Covering police news can be one of the most fun and exciting beats for reporters. Stories about crime, criminals and law enforcement are among extremely popular with the news-consuming public.
This is also an exacting beat, requiring a reporter to have a keen sense of the public’s interest, an eye for detail, sound observation skills, a willingness to build a rapport with police and fire officials and a sense of adventure. It also includes much more mundane tasks, such as the necessity to spend many hours reading records and researching documents.
Mark Puente, a reporter for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, Ohio won the 2010 Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting from the University of Colorado’s School of Journalism. The award recognized a series of stories Puente wrote that detailed corruption by a local sheriff. Here is just one of those stories.
Reading this blog post got me thinking about what Keith Phaneuf said the day he came in to talk to our class. He said that accidents and crime are among the easier things to report and that they require less training. Based on the amount of news writing I’ve done and the news I’ve been subjected to, I’d agree with his statement. While police news certainly requires great attention to detail and dedication, I feel that it simply reports the happenings and doesn’t necessarily dig deep enough into the story. Perhaps this is why new journalists are often assigned to the police beat- so they can gain experience in an area that requires less in-depth reporting. Still though, Puente’s work about the corrupt sheriff is very good and breaks the mold of most police beats.