Nine years of compassion and community: the best stories by the TNT’s Matt Driscoll
The news hit me Monday morning during a phone call from my boss, Stephanie Pedersen, president and editor of The News Tribune.
Technically, I was still on vacation, so I figured it was something important. When I heard her voice breaking, I knew it was something bad. When the words finally tumbled out, I felt my heart breaking. Our colleague and friend, local columnist and Opinion Editor Matt Driscoll, had died unexpectedly at the age of 43.
As I told other reporters and ex-TNT staffers, my voice kept breaking like Stephanie’s. Six days later, it’s still hard to talk about it. All of us at the TNT are grieving the loss. The public outpouring of love for Matt and his family testifies to his impact on the community. That’s why we’re providing a selection of his best stories and columns in this space, free to all readers.
Before I present the list, I have to share some personal memories. I worked with Matt for almost a decade. I remember when he was hired in 2015.
I was still an investigative reporter at the time, having covered all sorts of hard news stories since 2000. Matt was hired after the departure of local columnist Peter Callaghan, another friend and a TNT institution in his own way.
Here’s a secret about newsrooms: They can be clubby to a fault. The TNT is no different. We were and still are a family, and like any family meeting a new member, a certain feeling-out period is inevitable. Matt had to endure that.
We didn’t know much about him then. He’d worked for a couple of alt-weeklies. He seemed confident. Reportedly, he was pretty liberal. When I first sized him up, I wondered about that. Was he? The black glasses, the short hair ... he looked more like a refugee from a conservative think tank.
On the other hand, it didn’t really matter to me, as long as he could write, as long as he produced. That was the real measure for us, for any newsroom — could this guy crank when the big stories hit? Could he keep up with us?
I didn’t know then that Matt was scared of us in those days. He confessed it to me in an email he sent a while back.
“I’ve often struggled with the gnawing sense that I don’t belong,” he wrote. “Given my background, and the guy I followed, I’ve felt like I’m surrounded by real journalists who know what they’re doing. I suspected some of you (and especially you) could see that I was faking it.”
I read that note again this week, and felt tears well up. Oh, Matt — you weren’t faking it.
It didn’t take long for us to figure that out. I miss the hell out of him, but I’m glad I got the chance to tell him he did the kind of work that made us all proud.
“Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” is an old journalism maxim. Matt understood it. He wasn’t afraid to roast public officials. He never forgot the downtrodden, either. For him, the mission was sacred.
I think of all that, but mostly I like to think of laughing with him. We talked a lot of loving smack.
He often wrote long and late, which I understood too well (ask any of my editors). Often, the late-night edits fell to me. He would apologize. I would feign rage, then tell him I liked the story, but he needed to curb his melodramatic penchant for chains of one-sentence paragraphs. He would send winking private notes thanking me — in melodramatic, one-sentence paragraphs.
I mocked his taste in music, saying no one liked Dave Matthews (Matt didn’t actually like Dave Matthews, but I pretended he did just for grins). He threatened to post old photos of me singing in high school. When he wore his blinding-white sneakers to work, I pretended to reel from the glare. He countered with cutting comments about my admittedly scruffy fashion choices.
Matt loved the Denver Broncos. Every year, I sent him memes of the Seahawks humbling Peyton Manning in the Super Bowl. He answered with slo-mo clips of Seahawk blunders.
We bantered a lot that way, but more often, several times each week, we chewed on story ideas, and angles, and news philosophy: the shop talk every journalist treasures. Everyone who knew and worked with Matt can tell you about similar conversations.
The following list of stories is a starting point.
Back in 2015, Matt gave the newsroom a first inkling that he was a force, with this story about the public reaction to the death of a kindergarten teacher.
He didn’t stop there — after his first piece about her, he dove deeper into the life of Klara Bowman.
Sometimes Matt wrote about his family. It was impossible not to be moved.
In 2018, he danced on the roof of Cheney Stadium, not knowing a bizarre bureaucratic saga would follow.
Sometimes Matt went all in for comedy. This column about an ice storm and snow days was a highlight.
At the end of 2020, he looked back at Pierce County’s first casualty of the pandemic.
After the Seahawks traded Russell Wilson to Denver, I asked Matt (who started his career as a sports stringer) if he could write about it from the perspective of a Broncos fan. Naturally, he agreed (equally naturally, I couldn’t resist giving him grief during the disastrous season that followed).
Matt’s sourcing (a must for any reporter) was astounding. This story about Tacoma boxing legend Sugar Ray Seales destroyed me.
Following the trial of three Tacoma police officers, Matt reflected on the needless death of Manny Ellis.
He did his best to understand the death of Howdy Bagel owner Jacob Carter, and like the rest of us, he struggled.
In his alt-weekly days, Matt wrote about the local music scene. He returned to those roots with the story of Tacoma’s best band.
Yes, Matt was liberal — but only a month ago, he showed Democrats and President Biden no mercy.
Many people who knew Matt are asking us about a memorial. Plans are underway, but the details aren’t settled. When we know more, we’ll tell you in the TNT. Until then, let’s celebrate Matt’s work.