Conrad Malsom reminded me of one thing last week, and for that, as much as for his almost single-handed detection of the alleged Ohio sniper, I have to thank him. He reminded me why I got out of daily journalism.
As a stringer for a national daily newspaper, I was called Wednesday morning to see what I could dig up about Conrad Malsom, the man who kept calling and calling and calling police until they finally blinked and found that he really had located Mike McCoy, the man accused of 24 sniper shootings in Ohio.
The media pack was already all over Malsom. He had spent hours with local and national media with his extraordinary story. So I had to find something different, some "color," about the very quotable Malsom.
First I woke up a cop I knew. I'd never asked a cop to "run a name," the way they do on TV. And I'd have been better off not asking this time. Groggy from little sleep, the cop cursed, said he doesn't do that—"goes against my code." One source ruined.
Then I called a state political operative to see if a quick scan of voting registrations might turn up something.
Bingo.
The Oasis RV park—swank, as RV parks go, with an 18-hole golf course and pools to accommodate some 900 stalls—as an address for Conrad Malsom. The phone number went to someone who, from his sleepy growl, I imagined as having a massive head, hairy back. Not Malsom. Next stop:an FBI press conference.
Five years ago, you wouldn't have seen so many TV news cameras at an FBI press conference to announce the arrest of someone who had only killed one person in Ohio. Five years ago, every podunk cable station in the land didn't have talking heads, either. So Wednesday morning, the parking lot in front of the FBI's Charleston Boulevard office was packed with some 10 cameras, news trucks with satellite feeds and police.
After the expected reticence of the FBI to say anything beyond the most obvious—time of arrest and kudos to the arresting officers—I asked Metro Lt. Ted Lee, a veteran whom you could sense wasn't as troubled by the media as most administrators—if I could talk to one of his charges, Sgt. Raymond Reyes.
"Yeah, yeah, go ahead."
Since the media moves in herds, everyone followed. A cameraman grabbed my shoulder and pushed me out of the way. Reyes confirmed what the FBI could not. He talked about the value of Malsom's persistence in leading to the arrest. He was real. Honest. Doing his job.
I broke all land-speed records getting to the RV park two miles south of Mandalay Bay. The registration clerk says Malsom hasn't been around since November. "Oh, and he can't come back," she said, though she could not say why. A phone number he had left had since been disconnected.
Speeding back Downtown, I went to the courthouse to look at the case file of a suit in which Malsom is named as a defendant. I'm not good with legal jargon, so I called the man listed as Malsom's attorney. He didn't know who I was talking about. Then he hit on it: Malsom must have been named, along with a bunch of other Cadillac employees, in a suit that the attorney called "very minor." Human resources at the dealership wouldn't comment on why Malsom no longer worked there..
I touched base with the main writer in Ohio. Just write what I have, he said. On the way to my office—in this case, a coffee shop with free wireless Internet connections—I got stuck in construction traffic. The cell rang: It's the national paper's editor. Send what I have, he said. I do, 40 minutes later. It's not great writing, but it gets the job done.
The next day, the story had Reyes' quote and Lee's. None of my color about Malsom got in. But I did get an italicized mention at the bottom of the story.
But what does it all mean? What's a reader to grasp from the thousands of words of disposed-of copy, hours of digital tape and thousands of kilowatt hours spent zapping this stuff around the world? As an old editor used to say, what's this giving to the guy making hot dogs at Oscar Mayer?
Forget insight into the mind of a sniper, his life, history and why he became that way. Don't even think about a look into the overwhelming influence of the mass media on the actions of Conrad Malsom, both before he met McCoy and after, when he spent hours sleuthing.
A first draft of history? Maybe. A paycheck? Definitely. A personal pat on the back? Sure.
Mostly it confirmed why breakneck, daily news is a nice thing to visit, but I'm glad I don't live there anymore. Because at the end of that hectic day, after a scan of the news channels, national and local, after reading the local stories on the Malsom/McCoy chance meeting the next morning, I realized one thing.
Dailies don't need me. There were plenty enough reporters on the story—all those cameras, all that ink, all that paper and all those bleached teeth—to report the same story over and over and over and over …