Journalist puts foot in mouth

A local newspaper editor has put her foot in her mouth—and it looks like she may never live it down.

What did Sherry Chafewell do to become such a pariah?

“No, really, I put my foot in my mouth,” she said.

Earlier this month, photos surfaced on the internet of Chafewell attending a remote yoga retreat somewhere in the Sierra. In some of the photos, her foot was literally in her mouth.

“Look, I’ve pursued a lot of weird stories for the paper—been covered in snakes at a kids’ museum, had drinks in a laundromat bar, gone to the Elbow Room in Sparks,” she said. “Yoga’s not something I’ve done. I just kind of assumed the whole foot thing was gross but standard practice.”

Chafewell has lived down a lot of faux pas in years past.

“You think?” she asked. “Of course I have. Journalists make mistakes all the time. I once referred to UNR professor Wang Jung as ‘Wang Chung.’ I mixed up Clint Eastwood and John Wayne in one of Guy Dire’s film reviews! And I’ve pissed people off with the truth. What about that story I published about the craft place where you can’t use the bathroom because someone’s always huffing glue in it?”

Still, Chafewell said she knows the writing’s probably on the wall for her here—and she’s making contingency plans in case her reputation in Reno never recovers.

“I guess maybe I’ll have to move to another market,” she said. “No one here wants to talk to me now, but there’s that town in Alaska where everyone lives in the same building or that place in Pennsylvania that’s had a coal fire burning beneath it since 1962. Maybe one of those.”