ADVANCE EDITOR

Worth repeating: “As I look back over a misspent life, I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It is really the life of kings.” —H. L. Mencken

This week’s Fred/Mencken goes to John Sims, that guy you see around town all the time in his white t-shirt, black gym shorts, and slides—never without his camera and drone, and surely a police scanner in his car, or bike, or personal jet-pack, whatever he uses for chasing cop cars and ambulances.

John is the local one-man journalism operation known as Hyperbole, which has to be the most wrong-headed name ever for a newspaper (or news-Facebook page, or news-Instagram site, or news-anything). Content may be sketchy at times, and John’s writing could use some work, but he deserves full credit for practicing what we in the business call—or used to call, anyway, as much as I detest unnecessary acronyms—“GOYA, KOD.”

That is, “Get Off Your Ass, Knock on Doors.”

Too much contemporary reporting is just the opposite: text “interviews,” emailed questions to sources (and carefully curated quotes in responses). Limited chances for follow-up. No direct observations. No revealing answers to seemingly benign but important questions after the formal part of the interview is over and you’ve put away your notepad and tape recorder, and sources are relaxed while walking you to the door, and as often as not they blurt out something they didn’t intend to say, or they tell you something that puts you onto an even better and more important story.

Don’t expect process journalism or listicles on John’s social media posts, and thank the journalism gods for it. (More about those in a future column.)

Shortly after the terrible murder of a local woman by her ex-boyfriend two weeks ago, John got off his ass and went to the woman’s apartment complex. He found a large police presence there, and more significantly a message someone had taped up for residents telling them what had happened earlier when the ex ambushed the woman and her two kids in the parking lot. The ex was the children’s father.

John also got hold of arrest and bail records for the man, information about the woman’s application for a restraining order, and eventually, from one of Hyperbole’s 43,000 followers on Facebook, the name of a man who the commenter said had committed the murder—and then drove a couple of miles away and killed himself.

Earlier, John, his camera, and his drone had shown up at the murder scene where the woman crashed her car at the intersection of Emancipation Highway and College Avenue, near the University of Mary Washington campus. She’d been shot multiple times by the ex while trying frantically to get away. The car was still there, as were a number of police. The children had been taken to the hospital where they were treated for minor injuries, but survived.

John’s immediate post on Hyperbole got 600 responses, 200 comments, and nearly 150 shares. We quoted some of his reporting in The Advance. (A month ago, John’s post about the man or woman in a freaky Pink Panther costume and cowboy boots frightening children on Lafayette Boulevard got 1.3 thousand responses, nearly 500 comments, and more than 900 shares. John had tracked down the children’s mother for comments.)

Hyperbole has its detractors, and understandably so. John has a tendency to post first, ask questions later—if he bothers or has time. Here’s hoping he does a better job going forward of posting primary sources instead of just telling readers and listeners about what he discovered: picture of the actual note left at the woman’s apartment complex, copy of the restraining order and bail application. Here’s also hoping he does a better job of verifying information—and reining in unverified claims by others on his Facebook and Instagram sites.

10,000+ followers on Instagram, btw, in addition to those 43k Facebookers. Impressive work and reach by a guy with no training who had a notion six years ago during the local Black Lives Matter protests, and has stuck with it ever since. John’s brand of community journalism ought to be a challenge to all of us in the business.

Paid subscriptions for Hyperbole are $9.99/month. John also runs some sponsored content to help pay the bills. No idea how he gets around so fast in those slides.

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Things we can do without: 18 email news blasts on a typical day—last Wednesday in this case—from the Free Lance-Star/Fredericksburg.com. AI must have something to do with it, because no human sitting at the internet controls can possibly think that’s a good way to promote anything—especially not soft features, non-breaking stories, newsletter pitches, subscription offers, sports round-ups, meeting previews, and duplicate posts, which were all I found when I opened and read every one of them, something that will never happen again. Between 6 and 10 a.m. today, while I’ve been writing this column, nine more Fred.com emails have landed in my in-box. My wife Janet, who used to work at the paper, tells me to block them, as if that’s something a technical moron like me would know how to do. And besides, I’d hate to miss anything important, when and if it ever comes.

Deep Dive of the Week: Scott Shenk’s week-after reporting in the Free Lance-Star on June 7 with the print headline “Rogue operator issues revive,” and the drophead “Records: Warning signs existed before Stafford incident that killed five.” The online head was “Bus company in fatal Stafford crash showed warning signs.” Scott reminded readers about a similar fatal bus crush on I-95 in Caroline County 15 years ago, other crashes around the country around that time, and licensing and oversight regulations that were supposed to address the problem of so-called rogue bus operations, many of them with untrained, even unlicensed, drivers. Scott included follow-up information about the tragic Stafford crash, and the federal Department of Transportation response. Apparently, a number of these companies have Chinese-American and immigrant owners and operators. I could have done without Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s xenophobic tweets, which were included in the article, although I suppose those were important, too, and revealing in other ways.

Layout of the Week: Brandon Neasman’s June 14 FLS front page with Pilar Davis’s feature story “Celebración con baile.” Pilar also took the excellent photograph, which filled the top half of the page, and which Brandon creatively cropped, with the Free Lance-Star nameplate superimposed in reverse type. See for yourself:

New Hire of the Month: The Advance’s Adele Uphaus, by the Fredericksburg Free Press. With The Advance in transition—new editor; moving away from daily news coverage and more into features, investigation, and analysis—Adele should be more at home at The Free Press, which operates more as a conventional newsroom, with conventional newspaper focus and writing, similar to The Free Lance-Star, where Adele also used to work. The Free Press is fortunate to have her, and they know it, as evidenced by the coming-out event they’re promoting at the end of the month—introducing Adele to their readers, and re-introducing her and her prodigious reporting skills (on the education beat in particular) to the community.