So you want to be a reporter covering crime stories?
Can you listen to the screams of a man trapped in a burning car as he’s cooked alive?
Do you have the oratorical skills to calm a grief-stricken mother long enough to borrow a photo of her teen daughter fatally shot just two hours earlier in a gang drive-by?
Can you stand with dry eyes by a firefighter while he weeps over the 12-year-old boy whose lifeless body he just pulled from a smoke-filled home?
Do you have an answer ready when a distraught father asks why his son would kill himself in front of his classmates?
How are you at handling shotgun spray as you dive behind a parked car during a siege?
The best horror stories are inspired by real life.
Thomas Edwards
Can you walk through the housing courts at 3 a.m. knocking on doors to find the family of a fugitive gangbanger?
Does an exploding tanker truck or collapsing building that knocks you on your back rattle your nerves?
What about the roaring boom from a crashed cargo plane as the resulting heat wave washes over you out on the tarmac?
How about exposure to toxic gas when a refrigeration plant burns, leaving several dead?
Do you mind wading through chest-high waters and floating red-ant mounds to get an interview from families stranded in their homes by a record flood?
Does having your news vehicle lifted and dropped into a ditch by a tornado shake you?
Do you run toward a hurricane, not away?
Are you prepared to interview a mass murderer who executed teen girls in cold blood and not bat an eye no matter what he says?
And, facing all of this, can you under extreme deadline pressure spin a captivating, accurate yarn that follows Associated Press style?
If so, you might do a halfway decent job.
(These are all based on my own experiences).
