
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, August 3, 1993                   TAG: 9308030037
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: Paul Dellinger
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK, THEN & NOW

It was early in 1990 when the first Reporter's Notebook column appeared in Current. Peter Mathews wrote a piece on how the spread of development into formerly rural areas of Montgomery County had affected people living there.

Since then, well over 100 of these weekly gems have been written by the various reporters who are, or have been, assigned to the newspaper's New River Bureau.

They have been as serious as Kathy Loan's and Greg Edwards' pieces on the sufferings of families of crime victims. They've been as humorous as Robert Freis' Valentine's Day column on running an ad for the perfect woman or Madelyn Rosenberg's piece on Rep. Rick Boucher's vow to remove any of his campaign stickers that don't peel off car bumpers. They've been as varied as Michael Stowe's warning about unfounded rumors on the Radford Arsenal's future and Kevin Kittredge's look behind the creation of a book by a group of senior citizens.

Written by reporters, these columns naturally veer into journalistic concerns on occasion, such as why the newspaper can't print unsigned (and therefore unverifiable) letters, how some local governing bodies discuss public business behind closed doors more than others, or the degree to which a "spontaneous" news event has been staged.

There have been recountings of less serious court cases, like the man whose excuse for speeding was that the baby in the car passed gas, and regrets over Pulaski County's having no bookstore - little items that would never be news stories but might be worth sharing with our readers, anyway.

Greg Edwards once did a whole column about his ruminations over coming up with material for the column.

That's not always easy. By nature, columns are sometimes subjective and reporters are always supposed to be objective, to the point where - at least at this paper - they voluntarily give up such rights as marching in demonstrations involving issues they might have to cover someday.

Ideally, you should not be able to tell how a reporter feels about an issue by reading his or her story on it.

But sometimes the columns can give you a slant on a news event that an objective news story can't. Sometimes they give us a chance to share tidbits that, by themselves, wouldn't qualify as a news or feature story. Sometimes they just give you the chance to know a little more about us personally.

And sometimes they are hard to generate - like now.

I had planned to do a piece about my years of working with Jack Chamberlain, our assistant editor at the New River Bureau who is taking early retirement and will have departed our ranks by the time you read this (and whose editing skills have saved me from faux pas in print any number of times). But Kathy beat me to it by a week.

I considered trying to be funny about coming up with a column idea. But Greg had already done that better than I could.

So, here we are, at the end of a column on the history of the column - and seven more weeks before I have to come up with another column idea.

Paul Dellinger covers Pulaski County for the Roanoke Times & World-News' New River Valley bureau.

by CNB