Blog: Rod Boyce: The editor's desk
Sometimes a phone call is needed
Published Monday, July 13, 2009
A while back I wrote an item about how with publication comes responsibility. The issue came up when a reader called to complain about the amount of information we had provided in a crime story.
We had erred, I believed, in providing too much information. I concluded my written item by saying “Each instance needs to be looked at independently to measure the appropriateness of publishing that information.”
That statement is also true when it comes to photographs.
We recently published a photograph on the front page illustrating a story about the dispute over mementos being removed from graves at Birch Hill Cemetery under a policy by the new owners. The photograph, one of several with the story, showed one of the grave sites whose mementos had been placed in black garbage bags by cemetery staff and left next to the sites for the families to take away.
The photograph illustrated the story well.
But that photograph also greatly upset the mother of the young child buried in that grave. This mother didn’t know we had taken that photograph, let alone that we intended to put it on the upper half of the front page. She had not been interviewed for the story and was surprised and angry to see the photograph in the newspaper.
We caused her unnecessary grief, and for that I offer my regret.
No law required us to get permission from the family to publish that photograph, but common courtesy says we should have contacted the family to make them aware of our intentions. We didn’t do that. Perhaps, if it had occurred to me to make that call, the family would have expressed concern. Perhaps they would have asked us not to publish, initiating another type of discussion. Or perhaps they wouldn’t have minded. Maybe they would have asked to see the photograph first and said “Thank you for calling.”
I don’t know what the reaction might have been because, again, we didn’t make that call.
What I failed to do in this instance was to remember that cemeteries are one of those very few public or semi-public places where journalists should consider contacting either the subject of the photograph or a family member connected to the photograph so as to avoid causing unnecessary pain.
Journalists — photographers and writers — chronicle the life of the community in which they live. I believe that a journalist’s connection to community is much greater in small towns like Fairbanks than at newspapers in big cities. And because we have a greater community connection, we at the Daily News-Miner need to be constantly aware of how the work we produce can affect people.
Once in a great while a phone call needs to be made.
I have to wonder what crime story you are talking about in your first paragraph. My brother was murdered a year ago in April and the information you placed in the paper at the time was not only incorrect but very hurtful to my family. That was the first time I have dealt with you and the pain your paper has caused my family. This is the second time and both times happened to be surrounding death in my family.
Correction: The garbage bags that were filled with mementos were left on top of the graves not beside them, unless of course your photographer moved the garbage bag on top to make a better picture.
Unlike you, I don't believe in public humiliation or embarrassment so I will keep my tone and my words mild. As you may have heard at some point in your lifetime, a child's death is a mothers worst nightmare. I have to agree with that statement but like all nightmares they come to an end and we find peace again. Praise God for this, it is his doing. Friday I woke to my phone ringing very early and my day began with a picture of my son's grave on the front of your paper with what appeared to be a garbage bag on top of it where my parents planted a flower that comes back year after year.
You still don't seem to understand that a phone call does not cut it.
You simply DO NOT publish a picture of my child's grave, or any child's grave on the front of your newspaper! EVER! It is as easy as thinking of others first.
As the mother and sister of those gone too soon, your paper has stepped all over my family and brought on painful events that otherwise would not have happened.
One last observation that you may not be aware of, in doing what you have done, you have tainted you reputation in this community if it was not already and those involved in the decision making have proved heartless and without conscious.
Bitter much, noname? Mr. Boyce just about goes over backwards to offer you a public apology and you're not accepting of it at all. Shame on you.
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