Otterblog

There’s an interesting intersection between what’s a private matter and what’s a public matter. Journalists spend a lot of time discussing how to balance compassion and a respect for privacy with what is quite possibly a larger story with wider impact that requires public disclosure. Two stories from today illustrate that point. The first is about some hikers who got lost at Stone Mountain for three days. It’s not a huge park, but being lost is being lost and it can get confusing in a hurry. The second involves a boy who died at a camp on the WFU campus.

Hikers get lost in the woods all the time. 12-year-old boys die, not all the time, but more than we think. So how do these essentially private matters migrate into the public realm? There’s no hard-and-fast threshold, but there are a couple of factors in these cases. The first is public expenditure. It costs money to look for two lost hikers, and so even though these hikers are not from this area, many people who are were involved in the search effort. Also in this case, there’s a lesson about how easy it is to get turned around in the woods and the drama of survival.

The boy’s death is more complicated. But it goes something like this: When children die in public, and the police investigate, that’s newsworthy. Parents and guardians routinely turn their kids over to others to take care of them, whether it’s at school or at camps or in scouts or what have you. Custodians have responsibilities, and as the newspaper, we want to make sure that the custodians did their job. So, we’ll keep reporting on this until we get a final answer on why this boy died.