Covering a Community Tragedy

[Editor's Note: Dart Center President Joe Hight recently spoke on victims' coverage at the Wilmington Writers' Workshop in Delaware, which is considered the first of the National Writers' Workshops in the United States. Below, he writes about two of the participants and then asked both to describe their approaches in writing stories about victims.]

Michelle Mostovy-Eisenberg is a 2002 college graduate who reports for a small weekly newspaper in Delaware. Joe McDermott is a veteran reporter for a much larger daily in Pennsylvania.

Although their careers and newspapers are vastly different, Michelle and Joe both recently faced similar situations: tragedies involving deaths of children in their coverage areas.

Michelle is a reporter and photographer for the Middletown Transcript, a 5,750-circulation weekly in the town about 20 miles south of Wilmington. Before working for the Transcript, she graduated from Rhode Island's Roger Williams University and worked in three internships, including the Poynter Institute's summer fellowship program for recent college graduates.

She's already won a first-place award for a story that she wrote on a woman's battle with breast cancer. She says she covers "pretty much everything but sports." Most of her work involves writing features or about education and health.

In February, she was assigned to write a story about Jozlyn Faye Brown, a popular high school student who was killed in a car accident a day after her 17th birthday.

"This is a very small community and we don't normally cover accident victims, but when we heard her age and that she was a student, we decided to do a profile on her. It shook this community very hard ... ," Michelle writes.

"I ended up spending four hours with the family, on top of all the other interviews I did for the story, and now, four months later, it still haunts me every time I drive by the intersection Joz died at."

More than 100 miles northwest in Allentown, Joe is a reporter for The Morning Call, a 118,000-circulation daily, 165,000 Sunday newspaper. He has remained in Pennsylvania for nearly all of his 20-year career. For more than 11 of those years, he's worked at The Morning Call, covering city hall, county government, politics and now what he calls a "municipal general assignment reporter covering a suburban beat" in Lehigh County, Pa.

Joe recently was sent to northeastern Pennsylvania for a story about three children who were killed by their mother. Hollie Mae Grable shot her boyfriend, Kenneth Cragle, and then her three children, 18-year-old Jared Brown, 16-year-old Kirsten Brown and 14-year-old Kelsey Brown, and two dogs before committing suicide after a three-hour standoff with police.

"To be honest, I've covered too many of these stories in my career. I think most of us agree that one is too many," Joe writes.

"My advice is to remember that you are writing about people, you are interviewing people, and you are a real person. Let your humanity guide you."

Most U.S. journalists probably will never cover a war in another country or a mass disaster in their own community. Most likely, they will cover a car accident victim or a murder-suicide, the types of tragedies that Joe and Michelle recently faced. And it doesn't matter the stage of their careers or their newspaper's location: Tragedy occurs in every city, town or community and affects the victims' families and friends — and eventually journalists themselves.