Sad news and covering it

It's been a while since I last posted on here. I've been quite busy.

Work has been stressful and busy and everything else. Sometimes, when I get off work, I just feel like going home, crawling in a hole and bawling my eyes out. Sometimes, news is just sad and depressing.

Being a reporter is not an easy thing but being a reporter with my personality is a lot harder. I don't like talking to strangers. I'm a shy, antisocial person. It amazes me that I even have this job. I have to go out in public and talk to random people, cover all these social events and pretend like I just love, love, love it. But all in all, I know God put me in this job to make me a more social person. So, at the end of most days, I love my job but when I go home, I want to go back to being my anti-social self.

Anyway, it's hard to be so involved in a community and see people you know get hurt and go through things. Death is not something I enjoy covering but I'm glad I can take that person's life and help people remember who they were.

I have covered countless teenage deaths over the years and they are never fun. But it's at least a little easier to handle when it's through an accident. Recently, a young boy killed himself. It was one of those things that completely shocked the entire community. This kid was a star athlete, he was very popular and well liked and he seemed to have such a bright future. As a newspaper, we don't generally cover suicides. There are exceptions of course, like when a person goes into a public place and kills himself. And in this case, because this kid was a very well known athlete, we were scratching our heads on what to do. I had mixed feelings about the whole thing. The week after it happened, we didn't do anything but we told our sports guy to work on something for next week. He was supposed to do a story on the boy and go into detail about his life as a young athlete but also, the article was supposed to at least say how he died. In the end, all that was done was a full page "tribute" to this kid. I'm not against the tribute but I'm not sure how I feel that we ran a full page of photos of this kid and never even mentioned how he died. In my eye, I worry some other kid on the edge could see it and maybe think how we "glamourized" this boy for what he did. It seems we leave it up to the reader to figure out what happened to him.

Anyway, it's a great tribute and I'm sure his family will cut it out and save it forever and ever. But did we, as a newspaper, do our job? I'm not so sure.

Right after this suicide, we had another local guy murdered. This was a 25-year-old who was shot at a club. He was out partying and having fun, got into an argument with a group of guys and got killed.

It's sad that our world is coming to this, that we can't solve arguments the old fashioned way but instead, have to kill one another to prove something.

It's really hard to interview families and friends of people that have been killed, whether it's through a murder, suicide or some accident. It's tough and on the weeks where there is so much bad news to cover, I find it hard to wake up and smile.