The polls have closed, the people have spoken, and the winner is that AFP piece claiming "Steve Irwin's death will resonate for children the same way the deaths of Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy did for adults, parents and child psychologists have warned." We're not sure who wrote it, so if someone at AFP wants to claim the prize, please get in touch. The rest of you can use that same address to e-mail us future nominees. Today's pick - and it's a stunner - is after the jump.


We've seen a lot of bad journalism since we began this feature, but there's never been anything as downright creepy as this article from the Quad City Times. It's about the murder of a sixteen-year-old girl named Adrian Reynolds, but it's about so much more than that: It's also about Barb Ickes, who covered the story for the paper. It became Barb's story, and Barb spends God knows how many words telling you how she reported the story. The self-importance is breathtaking, which makes it all the more shocking that the worst part of it has very little to do with Barb Ickes, except that she wrote it.

Adrianne's dad, Tony Reynolds, sat on the floor with us for a few minutes, reading the latest poem he'd written to her. All his poems began, "Roses are red, violets are blue."

We were on our third or fourth game when Tony wandered back over, leaned against the wall near the big row of windows, looked down at us and said, "Could whichever one of you loses help me change the oil in my Mustang?"

He was chewing gum when he said it, which only made it funnier to me.

He held a pink pillow, Adrianne's favorite color, and tried to hide how much his back hurt from sitting for days on the wooden benches inside the fifth-floor courtroom.

Tony's a truck driver. His daughter is dead.

And violets are blue.

Please read the whole thing; we promise you we are not making it up.

A reporter's notebook- From the margins of a murder [Quad-City Times]