As a reporter, I wasn't the guy who caught the big cases.

If I was covering the trial of someone who'd killed or injured someone, the alleged perpetrator was almost always a poor, drug-abusing member of a widely despised minority group. Usually, it was a male, and he always had a police record. Sometimes, he'd done time, and he'd killed someone over a woman, or money, or drugs, or gang affiliation.

I was often the only reporter in court. The YouTube independent journalists weren't about to cover a trial if there were no demonstrators outside insisting that the guy was innocent, though sometimes there'd be two people on the sidewalk carrying signs that read "FREE RAYMOND."

I developed a face to wear during the proceedings. It's not a bored face. It's a dead face. You want your face to look like the door on a closet, painted flat white. Look at the bailiffs. They got that face and they're gonna keep it because they're playing for the pension.

Right now, in Massachusetts, they're trying a suburban woman named Lindsay Clancy for allegedly strangling her three children, all of whom were under the age of 6.

Once the ages of the children got out, newspaper writers all checked to see how many Rs are in the word "horrific" because they were going to need that word.

Clancy's first jury hung, so they're trying her again, and there are way more than two people carrying signs outside the court. One group wants Clancy imprisoned, or executed or tortured to death. Feelings run high when you're painting the sign you're gonna carry. The other group says Clancy wasn't in her right mind, a viewpoint that makes some sense when you consider how it would feel to strangle three of your own children.

We do this now. It used to be that when the "trial of the century" came round, you read about it, or caught the recap on the television news and you said, "That's awful" to your husband and he said, "Yeah," and you finished your meatloaf.

What some of us do now is have a kind of "death tailgating" event, although I don't know if anybody's thought to bring a gas grill yet. For the sake of the reporters, somebody should. A television station could do a sparky little feature about what kind of barbecue sauce was being used on the ribs.

And why not? When you're outside a courtroom wearing T-shirts that support "your" defendant, you're just an inch away from a foam finger and a red Solo cup full of draft beer. A good hint for the more upscale death tailgaters is that you can get a keg in the back of an SUV just as easily as you can get it in the back of a pickup truck. The difference is that people with a keg in the back of an SUV go to parent/teacher nights. People with a keg in the back of a pickup truck don't.

The YouTube journalists pose and smile in the courtroom because they're on the way to $2,000 in views this month. The closet-faced reporters keep their mouths straight and keep the pen moving over the notebook. Sometimes, they check to see if their tape recorder is on. An editor sent them to the trial, and if she hadn't sent them there, she would have sent them somewhere else, and no matter how the trial goes, you make the same amount of money every month.

Meth addict shoots a newly naturalized Nepalese convenience store clerk in a robbery? Same paycheck. Suburban mom strangles her three children? Same paycheck. It's called "perspective."

Professionalism is the ugliest thing in the world because it takes the fun out of everything.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paper back from Anazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.

Photo credit: Wesley Tingey at Unsplash