Bill Bryan, one of the longest-serving police reporters at a major U.S. daily newspaper, has retired from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Bryan, a reporter for more than 30 years, is a former member of the Criminal Justice Journalists board of directors. He started covering police for the the old St. Louis Globe-Democrat. When the Newhouse chain sold the paper in 1984, he moved to the Post-Dispatch, spending 23 years in a police department press room that Post-Dispatch public safety editor Pat Gauen says “looked like a set from a ’30s cop movie.”
In the early days, says Gauen, Bryan “rode to murder scenes with the homicide squad and waited in line behind the detectives to interview the witnesses. That stopped when TV reporters made a big fuss.” Once he almost moved to a hotel after a gangster warned that he would have him killed if there were repercussions from a mob-war story. Gauen praised “three decades of scoops swayed by neither fear nor favor from a mostly lone reporter literally surrounded by armed people not always happy with what he wrote.”
Link: http://cjj.mn-8.net