How the Blade cut to front of national coverage

Lauren Lindstrom

Eagle-eyed copy editor Toledo Blade Tommy Gallagher put the Ohio newspaper in the spotlight for its coverage of the car that rammed through a crowd and killed and injured in Charlottesville, Virginia during a white supremacists rally.

Gallagher blew up the photo and saw that the car had an Ohio license plate with a “48” county registration tag. That meant it was registered in Lucas County, where Toledo is the county seat.

Three Blade reporters checked voter and vehicle registration records and found that the car was registered to James Fields, Jr. of Maumee, a suburb of Toledo.

Blade reporter Lauren Lindstrom, usually a health reporter, went to the address and got an interview with the driver’s mother. The Blade also went to Florence, Kentucky, where the driver grew up and talked to his teacher.

Before police announced Fields’s arrest and released his mugshot.

Lindstrom made an important point in this day of newspaper layoffs and Internet “news reporting”:

“I think it shows the benefit of local news. We’re the hometown paper, and we were the ones on the ground. We were able to get there quickly.

My thanks to Roger Mezger, who was pretty eagle-eyed himself during his BJ days, for tipping me off about the article in the Columbia Journalism Review.

If you want to congratulation Tommy Gallagher, his email address is tgallagher@theblade.com

To read the CJR article, click on https://www.cjr.org/analysis/toledo-blade-charlottesville.php?utm_content=buffer39b9e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer