I’m a fan of Edna Buchanan.

I love her books and jokingly call them “reporter porn.” They’re mysteries where most of the time the reporter is the good guy, the hero or the heroine, the smart one who solves the mystery, gets the story, the girl or guy, escapes from the clutches of the bad guys and all around wins when they play by the rules of fair reporting and good ethics. Basically, reporter porn. Some of Carl Hiaasen’s books are the same but more kitschy and … lacking Buchanan’s tips.

One tip I picked up from Buchanan is to carry your tools in your car. Her character Britt Montero keeps a Miami city directory in her back seat, as well as a change of clothes and shoes.

Being computer geeks, you would think that we would be able to find ANY phone number online. When you are covering a town that’s circa 1880 and socially stuck in the 1960’s, folks give out their phone numbers out like this, “I’m at 3551.” In McIntosh, the 591 prefix is a given. My home number is 591-3551. (Don’t bother calling me though. I rarely answer and keep a landline for the sole purpose of having DSL.) McIntosh is a dinky little historic town. A large segment of the population consists of retirees. The town is so small that some people and businesses just don’t show up in Google searches. This presents a problem for me periodically.

So, I created an Edna Buchanan box for the backseat of my car. I keep a McIntosh area phone book in my car and in my office at UF.

I also keep in my Edna box: a camera tripod, a mic stand, phonebooks for McIntosh, Ocala and Gainesville, a Florida Sunshine Law manual, a copy of the McIntosh Land Development Code, a copy of the McIntosh Comprehensive Plan, extra pens, notebooks, batteries for my digital recorder and camera. I take my camera bag in and out of the car, because I don’t want the electronics in the heat, or to get stolen. This is Florida, after all.

I carry the camera tripod because my old digital camera had such a terrible vibration problem. This paid off for me once. Last December, I ran down to the little grocery store in McIntosh. While shopping, someone ran into the store and yelled for someone to call 911 because a car struck a man outside on U.S. 441. I was able to take pictures of this scene. It was just past dusk with my earthquake camera, so the images were pretty bad.

Ironically, some residents chastised me for posting them, even though I decided against running the image I had that was more of a close up. I was also caught in a tug of war between local residents who wanted me to post his name and residents who didn’t. One woman told me that if it was important enough to run his name, The Gainesville Sun would do it. The Sun never mentioned the accident, and I finally put the name in the comment section under discussion, where it would be less likely to show up in a Google search. While the town has done little about crosswalks at U.S. 441 as a result of the story, the broken street lamp directly over where the man had been hit was promptly fixed.

There are a number of reasons I’ve rarely used photos in the my blog. Some of them have been the negative reaction from the community. But the main reason is that my old camera took such horrible pictures. I bought a new Canon a week or so ago that I’m loving, which means I’m going to start posting more pictures in the McIntosh blog. We had a council meeting last night where I took a whole bunch of shots. Posting them means facing the sensitivity in the community, so I’m giving some thought today and this weekend on how to use them.

I’d love to read about what other reporting tips the rest of the class has like the Edna box.