At 3:58 I received a call from Pre-Trial telling me that Rick would be out within an hour. Then it took four hours to find out that he was still there, after getting the run-around from Metro Corrections– people telling me throughout the afternoon that he was there and that he wasn’t there, with some individuals refusing to answer questions, literally hanging up.

I was given the run-around by the Clerk’s office until finally demanding that someone give me a solid answer (so, maybe I called an elected official to find out, whatever). It’s then that the guy at the window determined there was never a bail/bond set, that the judge had released Rick on his own recognizance at 4:00 or so in the afternoon. I was assured then that he would be processed within a couple hours by Metro Corrections and that it’d be best to wait for him.

Unfortunately, from there, Rick was never released. And “Roger” and other individuals at Metro Corrections gave me constant contradictory answers. For a while he was an inmate, for a while he wasn’t. On two occasions while trying to get an answer, I was told he’d already been released and picked up.

Read the rest of this mess and find out why I was in rare form after the jump…

After trying to resolve the situation for several hours, I must have passed out around 2:00 A.M. I was awakened by a telephone call (after sleeping through three previous calls during the night) from Rick’s ex-wife and I started everything again before 6:00 A.M. When I continued to get the run-around, I called a high-level statewide elected official who is a dear friend. I called in frustration and for the first time ever, I asked for a favor. I still feel dirty about it, but I did it. Then, mysteriously, corrections folks told me Rick had been “misplaced” and that the “ball had been dropped.” They also admitted that paperwork had been lost on several occasions throughout the evening. That process that they said took three hours miraculously took 2-3 minutes after I admittedly asked for a favor. Funny what can happen when people are required to do their jobs.

Sure, it’s absolutely stupid of Rick not to take care of traffic issues. Stupid, stupid, stupid. That’s all on him and he did, indeed, need to take that responsibility. There’s no question there.

What’s ridiculous, however, is that something so minor can turn into a day-long stint in jail where one ends up getting lost in the system and treated like an annoyance or cretin. To make matters worse, people on the outside trying to get answers and to get people– employed by our tax dollars– to do their damn jobs was a nightmare. Getting solid, accurate answers was impossible. Speaking with someone who wasn’t a total asshole was far from reality.

Only after I made a brief, ambiguous post on our websites did the Clerk’s Office and Metro Corrections begin to take me seriously by providing real answers to legitimate questions. It’s absurd that it took 17 or 18 hours to be released after a judge said good riddance. It’s absurd that the Corrections Chief– continuing an apparent reign of corruption or just terribly embarrassing management started by his predecessor– calls to apologize only because Rick is not an average Joe on the street.

If it’s this difficult for people who are well-connected and know the powers that be, what’s it like for the average person in society? Is everyone treated so poorly? Is it such a nightmare for Joe Six Pack to get an answer from the Clerk’s Office or Metro Corrections? What gives?

If he weren’t Rick Redding and I hadn’t asked for a favor (for the first time ever, mind you), he would have been sitting in jail for the better part of yesterday. Today he’d still be wondering what the hell went wrong and why the system is so screwed up, forever hating the people who no doubt have a serious job to do.

Long story short: he probably got special treatment, but only after we tried to let the process work itself out and seeing it fail time and time again. And that’s screwed up. If we didn’t believe there was a problem with Metro Corrections and the Clerk’s Office before today? Well, let’s just say we agree with every criticism, ever, at this point.

So it’s been a decade since I first felt the adrenaline rush of breaking a news story, of beating the competition (at that time, the Courier-Journal), of seeing my name on Page One of the paper. There was a surprising thrill to painting a picture in words of a conflict that the subjects didn’t want to see in the paper.

After nearly four years, I left for what I thought were greener pastures in the dot-com world. But that’s another story for another day.

I think I’ve been trying to recapture that rush of adrenaline again ever since. It’s probably the biggest motivator for starting Page One, with my hard-working partner Jacob Payne. In the first week of real-life operation, he managed to find two significant stories that had been missed by mainstream media outlets. Once we posted our news, they had no choice but to follow our posts with their own stories.

That may be the highest praise we can expect as an independent blog, but it did serve to get my personal juices flowing. We had chased down a story with conflict at its center – we had a story that someone didn’t want in the news, and we had the goods in the form of official records. All that was left was getting quotes and comments from appropriate sources.

It got my pulse racing. It felt good to be back in the game.

The feelings came back to me Saturday night when I turned on the TV to find that my favorite film about journalism – Ron Howard’s 1994 classic “The Paper” – had just started. In the star-studded picture, New York Sun metro editor Henry Haskell (played by Michael Keaton) risks his job, his marriage, and his future chasing a story for the next day’s paper. His character is a classic newspaperman, one who puts the pursuit of the story ahead of everything else in his life. He simply couldn’t live with knowing that his paper was getting the story wrong.

Of course, journalism has changed a lot since the film was produced. Reporters aren’t working on typewriters any more. A crucial part of the film involves waiting for film to develop. There’s no Internet. But the principles of reporting haven’t changed a bit.

To protect two innocent young men arrested unfairly for a murder, Keaton must persuade a cop to tell him what he knows, on the record, so that he can get an exclusive for the front page of the next day’s paper. But his boss (Glenn Close) wants no further delays in the press schedule, and doesn’t seem to mind that the paper is set to go out with a story that’s wrong. Keaton and Close come to blows in the press room after Keaton stops the presses.

Today’s journalists still want to get the story right and take pride in their work. They have to sometimes produce copy on deadline, even if it’s only to beat the competition by a few minutes. Get the story up first online is the new way of keeping score. We count success by site visits, not newsstand sales. And the competition is as likely to be a TV station as it is a newspaper. Or an independent blogging operation. Anyone can have immediacy, but it takes discipline and journalism ethics to get the story right and resist rushing to publish.

Maybe there was some serendipity involved in the airing of “The Paper” right when I needed to see it, right when I needed a little push to get motivated to get back to chasing stories. It’s good to be back.

Rick