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Stuck in the Notebook: The Introduction


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I take a lot of notes…a lot. 

I am an old fashioned kind of guy when it comes to reporting, and how it’s done. Many reporters these days use audio recording devices to report on stories, and although I do that quite a lot, I mostly rely on a pen and paper. 

My notebooks are not neat, and my handwriting is atrocious. Calling it chicken scratch would be an insult to some of the more intelligent chickens. It’s really only legible to me, my shorthand is my own language, and only I really know what it was I jotted down while listening at a meeting or interviewing a subject or a source. 

An NYPD officer assigned to the department’s public information unit, DCPI, once called me a “Scribbler” at a press conference in Brooklyn, and I don’t think he meant it affectionately. 

My first few news notebooks were borrowed from my Grandfather, who many of you know as the former Managing Editor of this paper. He had a small shelf of them leftover once he hung up his reporter’s cap to enjoy a retirement of fiction writing and wondering why the New York Yankees don’t just bunt more. 

Since I began my relatively brief career as a news reporter, which I am comfortable say began in my second week of undergrad at Brooklyn College, I have kept and collected every single notebook I have used as a journalist. I am currently on number 27. 

In my adventures as a reporter, in college, in Rockaway, and citywide, I have interviewed a lot of people, and as I said, taken a lot of notes. 

Those notebooks, which often adorne a random sticker I found while using it, are numbered, dated, and have a “Table of contents” listing what’s in each one. 

Number 1, dated September 2017 to May 2018, contains my first reporting for The BC Kingsman in college, which includes notes from a reporting trip where I followed a student-led lobbying group to Albany as they fought for increased CUNY funding. 

My favorite note in that book is one to myself, where after waiting in the December cold for the bus to Albany to arrive I wrote: “I deserve a (expletive) award for waiting in the cold at 5 a.m.” 

Number 10, which covers February 2020 to April 2020, contains my first reporting with The Wave, as well as my first notes as a reporter for the New York Daily News, where I covered crime and politics in all five boroughs.  

The best in those pages discuss the first days of Covid, and my first homicide story, the details of which I will spare you. 

“Even in this sickness someones gettin’ killed, ” said a man who lived a few doors down from the murder. He is quoted as Andrew D. 

Number 25, which is May and June of this year, is my first full notebook since I started as Community Editor. 

In that book, I spent two hours on a boat on Jamaica Bay with local environmental advocate Dan Mundy Jr. I learned a lot on that trip about our bay and its wildlife. 

On that ride he taught me about how just a single oyster can filter 30 gallons of water from the bay in a day…Fascinating right? No? Well I think it is and this is my column. It was so cool to me, but I couldn’t figure out how to get that tidbit into the story. 

All those notes have one thing in common. They never ran, they never made it to newsprint, they never saw the light of day. 

Among the many quotes and conversations I have recorded in those notebooks, I’ve learned a lot, and heard tons of amazing stories, but not all of them made it into the newspaper. 

In some cases, they weren’t pertinent to the story, in others, a rewrite person didn’t like them, or there just wasn’t space in the paper.  

In recent issues, I may have talked about the Day Twins, two city kids who travel down to Rockaway to surf with Lou Harris’ Black Surfing Association, what I learned about wood carving from The Wave’s delivery guy, or the funny story about how the Rockaway Rugby Fisheads took the second “H” out of their name. 

All fun stuff, but stuff that just wouldn’t have been relevant in the articles they are related to. 

In this column, I’ll talk about things I learned that week that I found interesting, but for whatever reason didn’t make it into the news story, the things that got stuck in the notebook. 

Since its opening days, the New York Times has labeled itself as “All the news that’s fit to print,” this column is going to be all the other stuff. 

I hope you enjoy it. 

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