Journalists’ duty to inform sits uneasily with their duty to recognize now and then that the public knows all it needs to and it’s time to turn off the spigot. Journalists learn to balance these contrary responsibilities.
Next Haley’s paper published—”without any sense of the impact on the family and the community,” he says—the sort of specific details of the suicide that normally come nowhere close to seeing the light of day. The story was posted online December 8, and the reaction was immediate and overwhelming. “This is way too much information that we did not need to know,” was the first response and one of the gentlest. “This ‘news’ should be taken down,” someone added. “I hope it is not appearing in the print addition.”
The death of Alicia Yaus was different in that the original reporting when she was missing imposed an obligation on Haley’s paper to follow up when her body was found. But this slope is far from being too slippery to negotiate. How did it happen? I asked Haley. “It happened for all the reasons things like this happen these days,” he replied, speaking of things that go wrong at newspapers. “Too much effort to push copy out, too few people, not enough eyes. Fundamentally it happened because we made a fundamental error in judgment about what’s appropriate to publish.”
I recognize the intense pain we have caused both this family and the wider community with our reporting. I offer our deepest apology and regret.
This is damage that cannot be easily undone. There is pain here that we have intensified.
For those of you who have called me to express your upset, sent an e-mail, posted on Facebook or have added comments to our online coverage, I offer my thanks. We made a serious error in editorial judgment and the criticism is deserved.
Once more my apologies to the family and our community.
“We should think and talk about it,” Haley wrote then, “and since the spring, at least, Mariah has been asking me when I was going to write about all this. It’s too personal, I’d say. It’s your business, I’d say. And she’d say that other kids and other parents need to know.”
