Covering crime: ‘The Why?’
In Journalism 101, we are taught to report using “The 5 Ws and the H:” Who, what, when, where, why and how. Without fail, the “why” is always the most difficult to answer.
At my interview for the Herald-Standard crime reporter position in August, Executive Editor Mike Palm asked me, “So why crime?”
Without hesitation, I answered, “It’s the adrenaline rush.”
It’s the truth. There is a unique thrill that comes with rushing to the scene of a crime and being the person who gets to tell everyone what they’re wondering: “What’s going on over there?”
But some days, when you’re covering a story that hits closer to home, you need a bigger why.
The first time I needed a “why” was about two years ago when I was working for a previous newspaper, and I was sent to the scene of a fatal car accident. With two years in the newspaper industry at that time, it was far from the first tragedy I’d covered. But this one was different. Two little girls were dead.
The girls, ages 6 and 8, were killed in what police called “a freak accident.” In a case of tragic timing, a tree fell as a car drove by and landed above the backseat where the children were sitting. Worse, maybe, their two younger sisters, ages 3 and 5, were trapped in the car alongside the bodies.
Covering the story was mainly a waiting game. I sat in the car with a broadcast journalist for hours, mostly chatting about nothing. Although I’d seen much of the tragedy unfold when I arrived on the scene, none of it hit me until later, when they towed the crushed car into evidence, and I saw a pink T-shirt stuck in a door.
I realized my face was betraying my feelings when I caught a look from a veteran journalist from a local TV station. It was a look of wistful sympathy that I interpreted as, “I remember when I wasn’t jaded.”
Now, covering tragedies is my full-time job.
When I told my friends and family I accepted a job as a crime reporter, their reactions included concerns for my safety, amusement and barely veiled jealousy that my job was so much cooler than theirs.
When I told my grandfather, he just laughed. “Maybe they’ll send you down to the coroner’s office to watch an autopsy just for fun,” he joked.
That didn’t happen. But I did have the coroner’s number memorized before my own desk number.
It only took me a couple days to accept the fact that any time my mom texted me and asked me what I was doing that day, she would respond with some variation of, “Oh, that’s sad.”
But fortunately I came to an answer for the big question. It was one I had asked before, just out of high school, when I decided that what I wanted to do for a living was tell other people’s stories. Not just the bare minimum to make the cut. Not just the “5 Ws and the H.” I wanted to share the details that make someone human.
When I was 19, a friend was murdered. He was studying to be a teacher, and he was killed because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time — practicing his passion by teaching a friend who was struggling in math class.
But that didn’t make the story.
What did were the basics. 22-year-old man, shot to death in an off-campus apartment, Jan. 23, 2008. Who, what, when, where, why and how. Sans the why, it was all there. But what wasn’t there was the humanity. Who was he? What was the context of his death? What made his story unique? That day I decided that when I was a journalist, I would get answers to those questions.
Some say to separate yourself. Don’t think about the fact that the victim was a human, that they had a family and a life that was never deemed worthy of news coverage until a few minutes before you showed up.
It didn’t take long in the journalism field to discover what made finding and sharing those answers so difficult, especially in the first few hours and days of a tragedy.
Telling the human side of a tragedy is not always easy. Sometimes, it’s almost impossible. But it not only preserves the humanity of the people in the story, it preserves my own humanity as well.
Conveniently for me, that’s also what makes a story an interesting read.
And now that it’s in writing for all my writers and editors to see, I’m going to have to hold myself to it.