There are a few very unpleasant things that most reporters must go through at one time or another. For me, the top item on that list is covering a death. You don't want to bother the grieving family, though you know you must call them, hoping they'll be willing to talk about their loved one.
Tragically, deaths are not uncommon on college campuses, so student newspapers must make decisions on how to cover them. Last week, The Cavalier Daily was faced with such a decision.
The newspaper ran a short item in its Jan. 27 "News in Brief" section about the death of a Commerce student the previous Friday. The brief contained very little information. It didn't have any comment from family, nor did it mention the cause of death or contain any information about memorial or funeral services.
It struck me as odd that the newspaper would put a death in its brief section. Upon further investigation, I learned the death had been a suicide, though the editors did not learn that fact until after the item had been printed. Editor-in-Chief Justin Bernick said that reporters called many professors and students and were unable to obtain any information other than that which had been circulated in an e-mail in the McIntire School of Commerce. They tried to get enough information to merit a front-page story, and when they were not able to, they began to suspect that it was a suicide.
Bernick said that if they had known for sure that it was a suicide, they wouldn't have run the story.
The editors should have gone with their instinct and left the story out. The death of a student is a large enough story to merit more than a brief and must be covered with the utmost care and sensitivity. A solid effort must be made to contact family to confirm details and give relatives a chance to share their memories. But a suicide that was out of the public eye is not newsworthy and shouldn't be covered at all.
Many news outlets make a policy of not covering suicides unless they are done in an unusually public manner or cause some sort of disruption that would be newsworthy outside the death itself. This policy is justified by the principles of good taste that govern journalism, and by the idea that death, in and of itself, is not newsworthy. After all, mortality is a fact of life, and therefore not news. A suicide is a tragedy that causes suffering to friends and relatives beyond that associated with a natural death.
You might ask, "What about homicide?" A homicide is newsworthy because it is genuinely in the public's interest to be informed if there is or has been a danger to them in their communities. But while homicides are news, newspapers often choose not to cover suicides to spare the family further pain.
It's also possible that many readers didn't even see the brief, bringing me to my next, and far more minor, point. Online readers can't see the "News in Brief" headlines without clicking on the link first. I don't have the statistics, but I doubt very much that many people are clicking. "News in Brief" just isn't a very sexy advertisement forthis section, and while briefs are generally not very sexy, newspapers include them because they do have news in them.
Headlines are the advertisement for a story, but they don't work if you can't see them. The brief headlines should be visible from the Web site's News page.
One more online note, this time about corrections. Last week the paper ran a correction to fix an erroneous headline. Most readers didn't see it, because The Cavalier Daily doesn't post corrections on its Web site. This must change immediately. More people read the paper online than read the print edition, so the Web site must have all of the content that is in the newspaper.
Corrections are particularly important because the original errors are all still readily available in cyberspace via the archives and Google searches.
Got a question? Praise or criticism? Drop me a line with your thoughts.
(Masha Herbst can be reached at ombud@cavlierdaily.com.)
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