Published: May 11, 2008 12:35 am            

DUVALL: Seeing the best of the worst

You can dress us up, but for most newspaper reporters, you can’t take us out.

A three-man contingent from the Tonawanda News made the trip from Niagara County to the Empire State’s capital after taking home two awards from the New York Newspaper Publishers Association.

I always enjoy gatherings of journalists. We trade war stories, throw back (more than) a few drinks and revel in a profession that you have to experience to truly appreciate.

Some random thoughts from our whirlwind trip to Albany this week:

n Our state capital is incredibly hilly. I thought about this as we were trying to locate the banquet hall where the dinner was being held.

Leave it to me to flawlessly navigate the 300 miles between our front door at the paper and the parking garage for our hotel, but get us lost trying to find the place across the street.

I dutifully looked up the location of the dinner and found it just down the street from the hotel. I didn’t print out those directions, figuring we could remember them fairly easily — exit hotel, turn right, walk 300 feet.

What we got instead was a 30-minute sojourn up and down a street, the vertical grade of which was about 30 degrees.

First down the hill — not so bad. Until we got the bottom and realized we hadn’t found the banquet hall, or the open bar contained therein. We turned around and realized we’d started about 100 feet above where we were, and started trudging back up.

By the time we’d hit the top of the hill, stopping twice for directions (once from someone we suspected had indulged in a few drinks of his own), we were no closer to the gratis cocktail hour.

Back down the hill. Then back up the hill. Until I finally got sick of it, called 411 and called the place to ask for some help. The door, as it turns out, was actually on a different street — and the sign out front said the place was somewhere else.

Good to know Albany is as confusing in person as it is in the news.

n In the buffet line, the salad “bowl” actually had the brand of Grey Goose vodka. I took it as a sign I was in the right place.

n After making some new friends from some other small papers across the state, we stepped outside after dinner for a brief cigarette and some fresh air.

Our table got to talking shop and we were having a grand old time. Meanwhile, the awards ceremony had begun.

In typical me-fashion, I realized just in the nick of time that we needed to get back to our seats. As we walked back in the door, they were announcing our two awards.

Talk about making an entrance.

n Our hotel, which overlooked our stately state house, contained sleep packages. Masks, earplugs and the like.

Quipped I: “They must know how many people in Albany have trouble sleeping at night.”

Then Town of Tonawanda reporter Dan Pye made use of the earplugs. Seems as though I was making something of a snoring ruckus.

n Take some solace, residents of the Tonawandas. After talking to reporters all across the state, incompetence and greed exists there, too. And to no more or less of a degree than it does here.

Every reporter there had a story about some politician doing something remarkably dumb.

And it gave me some peace of mind, too. As long as there are politicians, there will be an industry employed to tell everyone else about the dumb, and occasionally criminal things they do.

It was nice to see some of the best examples of that happening — a reaffirmation of what newspapers, functioning at their best, do for our society and its communities.

Managing Editor Eric DuVall’s column appears every Wednesday and Sunday. Contact him at 693-1000, ext. 112 or by e-mail to duvalle@gnnewspaper.com.

        

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