The Newsmaker
The Works of Mark Edgemon from All-Creatures.org

Mark Edgemon has been writing for 30 years. He writes and publishes short stories, articles, poetry and scripts, as well as, produces audio comedy productions for over 700 radio stations nationwide.

Contact Mark through his website, Creator and the Catalyst.

The Newsmaker

Stewart Jacobs was an up and coming journalist, who did weekend reporting for one of the national news stations and wanted to move upward in journalism fast and did not want to wait for all the preliminaries and paying of his dues. His climb had to be fast; the top positions in news reporting were beckoning to him.

One day, he and his cameraman were walking to a parking garage after shooting a boring interview with an investment banker, which would probably not make it on the air. As he walked past a huge luxury apartment building, he noticed a crowd forming on the street and looking up toward the top of the building. When he looked up he saw a man on the ledge looking like he was going to jump. Before he knew it, the man did jump and was falling fast toward the pavement. He looked over to his cameraman to tell him to not miss this footage, but he was already recording the event.

The man hit the concrete in a most gruesome way all captured on film by Stewart’s cameraman. He submitted both events and as he expected, the news producer did not use the first footage, but raved over the footage of the man falling to his death, giving Stewart all the credit.

It was discovered later that the man was the city’s mayor, who was high on cocaine and believed the details of his kick back corruption scandal was going to be released to the press any day. This story was huge and Stewart planned to ride it to the top.

After months of reporting on little stories, he decided the only way to get an important exclusive was to create news and be ready to film it.

He began to commit one crime after the other such as planting evidence on political officials, burning down buildings and evading people’s privacy by gathering incriminating evidence and misusing them to give him the edge on the next story.

Finally one day, he happened on a gangland shooting of rival gang members and got caught in the crossfire. He was accidentally shot in the chest when he hurriedly walked in front of a prominent citizen, who happened to be in the way. As he slowly began to die, he turned the camera on himself and continued to report the news as it was happening, which happened to be his death. He thought it would make a good story and might receive national attention. It did!

It was discovered that the reporter had committed crimes to boost his reputation and was a hot scandal for several weeks. It seemed that the news reporter was the focus of his own last story.

Copyright © 2008 Mark Edgemon

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