Early Monday morning, we broke the news of a house fire on Alder Street as it was happening.
While I was on-scene doing a Facebook Live post telling people to take an alternate route on their morning commute, I was accosted by a neighbour telling me that I should be more sensitive to the situation.
I apologized to the man, but explained that I was doing my job and that the community needs to know what’s happening. He asked how I would feel if it was my mom’s house burning down. I said, unfortunately, I would have to cover that, too. Because a much as I would hate to be there watching it happen, the community would want to know that, as well.
Everyone has parts of their job they don’t like. I don’t know a single reporter who would say that telling the community about terrible things happening around them is something they enjoy doing.
But it’s something we have to do. It’s part of our role here in Campbell River.
It’s always a tough balancing act for a news organization. On the one hand, we have a responsibility to the community to tell them what we know about what’s going on around them. On the other hand, we have to also try to be sensitive to the people being affected by those things.
That’s why we don’t show gruesome photos of dead bodies. We don’t accost a grieving widow or parent to ask for an interview. We don’t cross police lines or put ourselves in positions where we could be impacting responders’ abilities to do their job.
Because we care about this community as much as anyone else who lives here.
And we care about the people in it.
I go out of my way to share heartwarming stories of people doing good things within the community. I love talking to people about how they were helped or how they helped someone else. And I love sharing those stories.
I love talking about teachers doing awesome things with their students, readying them for the world they are a part of and will be in charge of improving.
But the reality is that there are also bad things that happen in that world. We would be painting an inaccurate picture of the community if we didn’t show those things.
Another reality is that if we didn’t report on tragedies, we’d get more people accusing us of only showing people the beauty of the world than we ever hear from those who tell us we should be more sensitive.
For example, we were getting requests much of the morning on Monday to take the photos and video off our website in the interest of sensitivity to those affected.
But if we didn’t have anything up there, I guarantee we would have had far more people asking uswhy we didn’t have anything about it than we had asking us to pull down the photos or video.
The long and short of the matter is that this is what we do. We tell the world what’s happening in and around Campbell River. Sometimes that’s not a fun thing to do.
Sometimes we get to share the stories of the community coming together to help. We get to talk to amazing people doing amazing things and share their stories with the world.
Unfortunatley, there are also days like Monday.