The value of asking people to tell their own stories
I was apprehensive when Tim Ballenger's Facebook post was passed along to me.
His opening lines filled me with a sense of foreboding that this was not going to turn out well. Pulled over by Hoffman Estates police, Tim says it better than I can: "It's the middle of the night, on a dark road, I'm a black man with a gun."
Oh, geez, I thought, here comes a story that's become depressingly common: Some sort of skirmish between black people and white cops, and now in the heart of our circulation area.
As many of you know - Tim's post is up to 17,000 likes, more than 5,100 shares and almost 900 comments - the encounter turned out well: He produced his driver's license, proof of insurance and concealed carry permit. The young officer thanked him for doing so, let him off with a warning for driving 15 over the limit and told Tim to get his wife some ice cream - the reason they had detoured from the tollway in the first place. The punchline of his post was to let his Facebook friends, who are about 85 percent black, know that "Every cop is NOT out to Shoot Black People!"
Even after that happy ending, I still wasn't optimistic about the mission I'd been given: See if Tim would be interested in writing an essay for us on his experience and the reaction it received.
Wrong again.
Don't tell my bosses, but getting Tim's buy-in was easy. I messaged him with my pitch. He replied quickly: "Really? SURE!!!" and left his cellphone number.
We chatted briefly about how to approach the essay, deadlines (yes, even freelancers have deadlines), and that evening he sent me the narrative that appeared on Wednesday's front page. Again, don't don't tell my bosses, but my edits were minor. I did let Tim break a few traditional newspaper style rules - he seems to love capitalizing words and uppercasing all of many of them - but that seemed essential to preserving his voice, his style, the flavor of his writing.
There was a time, probably not too long ago, that our strategy after coming upon a Facebook post such as Tim's would have been to have a reporter track him down, do an interview and write a story about it. Would have been a fine story, I'm sure, but I wouldn't trade for the world the way this approach turned out. It's part of an initiative here at the Daily Herald to try to get more and different voices in the paper. Tim's first-person account carried the logo, "Straight from the Source," reflecting that.
Two days later, in Friday's editions, we asked for an essay from Sarah Katula, a domestic violence expert and nurse at Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove. She wrote about the just-released "Fifty Shades Darker" - that its main male character's abusive behavior shouldn't be confused with love and romance.
This initiative of injecting more voices into the paper, I should add, isn't unprecedented. Years ago, for instance, we started asking people involved in charitable walks to write first-person stories, which we labeled "Why we Walk." This was partly a product of not having enough staffers to write all the stories out there about the many, many walks occurring in our communities, but, funny thing: Turns out the cancer survivors, parents who have lost children and those raising kids with autism can tell their stories better than anyone. I've attached a few good examples to the online version of this column.
Back to Tim for a moment.
His Daily Herald essay was predictably popular. Tim was pleased, too, when I told him it was going on the front page and that his 15 minutes weren't quite up. More positive Facebook feedback ensued, and he was contacted by two radio stations for interviews. But here's the coolest part: Tim says he received more than 100 Facebook friend requests.
I was one of them, of course.
jdavis@dailyherald.com