Journalist proposes to girlfriend via newspaper column

by Armando Tamayo (Guest contributor/Digital Journalist)

South Carolina newspaper reporter Nick McCormac asked his girlfriend to read his column on Tuesday morning. He decided to ask for the hand of his girlfriend in a non-traditional way: through a blog post.

McCormac, who wrote for the SC’s The Item, didn’t cover state or political news for the said column he simply titled, “A story of boy meets girl“. He instead wrote about his own tale with a girl he met a year and a half ago. McCormac wrote on his post: “No matter what I do or what I say, no words could ever justifiably describe how I feel about you. But there are six words that come awfully close. Whitney Bragg, will you marry me?”

Bragg read his column on her computer while McCormac looked nervously for her reaction. The couple was getting ready to leave for their respective work. In an interview with Daily News, McCormac said, “My stomach begin to drop as she took a few seconds to respond…finally, she started flapping her arms and turned around and had tears in her eyes.”

McCormac said he thought of the marriage proposal idea through his column a month ago while coming home from a military reporting conference. The column he said would be something he can keep for a very long time and something he can show his friends and family.

“I’m a lot better at writing than I am at speaking. Ever since I’ve become a professional writer, I’ve looked at it as something really unique,” he said on the interview. “Me being the sentimental sap I am, I wanted something that I could hold onto.”

In The Item column, McCormac described how he met Bragg, who just happen to came along with his long-lost-friend’s girlfriend in a bar. He described how he then saw Bragg as “…a sweet girl with a slight smile and blonde hair who resembled a young Meryl Streep.”McCormac described himself as a hopeless romantic “Like John Cusack as Lloyd Dobler inSay Anything (1989) boombox blasting Peter Gabriel and all.” He writes, “Words are my profession. They’re my living. My job is to take the most complex, complicated and confusing situations and describe them in a concise and simplistic manner.”

McCormac said that the response to his column was overwhelming from friends, families and readers. He said he celebrated the occasion by going to work and then answering messages from his future in-laws. “My battery on my phone is about to run out with people tweeting, emailing and calling” he said.

The column of McCormac was linked into a post by Steve Myers, a managing editor at Poynter.org, a journalism site. Myers playfully wrote “She said yes! …. (Alternate universe: McCormac asks Bragg if she read his column, and she says … No, why?) ”

This article was originally published on Digital Journal