Friday was one of those days when it’s tough to be a community newspaper journalist.

It had been a challenging week already, with the emotional funeral for Toledo Detective Keith Dressell on Monday and the highly charged public hearing on closing Monroe schools on Tuesday.

Then early Friday morning, reports came in that a car had driven off a bridge into a creek near Milan. The driver, a 39-year-old woman, didn’t survive.

At about the same time, we learned that a bus carrying Blufton University baseball players, including two Ida High School graduates, had crashed off an interstate overpass in Atlanta, killing six. One of the Ida students was badly hurt.

We already had planned a story for Page 1 on the devastating tornadoes that had killed at least 20 people in Georgia and Alabama. That made three tragic, deadly stories on Page 1 of Friday’s newspaper.  

Ironically, the other two stories on the page were upbeat - a feature on a nurse who was given an award for saving a man’s life, and a fun story about what people would do with the money if they won the $267 million jackpot.

Still, it was a depressing morning at The Evening News, and Friday’s paper was probably depressing for many readers. That’s part of being a newspaper, but it’s not a role we enjoy.

Thankfully, this weekend there’s some good news to report. Dundee High School won the state wrestling championship, and Bedford High School made it to the semifinals.

Congratulations to the Vikings and Mules.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Local issues, events, The Evening News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.