Off the I-15

In the news business, like anything else, it seems that it’s always feast or famine. Some days I find myself juggling five breaking news stories, and other days I find myself grasping around for anything to fill the “news hole,” as we call it. I know some people are firmly convinced that the media just sits around making things up. I wish it was that easy.

Today, for instance, I started out with about four story ideas, none of which ended up being the one I wrote. I spent the morning following multiple leads, but it eventually became obvious that none of them were going to come through in time for our 3 p.m. deadline. Some of my sources never called back, some were on their days off, some couldn’t tell me anything, and some just didn’t have the information I needed.

By 1:30, with deadline looming ahead of me, I was desperately scanning through the police logs in search of a hidden crime trend or interesting incident I might have missed. I called over to the sheriff’s station to ask about a couple of vehicle thefts that had been reported in the same area. Was this a trend? The sergeant I talked to didn’t think so, but had I heard about the two guys they arrested on suspicion of stealing fence posts?

Fence posts didn’t sound like much of a story, but I was willing to write about just about anything at that point. A couple of phone conversations later, I had my story for the day and it was actually a good one — a concerned citizen chased suspected metal thieves from Hinkley to Lenwood, after seeing them uprooting steel fence posts on Bureau of Land Management property. The chase ended with two men being arrested after being caught with about 80 fence posts. Hey, it wasn’t what I had in mind for the day, but I’ll take it.

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