rest of the new guys. Compared to the pristine Chiba office, this was, to put it subtly, a bit of a comedown. Chappy breathed deeply and said, “This is a rat hole. I was hoping for something a little snazzier.” Frenchie said, “Sure doesn’t look like the typical newspaper office in the company pamphlet.” The Face said he’d heard of worse.
The office consumed most of the second floor of an office building in a residential neighborhood. The bureau chief had his own office with a door. The rest of the office was all open space, no cubicles, no privacy. The reception area near the window wasn’t the most welcoming place. There were three faux leather sofas surrounding one long table overflowing with newspapers, hiding the reams of magazines piled underneath. The blinds over the window were covered with a nicotine glaze that, like flypaper, had trapped everything from dust to particles of food to, oh yeah, insects.
There were two large islands of desks. The two editors had the desks near the middle of the room. The senior reporters had the three desks in the back and the luxury of a sofa jammed against the wall. There wasa darkroom and, next to it, a tatami-mat room where the night staffers slept. (It came complete with a shower/bath and a desk stuffed with porn in the lower drawers.) The editors would take naps there, but it was off limits to the other reporters while the sun shone. As for the four new guys, their desks were in the middle of the room, where they were most vulnerable.
Almost every desk had a multibutton phone but no computer (too early in history for that). There was a modified network station where stories were typed in and sent to the head office for final review. We sent our stories over the phones to the terminal, and Shimizu retyped and formatted them. It was pretty inefficient.
Ono showed up around nine, bleary-eyed and cranky, appearing to have slept in the suit he had been wearing the night before. He stood in front of the reception table and glared at us.
“Who the hell told you you could sit down here!” he yelled.
We immediately stood up.
He laughed and told us to sit down. Nakajima then handed us a copy of the police reporter manual, version 1.1, titled
A Day in the Life of the Police Reporter;
a beeper, which would forever be clasped to our hips and which had to always be on; and, finally, a set of documents—collections of articles under such categories as Robbery, Homicide, Assault, Arson, Drugs, Organized Crime, Bid Rigging, Traffic Accidents, and Purse Snatching. Yes, purse snatching. In 1993, serial purse snatching was still enough of a newsworthy item to merit its own reporting style; sometimes, apparently, it was good enough to command the lead story for the local edition.
“These are examples of the types of stories you will be covering as police reporters,” Nakajima explained. “Study the articles and remember the style. I’ll expect you to know it within a week. You have everything you need now to write an article. Now it’s about getting to work.”
That was the beginning and the end of our formal training as police reporters.
The next item on the agenda was an explanation of our daily duties other than reporting. When we came to the office in the evening, for example, we were expected to take dinner orders from the senior staff. And when we ended up on the night shift, we were required to update the scrapbooks.
The scrapbook rules were incredibly complicated. There were instructions on where to write the date of an article, how to write whichedition of the paper it came from, where to file, where to multiple-file, and how to note national editions and front-page articles. The manual for handling the scrapbook was considerably longer than the one for covering the police beat.
We were also introduced to other duties, including writing mini-biographies for a section known as “The Little King of Our House” in the free local paper distributed by
The office consumed most of the second floor of an office building in a residential neighborhood. The bureau chief had his own office with a door. The rest of the office was all open space, no cubicles, no privacy. The reception area near the window wasn’t the most welcoming place. There were three faux leather sofas surrounding one long table overflowing with newspapers, hiding the reams of magazines piled underneath. The blinds over the window were covered with a nicotine glaze that, like flypaper, had trapped everything from dust to particles of food to, oh yeah, insects.
There were two large islands of desks. The two editors had the desks near the middle of the room. The senior reporters had the three desks in the back and the luxury of a sofa jammed against the wall. There wasa darkroom and, next to it, a tatami-mat room where the night staffers slept. (It came complete with a shower/bath and a desk stuffed with porn in the lower drawers.) The editors would take naps there, but it was off limits to the other reporters while the sun shone. As for the four new guys, their desks were in the middle of the room, where they were most vulnerable.
Almost every desk had a multibutton phone but no computer (too early in history for that). There was a modified network station where stories were typed in and sent to the head office for final review. We sent our stories over the phones to the terminal, and Shimizu retyped and formatted them. It was pretty inefficient.
Ono showed up around nine, bleary-eyed and cranky, appearing to have slept in the suit he had been wearing the night before. He stood in front of the reception table and glared at us.
“Who the hell told you you could sit down here!” he yelled.
We immediately stood up.
He laughed and told us to sit down. Nakajima then handed us a copy of the police reporter manual, version 1.1, titled
A Day in the Life of the Police Reporter;
a beeper, which would forever be clasped to our hips and which had to always be on; and, finally, a set of documents—collections of articles under such categories as Robbery, Homicide, Assault, Arson, Drugs, Organized Crime, Bid Rigging, Traffic Accidents, and Purse Snatching. Yes, purse snatching. In 1993, serial purse snatching was still enough of a newsworthy item to merit its own reporting style; sometimes, apparently, it was good enough to command the lead story for the local edition.
“These are examples of the types of stories you will be covering as police reporters,” Nakajima explained. “Study the articles and remember the style. I’ll expect you to know it within a week. You have everything you need now to write an article. Now it’s about getting to work.”
That was the beginning and the end of our formal training as police reporters.
The next item on the agenda was an explanation of our daily duties other than reporting. When we came to the office in the evening, for example, we were expected to take dinner orders from the senior staff. And when we ended up on the night shift, we were required to update the scrapbooks.
The scrapbook rules were incredibly complicated. There were instructions on where to write the date of an article, how to write whichedition of the paper it came from, where to file, where to multiple-file, and how to note national editions and front-page articles. The manual for handling the scrapbook was considerably longer than the one for covering the police beat.
We were also introduced to other duties, including writing mini-biographies for a section known as “The Little King of Our House” in the free local paper distributed by
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