Crime beat: All you need to know

Alright, here's the deal.

Now that I know what I am doing to an extent, here's your guide to crime beat.

Crime beat is pretty hard to describe just because it is so different. My schedule is pretty wonky and some days I end up writing about three articles before my 11 a.m. deadline. On days like that, my afternoon can be slower or just as hectic. It just depends.

The fun part about my job: I am always on my toes. I have no idea what is going to come of each day when I get to work.

The hard part about my job is in the description: its CRIME reporting. Crime reporting often means digging in to get info on things that aren't always pleasant, and that usually involve at least one person having a bad day.

The most important thing, I think, is detachment. It's good to care about the story and be empathetic with the people while it is happening, and it's always good be be nice to the police officers/ sheriff's deputies that are giving you the info because they are taking time out if their day and investigations to talk to you, but at some point, you have to view it for what it is. A story.

It's a true story, and some of them are quite horrible, I have to know when to move on from it. Sometimes that's hard and sometimes it's taxing, and there is definitely a much larger separation that I have to make between between what I do for work and what I do with the rest of my life.

So now, onto what I do, if there's even a way to explain what that is:

Every morning when I get to work, I check the press release sent to us by the fire department. I look it over and decide if any of the items should be included in the morning blotter, or if there are some items that require an additional story. And sometimes those need an additional call to the fire department.

At 8:30 every morning I have a meeting with the sheriff. I get to the Sheriff's Office and receive a log of all the calls they have had since I had last been there. I mark the ones that I want to know more about, and then we are called back into a conference room where they look up the calls that we marked on the sheet.

I then head directly to the police station and do the same thing. By the time I get back to the office, it's usually around 9:30 or 10 depending on how many calls we have to go through.

Then I come back and report if there were any calls that might require an additional story; these usually include bad traffic accidents and sometimes bad domestic violence cases. Basically anything that would require more than 80 words to describe to the public what happened and what charges came out of it.

I write up blotter, which is ideally around 550 words, yell out "blotter's in," one of the main reasons why I am sure we have an open office, and wait for my editor to ask me questions on blotter, if they have any.

Hopefully this is all done by our 11 a.m. deadline and then I copy edit proofs of the news pages. I, along with two other reporters, sit on couches and chairs in what we call the "mosh pit to edit the pages."

My afternoon is usually spent writing up other feature stories and stories for the paper in Wright, a small town of about 2,000 people just south of Gillette.

Around 2 p.m. a paper fresh of the presses (quite literally), lands on my desk. Oftentimes the ink is still a little wet and it's quite possibly one of my favorite parts of the afternoon.

So there's one paper down, and we get to do it all again the next day, so the reporter is never really "done."