This newspaper lost its editor-in-chief and guiding light to academia a few weeks ago, and we — you know, the talent! — are all still moping. Meanwhile, however, the job is open, and is being publicly advertised. The pay is pretty good, but if you are thinking of applying, you should really be conscious of what a top editor has to deal with these days. BBC News provided a good example on Wednesday, offering a brief account of a controversy at the Teesdale Mercury, a rural paper in princely, scenic County Durham. (The county called Durham in England, that is.)
It seems a reader of the Mercury ran across a brief news item about the suicide of a 16-year-old girl in its pages, and was horrified at the sensational, detailed nature of the report. The story described Dorothy Balchin as being “of a reserved and morbid disposition” and described the romantic disappointment — a beau’s emigration to Australia — that preceded her suicide. The newspaper noted that a photograph of her boyfriend was found immediately below her hanged body, and even printed the text of two notes she left. In other words, the news copy broke every rule that newspapers now normally observe in mentioning suicide.
But of course no one had thought of any of those rules in the year 1912.
Which is when the story had appeared in the Mercury.
Which didn’t stop some reader from complaining to the paper in the year 2019.
Colby Cosh, “Want a newspaper job? Dream of making films? Be careful what you wish for”, National Post, 2019-05-09.
December 12, 2022
QotD: Oversensitivity is not constrained by the mere passage of time
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