In midst of covering tragedy, journalists do care about sources

Reporters and photographers play a role that goes beyond merely satisfying the public's curiosity about a shocking event.

At times like these, news reporters aren't exactly the most popular people in the neighborhood. They can be seen as downright ghoulish -- picking through emotional wreckage to ask dazed witnesses what they saw and how they feel, cold calling the families of people who've just been killed, lurking around the fringes of memorials and funeral services.

A Daily Herald reporter had her interview with a dazed but willing witness interrupted last Thursday night by a school official, who whisked the student away and spat, "Do you care about the well-being of students?"

In the aftermath of tragedy, reporters are not seen with the firefighters, the police, the ambulance workers racing to save lives. Nor should they be. But they play a valuable role in the evolution out of crisis all the same, a role that goes far beyond merely satisfying the public's intense curiosity about a shocking event.

Consider Dan Parmenter. We learned this week that in the mayhem of last week's shootings, he sheltered a fellow student and lay praying with her until he himself was hit with the shots that would kill him. In that one image alone, he went from indistinguishable victim to flesh-and-blood human being, and a heroic one at that. It's an important picture for people to see, an image of the courage people muster in the most frightening of times. It reminds us that beautiful actions sometimes take place in the midst of the ugliest of scenes, that humans can rise above horror, even when they are in the middle of it.

But that lesson wasn't described at a press conference. It didn't come from a handout or press release. It came because a Daily Herald reporter mustered the strength of will to approach grieving parents. Sadly, reporters have been taking up such conversations with family and friends of victims hundreds of times the past few days, enduring occasional jeers and glares as they seek out bits of information, not always knowing what they're trying to learn, what questions to ask or how to ask them but still hoping that somewhere out of the awkward exchanges, they'll find something that will help others better understand a frightening circumstance or the human beings who endured it. Although their tools are different, photographers work through similar difficulties with similar goals. And, loaded down with electronic equipment, it is even harder for them to do it all unobtrusively.

But do not think these folks heartless, nor imagine that they themselves cannot put themselves in the place of the subjects they seek to portray. These are not days when journalists go home from work and tell their husbands and wives what an exciting and interesting day they had.

We know what people are going through, sometimes even with personal experience. I can never forget struggling through shock and grief myself 20 years ago as I sat down to an interview with television reporters about a friend and colleague who had been murdered just hours earlier, then watching in a sort of dumbfounded awe as they wandered my newsroom, looking for images to photograph from the life of a person they could not know.

Yes, we understand. We care about sources, and there is something more than that, too. You could not see the sense of unwelcome duty in the eyes of the reporters and photographers who came to me and other editors last Thursday night near the end of a long workday that they knew was about to get unimaginably longer. You have not seen them struggling tirelessly through the weekend and into the long, sad days of this week.

But I have, and I must tell you, I am immensely proud to work with such people. They are not the heroes of the day, to be sure. But they suffer a good deal to ensure that you know who are.