Pamela Wood

I recently read a piece on phone interviews vs. email interviews. For me, this is a no-brainer: Phone interviews always trump email interviews.

Of course, the best way to interview someone is in person.

But that isn’t always feasible or practical.

So when you can’t interview someone in person, a phone interview is definitely second best.

Email is an interviewing too of last resort to me.

While email might be great for setting up interviews or sharing information, it is clunky and time-consuming to interview someone over email.

There’s no spontenaity — every answer is thought out, probably typed and retyped. Answers from interview subjects often come out stiff and unnatural, not conversational.

And follow-up questions are just impossible over email. If you’ve got a follow-up question, you have to wait for the subject to get the question, respond and so on.

Perhaps most importantly, it’s difficult to challenge a subject via an email interview. There’s no way to interject in the middle of a scripted answer to say, “Oh really? That’s not what the numbers say.” And that’s one of the most important things we do.

I was saddened to learn today of the death of Jack Perry.

Who?

Mr. Perry was a nice man from College Park who I knew in two unique ways.

First, as a reporter at The Diamondback at the University of Maryland, I covered Mr. Perry in his role as a city councilman. He also was my next-door neighbor for my last two years of school.

It’s kind of funny that one of my very first sources as a reporter was also one of my first neighbors living on my own.

I was grateful that Mr. Perry and the other politicians and officials in the City of College Park treated me with respect.

I’m sure they sometimes got sick of the endless stream of student reporters who cycled through City Hall to cover elections and council meetings.

But Mr. Perry and the others always answered my questions, agreed to my interview requests and didn’t give me crap when I undoubtedly asked dumb questions.

Perhaps more than any of my j-school classes, I learned how to be a real reporter covering the City of College Park.

Mr. Perry also was a great neighbor.

The neighborhood we lived in, Berwyn, had some rentals for college kids, but fewer than other neighborhoods. But I bet my house had been rented to students for years and years.

I always figured Mr. Perry must have taken a liking to the group I rented the house with — six girls who studied a lot and only had blowout parties once or twice a semester. (I swear!)

We had one bedroom that was illegal under the fire code, and I don’t think we were allowed to have six unrelated people living in one house, but Mr. Perry  never turned us in.

In fact, he was super helpful to us.

I remember one fall, the city was going to come around with trucks to vacuum up leaves. The trouble was, we had no way to get all of the leaves from the backyard to the front curb.

Mr. Perry loaned us a tarp to help move the leaves. He also climbed on top of our roof to clear leaves — well above and beyond what most neighbors would do, especially for a bunch of college kids.

Jack Perry was a good guy who cared a lot about his community. I got to see that as a journalist and as a neighbor, and I’m glad.

This week, for the third or fourth time, I covered a wild political event known as Sine Die. And this was the wildest one yet.

Sine Die is a Latin term that’s used when the Maryland General Assembly adjourns the final day of its annual 90-day session. It means something weird like, “without a day” or something like that.

I don't have a desk at the State House press room. So I made do on Sine Die by setting up my laptop on a filing cabinet and sitting on a random folding chair.

What really matters, though, is that Sine Die is a sprint for lawmakers to get a whole bunch of stuff done that they neglected to do in the first 89 days.

There are usually one or two hot-button issues and a whole host of lawmakers’ pet projects to shepherd through the House of Delegates and the state Senate before the stroke of midnight. It can be kind of exciting to see which issues live and which ones die and most lawmakers are in pretty good spirits.

But not this year.

I covered a few environmental bills over the course of the session and was called in to help our main State House reporter for Sine Die.

Unlike past years, there were big, big, big issues to resolve on Sine Die: whether to open the door to more slots and even table games and a little thing called the state budget.

Man, that is a lot of microphones. Waiting for the governor to speak on Sine Die.

To make a long, long story short, lawmakers couldn’t agree on anything.

The Senate president wanted to push through the gambling bill, but a House committee delayed a hearing on it for hours upon hours on the final day. Journalists, lobbyists and others sat for hours waiting for the hearing.

Meanwhile, the Senate didn’t send budget negotiators to a conference committee meeting for much of the afternoon. The House negotiators sat on one side of a table, staring at no one on the other side. And again, journalists sat for hours waiting until they finally got together to resolve some — but not all — of the budget issues.

And throughout the day, the House speaker, the Senate president and the governor all took turns in front of the cameras, urging the others to get their act together and strike a deal over all this stuff.

No deal was sealed by midnight.

Here is a brief budget negotiation meeting after hours of delays on Sine Die. One of my colleagues last year called this "the mother of all back rooms," as the room is difficult to find and there's hardly any room for anyone to observe the proceedings.

Because lawmakers couldn’t agree on how to raise taxes as part of the budget, a sort of default budget with spending cuts goes into effect. There may or may not be a special session to work things out.

From a news perspective, the weirdest part of the whole thing happened the next morning. All three dudes — governor, House speaker, Senate president — had to attend a bill signing ceremony.

Suffice it to say, things were tense.

The Senate president and the House speaker at a post-Sine Die bill signing ceremony.

The whole thing is probably not good in the eyes of most Marylanders. And it was pretty bizarre for us journalists. Who would have thought things would go down like this on Sine Die? Not me.

Can you see me at the post-Sine Die bill signing? Photo from the Maryland Office of the Governor.

Because sometimes they willingly spend time off the clock watching the County Council on public access TV:

Seriously, though, I think I’ve got a good reason. The drama in Anne Arundel County politics is absolutely insane — better, really, than you can find in scripted or reality TV.

We have a county executive who has been indicted, accused of misusing his police protection officers for inappropriate tasks such as picking up campaign donations, driving him to sexual escapades and making sure his girlfriends don’t run into one another.

And here, in this photo, you have the police chief being called on the carpet before the County Council and, for the most part, refusing to testify on what he knew, when he knew it and whether he did anything about it.

You can’t make this up, folks, and I can’t help but watch it unfold on public access TV.

I’ve said it before: Journalists are not normal people.

One weird thing that journalists do is attend the funerals of complete strangers. Then, having listened to the eulogies and talked to loved ones, we do our best to write a story that encapsulates the person’s life, even though we never met or talked to that person when they were alive.

It’s a tall order, one that I think most journalists are terrified they’ll screw up royally.

We take these assignments very seriously — after all, the funeral story may very well be the last thing published about the person who died.

I’ve only had to write these types of stories a few times in my journalism career. This weekend was one of those times.

My editors sent me to a “celebration of life” service for Joe Byrd, a local bass player who had some renown in the world of jazz music. I drew the assignment because I was the on-duty weekend reporter.

Thankfully, one of my colleagues wrote a pretty in-depth piece about Mr. Byrd a few days after he died earlier this month. So I was familiar with his back story and wasn’t starting from scratch.

Still, I re-read that story and others. I clicked through Mr. Byrd’s website and watched a video interview on YouTube that apparently was filmed just a few weeks before he died.

I think I did a pretty good job with the story. As I listened to the speeches, a clear theme emerged about the supporting but vital role of Mr. Byrd as a bass player in a band as well as in life. The theme was started by the first eulogist, radio personality Andy Bienstock, and continued by others.

But still, I worried that I didn’t quote all of the speakers, that I didn’t say enough about the extensive musical tributes to Mr. Byrd. (There was about an hour of speeches and an hour-and-a-half of music.)

Maybe if I was a fan of jazz music, I could have done better, I thought. (Sorry, jazz-lovers, there’s only a narrow range of jazz that I like. I’m much more of a blues gal, thanks to my guitar-playing husband.)

The assignment was also a little odd because — strangely enough — I wrote the very first report we had about the car crash that led to Mr. Byrd’s death.

Mr. Byrd’s car was struck by another vehicle on busy Route 2 in Edgewater shortly before rush hour on a weekday. It caused major traffic problems. Our police/fire/emergency reporter wasn’t in the newsroom, so I volunteered to get the basic details so we could post a news item on our website. Only later did we learn that Mr. Byrd was involved and died.

So it was just by sheer chance that I wrote about the wreck and only due to scheduling issues that I wound up covering Mr. Byrd’s service. Through luck, it all came full circle.

That’s kind of why this line of work is amazing — you never know quite what’s going to happen, who you meet, what stories you’ll tell.

Being a news reporter my sound like an exciting job, but often, it includes sitting. A lot of sitting.

As I type this, the Maryland House of Delegates is into its eighth straight hour of debating budget and tax bills.

Thankfully, I am not there. I’m actually off today and following the action on Twitter. (Which, actually, is pretty sad!)

I really feel for the reporters at the State House because the reporters’ chairs in the House of Delegates are not friendly to one’s backside.

Quality of chairs is the sort of thing you notice when you cover lots of government hearings, court cases and community meetings. A few venues have lovely, comfortable chairs. Most do not.

The House of Delegates has a press area set up on the floor, not far from the speaker’s rostrum. There are a few rows of those wooden chair-and-desk combos that you may remember from your school days. In fact, I sat in a lot of these kind of chair/desks in college.

The seats are upholstered, but there’s not much padding. The little desk is kind of nice for note-taking, but not if you’re a lefty. And pens tend to roll off onto the floor.

One reporter even joked on Twitter that delegates should have to sit in the reporters’ chairs. Debates would never last as long. Not a bad idea, I say!

The state Senate across the hall is smaller and can get crowded with reporters much more quickly. But the Senate has much nicer accommodations for reporters.

Generously padded red leather chairs are arranged behind large shiny tables. Eight hours in the Senate would definitely be less punishing than in the House.

If I had a rating system for chairs in public places, the state Senate would definitely get the highest rating.

The Anne Arundel County Council has fold-out, auditorium-style seats that aren’t bad. The seats in the front row have little writing tables that you can pull out or leave down to the side — that’s a nice option.

Then you’ve got courthouses, which generally have wooden benches that are like church pews. Thankfully, there are no kneelers.

The award for the worst place to sit through a long news event, though, has to go to any of the number of church halls and fire station halls. Inevitably, they usually have metal folding chairs. Try sitting in a metal chair and talking about zoning for two hours!

The old saying goes that truth is stranger than fiction.

It sure feels that way in Anne Arundel County lately, where my newspaper has been covering one scandal after another lately. There have been so many bizarre political stories that it’s been tough to keep them straight.

I’m not covering any of these stories, really, though I’ve contributed here and there with a spot story or a bit of background research.

I’m going to attempt to summarize all of the shenanigans. Let’s see if I can keep it brief.

Alderman Ken Kirby* of the Annapolis City Council was found living in a public housing apartment when city police officers conducted a drug raid. The cops never found drugs and the alderman was never accused of any drug-related wrongdoing.

But he’s been dogged for weeks by questions about where he really lives, whether he was improperly living in public housing and whether he’s violated any laws by apparently not really living at his official address.

Anne Arundel County Councilman Daryl Jones pleaded guilty in federal court to not filing his tax returns for multiple businesses over the course of a couple years. At last check, he’s mostly squared things with the IRS, but he still got sent to federal jail in South Carolina for five months.

Right before Jones went off to the clink, his fellow council members voted him off the council, a move that he unsuccessfully fought in court.

After that, the remaining six councilmen have been unable appoint a replacement for Jones’ seat. I think the tally now is more than 100 votes over the course of three meetings. There are various theories afoot as to why they are deadlocked 3-3 between two applicants, possibly related to who might vote for whom if they need to appoint a county executive.

And why would the County Council possible need to appoint a county executive?

Well, that’s because County Executive John Leopold was indicted last week on four counts of misconduct and one count of misappropriation. The indictment — which is well worth reading, by the way — alleges the county executive used police officers to run errands, deliver campaign signs, empty his catheter bag, compile dossiers on political rivals, drive him to sexual liaisons in parking lots and run interference when he was in the hospital so his two girlfriends would not meet.

This is all really crazy stuff. It’s so crazy that even the most creative fiction writer couldn’t have dreamed it up. And it’s keeping lots of reporters on their toes.

I’m not a personal fan of political scandal, but boy does it make for an interesting life in the newsroom.

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* I actually wrote the first story about Alderman Kirby’s situation. The news broke on a Saturday when I was on the weekend shift. I was at my cousin’s wrestling tournament in Baltimore County when I got word of the raid. In between his matches, I darted in and out of the gym, making phone calls and sending emails to the police, Kirby’s attorney, my editor and the website editor — all before I was officially “on duty” for the day.