Monday, June 17, 2002

FELLOWSHIP JOURNAL

The Waiting Game
A Day with Cops Reporter Mike Brassfield
By Whitney Kvasager

Photo by Ellen Sung

Mike Brassfield works the phone on the night cops shift at the St. Petersburg Times.

Mike Brassfield didn't set an alarm clock last night. He never does. He wakes up whenever he feels like it and rolls into work at 3 p.m.

Mike is the St. Petersburg Times night police reporter. He calls himself "the bad news man."

It's a good gig, he says. It gets you on the front page. It's good for the ego. It's high profile. It impresses mom. It does, though, make some folks hate you. And you end up seeing so many cadavers that they cease to disgust you – except when they've been found rotting a few days.

Today is Tuesday, the beginning of Mike's week. He settles into his desk, smack in the middle of the newsroom's "blue collar pod," where he, along with the day police reporter, files stories every day.

The "posh pod", where the reporters who write "whatever they want" live, is a little ways off. Those guys, Mike says, get paid more.

The afternoon comes and goes. He checks his messages. Nothing. He runs through the budget. Nothing. Mike's comrades are headed home, and his police scanner sounds louder when newsroom numbers dwindle, but it doesn't sound how he wants it to. No excited tones. No calls for the whole squad. No "signal sevens" indicating a homicide.

This isn't a bad day, necessarily. Just not the kind Mike lives for.

The ones where something really big happens – those are the great days.

"You go, go, go, go, go. You gather as much stuff as you can. You come back, and bam! You hit it, you write as much of it as you can in the car. And you look up and you turn the story in. Four or five hours have passed, and it's constant action. You're wired. You haven't had dinner, but you're not hungry. It's like drugs. But it's legal. And you get paid for it."

Mike's had great days. One of the greatest – he can't decide which is the absolute best – was the morning in South Carolina he spent talking to a woman who had killed her boyfriend in self defense. He then sped downtown to a college commencement in time to meet the governor. He remembers feeling high off the tight deadline. He remembers only a five-minute difference between shaking hands with a woman in the town's worst housing project and shaking hands with the man who ran the state.

Today is not among the greats, and Mike wanders over to the tube. Maybe the 6 o'clock news will be good for a tip. Or at the very least, a laugh.

A few newsroom remainders gather beneath the TV. "She sniffs glue. That's why her eyes are all big like that." "Man, we already have all this stuff." "Hey. Guys. Can you turn that down?"

This is not looking good. Mike flips through the channels and lands on one in the middle of a report about a child who died under state care. He had been taken from his grandmother, and Mike jots down a few notes. He talks to his editor. The Times doesn't have it. By 9 p.m. it will; Mike's been given the assignment. Finally, a story. He's got two and a half hours to turn it out. He makes some calls. He types a few lines. Another reporter goes out to interview the grandmother. Mike is jittery and takes a slug from his Diet Coke, satisfied that the day won't end without a little adrenaline.