Update: Unattended Death in Brady

I wanted to say this article (in my opinion) was completely inappropriate. The poor family. San Angelo Live is on the verge of tabloid news. A recent story also reported of a body found on top of a truck near the new HEB and had shown a photograph of the deceased being removed from the truck.

What is and isn't appropriate isn't the question. The question is, how do you balance reporting public deaths versus reporting suicides. The latter, we generally do not report. There were three suicides last week and none of them made our news. We don't report them. This report was not presented as a suicide from the Brady police. The incident attracted much attention because of where it was. That is, it was in a very public place with 100s of people passing by witnessing it. I made the call to report it because my opinion was that knowledge of what was happening overrode the chance it was a suicide, and if it turned out to be such (no one has said so yet), it was in a very public place. 

The man who died on a truck last week was reported much more graphically than us by your local TV news station. Their reporting included panning videos of the body and all. We did not do that. But we offer readers like you a place to condemn us publicly, they don't. The photo we used was completely appropriate and told a story from a photojournalism perspective of the investigation of the man's death. I took it down because I was tired of the backlash, not that I thought the photo was wrong to use.

Here's the bottom line. I try to give the balance between reporting news and the impact of the news we report due consideration. We face tough, mostly subjective decisions daily. We are not just running out to capture gore, but try to present what is happening in a truthful and real way.

We pull off stories all the time because its suicide, or domestic/family violence. We tell competition news agencies we are doing so so they don't feel obligated to report it as well. 

Before you tell us what is and is not appropriate, I want you to consider that we do have standards. You may not like our standards. If so, you are welcome to get your news elsewhere.

The Publisher

Please forgive my knee-jerk reaction. I lost my daughter to suicide by hanging (although not in a public place) several years ago. The pain remains. Thank you for your explaination.

I live in Brady, tx and this area was not a high traffic area with 100s of ppl passing through witnessing it! My father in law found this poor girl cleaning up the area as it hadn't been touched in a while .

Wow, pretty strong statement there at the end Joe. Keep that attitude up and you may find your subscriber list dwindling...just saying. You do make some very good points in your response with which I happen to agree. I saw the headline of the story, but chose not to read it because I thought I might have an idea of what happened. You do seem to take your journalistic responsibilities seriously. I commend you for that because a lot of the web publishing doesn't. This sentence really caught my attention: "I try to give the balance between reporting news and the impact of the news we report due consideration." That is a value missing in many efforts today, and is exactly the value I was hoping for when I was trying to suggest something needs to be done about the traffic in San Angelo, and about people being thrown in jail for a misdemeanor offense such as expired registration, etc. I happen to notice some of the other outlets are starting to report the number of tickets being issued. While that seems to be a minor effort of some sort, maybe it will get something started.