The Ice House

Here's a great story about -- well, whatever you want to call it: intuition, luck, the brilliance of stupidity. Found via my friend Sarah's Twitter feed, read CJR's "Writers Dish on Scoops That Slipped Away." Make sure you read the last one. It's a doozy and a genius life lesson. 

I was pretty new. I had been there maybe a month, and I was doing weekend cop shop. There was a story in which three 14-year-old boys went out and attempted to rape, and ultimately murdered, a classmate’s mom. A huge story. A capital crime. I just got beaten like a drum the whole weekend. Every step of the way, the News reporter, Bill Hendricks—the longtime cop reporter with all the sources—was just getting everything that I wasn’t getting. It was so bad that my bosses couldn’t even be mad at me. They treated me as if I were developmentally disabled.