1.) I would enjoy moving from the obituary desk to the police beat for several reasons. First, it would be interesting to be more in-depth with my reporting. Reporters covering these types of stories are expected to go to the scene and speak with more people (witnesses, police officers, victims, etc.) to find out the who, what, where, when and why. For me it would be much more interesting to do the investigative reporting that goes along with covering the police beat. Another reason I would enjoy reporting police beats is the spontaneity of the job, you never know what will happen next or what story you are going to be assigned to cover.
2.) If I were forced to make the move from the obit desk to the police beat I think the hardest transition would be finding everyone I needed to talk to in order to produce a factual and all-encompassing story. After reading this chapter, I came to believe that handling these types of stories can create a lot of stress. When at the scene, the reporter must find police officers, coroners (if applicable), witnesses and victims in order to answer the questions journalists need to answer in their stories. Another hard transition for me would be the possibility of being around an accident where there are victims who are dead. I do not like blood and gore, so this would present a problem for me.
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There is no such thing as an "all-encompassing story." The story is what the story is on deadline.
Anecdote: Once upon a time when I was on the night cop beat at a paper at a small daily in Texas, the police scanner cracked with a "major-major," copspeak there for a bad wreck with at least one fatal. It was 10:06 p.m. Deadline was 11 p.m. This was the early '90s -- no cell phone, no laptops. I had a two-way walkie-talkie-type radio that worked if I could get far enough over the horizon to get a line-of-sight connection. Didn't come into play on this story. I roared out of the newsroom to the back alley, jumped in my 1989 4-cylinder Ford Ranger pickup and rushed to the scene, about 5 miles way. Pulled up as far as stopped traffic would let me. Continued on on the side of the four-lane highway, in the grass, puttering up just as close I could. Jumped out. Ran up to the scene. I saw two '70s-era cars that had hit head-on. From where I stood, I could see one of the two dead drivers; his left heel was sticking out of the back of his sock; the shoe had torn down the middle aback of the heel; the threads in the seam just snapped like twigs -- because, as I found out from chatting with a cop-ID tech working the wreck, both cars were going in excess of the speed limit, which meant more than 55, which meant that because one driver was on the wrong side of the freeway and didn't know it, and the other driver was just driving along on the curve minding his own business, they hit at full force. No interview took place. Just that chat with the cop. Didn't care what his name was. Didn't matter. I wrote down the color, type and etc. of both cars, wrote down the precise location of the wreck, and what all the officials and such were doing at the scene; took note of the few gawkers who were standing around. I probably took note of the weather. Got back in my pickup and rushed back the newsroom where I banged out about 8 inches on the wreck, on deadline. Turned it in at 11 p.m. sharp. 54 minutes from the time the scanner first cracked about the major-major. Not anything close to an "all-encompassing story." But a story. Turned in on deadline. The next day we ran a brief that identified the dead. I remember it because it was really a rush to go from sitting on my ass to rushing to a fatal, to rushing back to my desk, to banging out a story, all in 54 minutes flat.
Correction: The above happened in 1989. WARNING: Journalist doing math. Let's see, assuming by the class number that this is a junior-level college class on this blog, that would make y'all about 20 or 21 years old. Y'all all would've been about 5 then. Yeesh.
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