Otterblog

I received a pretty angry—but polite—telephone call on Friday afternoon from a reader. She had seen our skybox tease in the paper for a Sunday story on the one-year anniversary of the shooting death of Sgt. Howard Plouff.

The caller said she was a friend of the family, and she was outraged that we continued to run stories about Sgt. Plouff’s death. “It’s a wound that you won’t let heal,” she said. There was more, about the pain we were putting the family through, the kids, etc. This went on for some time, and of course it finally ended up with the question: “If this had happened to someone you know, wouldn’t you feel differently?”

Editing a newspaper isn’t an easy thing to do. You often need to step outside your own skin, your own relationships and look at right and wrong in a local and global sense. This caller wanted us to be compassionate to the family. Her idea of compassion involved us nearly avoiding coverage of the Plouff shooting. Sometimes compassion—or sympathy, empathy, what have you—is in conflict with journalism. It’s important to step outside one-on-one relationships and look at what makes sense from a story standpoint.
For better or worse, the Plouff homicide is a public death. Better, in that it is a shared grief. Worse, in that the grief is not controlled by those most affected. It’s different than all the other homicides we had in 2007. There’s a public-policy component --night club regulation, officer safety, etc.— that can’t be ignored. Except for the scale of tragedy, it’s no different than the Virginia Tech shootings or 9/11.

We write about stories to the amount needed—no more, no less. We listen to victims and their concerns. We don’t write stories just because we can. We don’t overplay stories. And we listen to readers, whose sense of our coverage is sometimes more finely tuned to subtleties than our own. Friday’s caller didn’t agree with our decision to write an anniversary story, but I do think we each hung up the telephone with a better understanding of the other side of the equation. What we’re really talking about is not just compassionate journalism, but rather common-sense journalism.