Tard at the Herald
I’ve been following a couple LiveJournals of people who were at the Virginia Tech shooting, and under a few entries is this query from a reporter:
Hi, I’m glad you’re okay. I understand that peoples phones are not working too well in all this chaos. Have you and your friends been IMing, blogging or posting bulletins about what it going on? I work for the Boston Herald and I’m wondering if online communication is the best way to stay in touch during a crisis. What do you think?
Take care,
Kerry Purcell
kapurcell@heraldinteractive.com
617-619-6407
This struck me as rather unseemly, at least so soon after the event. I was going to leave a snarky comment on the LJ entry but I didn’t want to get the poor guy involved, so I e-mailed the reporter:
Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 15:13:29 -0500 From: Kim Scarborough <sluggo@unknown.nu> To: kapurcell@heraldinteractive.com Subject: School shooting "Hi, I'm sorry the bodies of your friends are still warm, but I'd like to use you as a hook for my boring feature article with an already-conceived thesis about how these kids today are using Facebook & Livejournal instead of phones to communicate while people are being shot. Please contact me ASAP so I can feed you quotes, I know you have nothing better to do. Thanks!"
A few minutes later, I get this reply:
Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:15:54 -0400 From: "Kerry Purcell" <kapurcell@heraldinteractive.com> Reply-To: kapurcell@bostonherald.com To: "Kim Scarborough" <sluggo@unknown.nu> Subject: Re: School shooting Hi Kim. I am a reporter and working on the same story - not a student.
WTF? A reporter for the Boston Herald couldn’t possibly be that retarded, could she? Is she just pretending to not understand I was insulting her, or does she really have serious reading comprehension issues? So I Google her… and find this. Yay nepotism! An endless source of amusement.