Chad Smith

I got to do some cool shit this year. I visited two countries I’d long longed to, England and France; went to Texas; saw the Gators win their third football championship; saw them beat Louisiana State in Death Valley; went to a Premier League match; was interviewed on MSNBC; had a few stories featured on Bizarre Florida; had the pleasure of visiting Disneyland Paris; and so on.

But I don’t think I will remember 2009 fondly. After all, it was the year that left us with these enduring images: a seemingly occupied balloon floating over the Colorado desert; the mug shot of the governor of South Carolina, who was thought to be missing in the Appalachian Mountains but was really off bopping some South American broad unbeknownst to his staff (not to mention his family); Tiger Woods’ smashed-up SUV; a Texas military base in chaos; thousands mourning Michael Jackson’s hardly untimely death; protesters around my age dying on the streets of Tehran.

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After my first full year as a reporter at The Record, I’ve put together a list of my most interesting stories of the past 365 days.

For each month, I’ve selected my “best” article (based on only my obviously misguided judgment). On the police beat, there is an endless influx of weird — people, crimes, situations, mug shots — so I’ve also picked the most bizarre story for each month. Some months were better than others.

Enjoy.

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Attorneys, bailiffs, the alleged victim and her family scrambled around the courtroom, and I was shooed into the hall, the courtroom locked, and no one told me what was happening. But from what I overheard and observed, I knew something Shakespearean had just happened. And I knew I had a Shakespearean story to write. I couldn’t do much but wait in the courthouse hallway, so I took a beat, looked out the third-floor window and thought something like, Oh, my god. This is the craziest shit I’ve ever covered.

The defendant in the sexual battery trial I had been covering all that week, William Telano Evans, had not shown up after the jury announced it reached a verdict. He wasn’t in court 20 minutes later when the judge decided to have the verdict read anyway. And he wasn’t there to hear the words jury foremen rarely utter in St. Johns County: “not guilty.”

At some point during the roughly 130 minutes it took the jury to deliberate, Evans got into his truck, drove home and shot himself. He was found dead a matter of minutes after the verdict was read.

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Recently, whoever keeps track of such things declared “Web 2.0″ the millionth word in the English language. The newspaper I work for — traditionally stubborn toward the Web, the norm in the industry — last week set up Facebook and Twitter accounts. The Time cover story last week was about tweeting, and several of the podcasters I listen to regularly — Bill Simmons, Adam Carolla, etc. — in recent weeks have gone from talking shit about the tweeting phenomenon/claiming ignorance about it to using it to promote upcoming shows and criticize Dwight Howard.

Sigh. I guess I might as well get on board too.

I think there’s a legitimate news application for Twitter, and I guess there’s a legitimate social application as well. It seems to work for The New York Times, as it does for Miley Cyrus. (By the way, if asked to bet I would have guessed Miley has more followers than The Times. Not so. NYT leads by about 200,000. I suppose that’s encouraging.)

I’m excited about the possibilities of implementing it at the paper, but we should all quit if mainstream, legitimate news ever begins to look like this:

we getting hustled? all candid’s pre-selected by clerics and hold position a-jad regime? takes bite out of “populist revolt”? #iranelection
about 10 hours ago from web
ChrisCuomo [ABC anchor]

Right.

So begins Round 2 of my Great Twitter Experiment. I had an account for about a week senior year, but I quickly realized I neither had the time to “micro blog” nor was I interesting enough to do it consistently. But if the aforementioned starlet can figure out something worthwhile to, uh, tweet, I better be able to come up with something too.

(Sry for goin over 140 chrctrs.)

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A Record photographer and I got to the Jacksonville arena at about 8 a.m. on Nov. 3, Election Day eve. We finished our coffee and walked around to the press entrance. Several vendors had set up shop on the street, hawking T-shirts and hats. One young man, standing next to a colleague on a street with little foot traffic yet, held out a pink shirt that read, “The Real Deal.” Inside the arena, the estimated crowd of 9,150 exuded a sense that the man they were there to see was indeed that. But that anticipation stemmed not solely from who was scheduled to take the dais some time later but when: the day before an historic election following an epic campaign that, either way, would result in someone other than a white man being elected president or vice president for the first time.

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