The rumor mill
The rumor mill was in full swing Tuesday following a “drill” at the Norwich High School. Since starting at the paper I have realized how crazy people can actually be, especially when those people are ages 14-18, not all of them of course but some definitely have overactive imaginations.
Just six or so months ago I got word that there was a white powdery substance spread out back of the highs school complex and a helicopter had made an emergency landing there. (Because this sounds reasonable) so of course I had to see if anything happened at the school the day before that was a little abnormal. Of course the rumor was bogus but I would not be a reporter if I did follow the silliest leads that came y way.. Thus the same reason Tuesday I jumped on the bandwagon to follow a lead that again seemed a little far fetched even for Norwich…
The rumor: 50 students had been removed (by police) from he building for possessing drugs after a random locker search and lock-down Tuesday morning..
After a phone call to the Norwich Police Department and to school administrators the real story was this… A training drill was conducted meaning the school was on lock-down but only as a drill not because the drug lord of Norwich was roaming the camp and one student was ticketed for having a quantity of marijuana. Five K-9 units were on hand because the school is big and it saved time. No one was removed from the building nor was anyone arrested.
So the point.. Kids love drama and secretly so do reporters, it not only lightned up my day it also made my co-workers chuckle just a bit too!
By the way if 50 students were caught with drugs and removed from the building Anderson Cooper would be here not Jill Osterhout. Reasons like this is why I love my job. I will keep following my leads and who knows when a first of its kind alien spacecraft lands on the high school field I will be the first one to greet them and show them around.
May 4th, 2007 at 2:25 am
For a rumor to work it has to be a believable story. What bothers me most is that this rumor was believable. I moved to Norwich about six years ago from a large city in the Midwest. The first thing that hit me was the safeness I felt here. I grew up as a child in a very small town in Indiana. It was that same feeling of safeness I had as a child. The news over the past few months has caused me to have concern about my family’s safeness.
There will always be rumors because some people need to have an artificial feeling of excitement. But I have discovered over the years that some of today’s rumors are tomorrow’s headlines.