News Junkie Book

Jason Leopold's News Junkie is a fascinating memoir that manages to blend cocaine addiction, the Mafia and Enron into an intoxicating stew. You become the rat that keeps pushing the button; page follows page and bam, it's over.

I mentioned the Mafia above, so take that as fair warning that if f-bombs offend you, steer clear; there are plenty in this slender tome.

Is there a high to be gotten from writing on deadline? You bet there is. And sometimes it's a low, when you have to do drudgery-on-deadline. I've alluded to fearing the police beat in Boise, but Leopold has been there, and worse, and has succeeded -- all the while trying to feed a coke habit that threatened to destroy his marriage.

I know all too well the rush that comes from hitting SEND on the old Coyote terminal -- was it really called SEND? Truth be told, I don't remember. Could have been SAVE. I just know that if you hit SPIKE instead, your day was ruined.

But when you look up, and the big hand is up there near the 11, and you're trying to jam in the day's A-1 story, there's nothing like the witches' brew of intoxication, fear, and euphoria that results.

Leopold captures this rush brilliantly in parallel with his addiction and warns us where the need to feed the rush can lead. Recommended. (It does help to know two bits of jargon: 'graf' is short for paragraph, which in journalism often is just one sentence; and 'lede' is the old-school spelling for the all-important first graf of a story, now often written as 'lead' but still pronounced as in 'lead a horse to water'.)

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