Obviously: Coda

You lose track after a while.

All of the events, games, crime reports, board meetings and feature stories blow by like trees in the 30-mile per hour gusts Missouri seems to get on a daily basis. 

If you stay in this job long enough, a few are going to stand out, of course. 

I’ve thought about all of the long nights I’ve spent in the newsroom, especially on Wednesdays preparing for Thursday’s deadline, and hearing the little creaks and noises, wondering if it’s the ghost whom I’ve been seemingly chasing since I first arrived here.

I hope I made Bob Simmons proud sitting at his desk all this time, even if I never reached his popularity, even though it was never my intended goal or purpose in the first place. I knew from the moment I heard his name, there was a standard that was never going to be reached here.

All I could do was my job as best as I could do it, in my style, with my personality and force.

I didn’t get into this profession to be loved or hated. I became a sportswriter as a diversion, believe it or not, from military service. Making the switch to news was actually an involuntary choice a little over a decade later.

However, in both sports and news writing alike, the purpose is the same: to present the facts as accurately as possible, without slant or prejudice, adhering to highest form of journalistic ethics.

We must be able to hold our elected officials to task, because we are “watchdogs” for the community, the final barrier between those in power and the people. If our voices are silenced, or corrupted, then there is nothing stopping those people from doing what they want in darkness.

I was always taught to bring light to that darkness – and I will never apologize for anything I have written in that regard.

I can honestly say I’m not a popular person across the parking lot from this building at the Lincoln County Justice Center, because of a series of stories I’ve written over the last two-and-a-half years – and they’re making the newspaper pay for it.

Voltaire once said, “it is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.”

No apologies!

I’m definitely not a popular person in Winfield after the last election, even though that was a complete soap opera that CBS couldn’t have even produced to create that much drama, or the late Jerry Springer could have mediated without actual blood being drawn.

You’re welcome!

Feathers are going to get ruffled sometimes in this job. Most of us don’t set out to do this, myself included, but it’s going to happen – and it’s always business, never personal. 

I have a job to do, and most times, things will get reported with details that might not be so flattering, even though they’re true.

We’re a newspaper, not a propaganda machine. Please don’t kill the messenger!

Every journalist makes mistakes, and I am not above them. Name a journalist who has never made one – and you’ve never met one.

However, no true journalist has ever made an error out of malice, and refused to own up to it. This is how media outlets get sued, and reporters get fired.

A family member always said to me, “if you have nothing else in this world, you still have your name and your reputation.”

Well my name is Shawn Singleton, and my reputation is pretty solid. I don’t plan on ruining either holding grudges, or sacrificing my ethics for anyone!

Wow! That was cathartic! I’ve been waiting three years to get that off my chest!

I need to catch my breath after that!

I find myself at peace with everything here after three years. From arriving at the beginning of a pandemic to nearly succumbing to it to multiple tragedies to other calamities to having to handle an entire county’s coverage alone, I am at peace with it.

Voltaire also said, “we are at the end of all our troubles, and at the beginning of happiness.”

Is it 632 square miles? Or 642 square miles?

Doesn’t matter anymore?

At this point, “wherever my travels may lead, paradise is where I am?”

Voltaire said that too…