There will always be stories

I will always remember where I was when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up. I'll always remember where I was on 9/11. And now I suspect I'll always remember that I was in the Town Pages office, waiting to conduct a job interview, when I heard the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River had collapsed.
I'm not sure I'll remember quite so well how I felt at that moment, but the emotions are still clear now. There was confusion, of course. Surely they couldn't have meant an interstate highway had just fallen into the river. Clearly it was a bridge over the highway that had fallen.
Right?
There was amazement. An urge to to talk about the tragedy with anyone and everyone. "Did you see that?" I wanted to ask and be asked. "Can you believe it?"
Ultimately, as I drove home listening to reports of the collapse on the radio, there was a kind of intellectual adrenaline rush. A desire to be at the scene not so much to see the wreckage but to tell the stories. To dig around — literally, perhaps, but mostly figuratively — and find out what had happened. Why things had gone so wrong. Who had been affected and how.
Maybe it's a reporter thing, but as I pointed my car north on Cedar Avenue that's what was going through my head. On top of the confusion and the amazement and the sadness for the people who had lost their lives there was that desire to talk to people. To find out what they had experienced. And most important to put those stories into words. To share them with as many people as I could and to get it all done to meet a deadline that wasn't even mine to worry about.
There has been no shortage of stories in the weeks following the collapse. That much has been obvious to anyone who has opened a newspaper or turned on a television news broadcast since early last Wednesday evening. Even earlier this week Twin Cities daily newspapers are dedicating entire front pages to stories coming from the collapse. Some of those stories are based solely in fact. They're the stories that attempt to explain what went wrong. What could have been done to prevent such a catastrophic failure.
Many other stories are rooted more strongly in emotion. They're the stories of the people who were touched by the disaster. Those who made it off the bridge and those who didn't.
There are local stories, too. Some of them have happy endings. Farmington resident Jeremy Schutte was on the middle section of the bridge when it collapsed. He was on the phone with his wife at the time, on his way home from work. The last words he said before his cell phone lost contact were "Oh my God, I'm in the water. Help me."
Schutte's truck ended up in the water. He had to crawl out the window and swim to the bridge deck, but he made it. He was lucky.
Other stories lack that happy ending. Some, like Peter Hausmann’s story on the front page of this issue, don't have an ending at all. At least not yet. It is all but certain Rosemount resident Hausmann was also on the bridge. According to at least one report rescuers have found his car in the bridge's wreckage but not any sign of Hausmann, who last week was one of eight people officially listed as missing by the Minneapolis Police Department.
In the week since the collapse newspapers in Minnesota and around the country have dedicated thousands of pages to telling those stories and more.
It has been popular in recent years to predict the demise of newspapers. And there is evidence to support many of those claims. Clearly the newspaper business is changing, even in places as relatively small and out-of-the way as Rosemount. In recent years we have embraced new technology in our office. We've added web pages. We've bought video cameras. We've tried to find new ways to reach readers.
But here's the thing: In the end it all comes down to stories. And whether they are about a tragedy or a triumph, whether they're delivered online or in print, in words or in video, there will still be a need for stories. And for people who get excited at the opportunity to tell them.


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