Back when I was a suburban bureau chief and reporter for The Indianapolis News, and later for The Indianapolis Star, I covered a lot of primary and general elections and spent several election nights in the Boone and Hamilton County courthouses.
Maria arranged for me to feed vote totals to the Associated Press last night from the Boone County primaries. I got minutely detailed instructions from the AP over the past couple of weeks and was just a little nervous about it since I haven't covered an election in more than 10 years and have never done it as an AP stringer.
I needn't have worried.
Old friends retired Judge Becky McClure and Debbie Ottinger greeted me like a long-lost relative at the clerk's office and Clerk Jessica Fouts did a superb job of feeding us the returns as they came in. The AP folks were easy to work with and the evening went smoothly.
I hadn't planned to take any photos, so I left my Nikon at home.
But when the crowd outside the clerk's office exploded with shrieks and cheers at 8:15 p.m. with the news that Lori Schein had scored the upset of the evening, beating County Attorney Todd Meyer and another attorney for the Republican nomination for judge of Boone Circuit Court, I stepped outside and fired five quick photos with my iPhone. The one shown here dominates the front page of The Lebanon Reporter this morning. I can't recall taking a better election photo in my 30-some years in newspapers. And I did it with a chickenshit little cell phone camera.
I love being able to play newspaper on my own terms.
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