What leads me to this is a story today where, apparently, the editor of a rural Aussie newspaper has been stood down after commenting on Facebook about how his circulation would benefit from coverage of the tragic shooting death of a local policeman.
His Facebook friend left comments saying how inappropriate that was to post on Facebook, and I wholeheartedly agree. Read the story on news.com.au
Yes the newsroom can desensitize a news journo, no doubt.
But essentially I think a newsroom is just like Vegas - the trick of the trade is to remember that what's said in the newsroom, stays in the newsroom.
Case in point - the day Diana died. It was a quiet Sunday morning in the newspaper office, nothing much had happened on Saturday night which meant the following day's Monday paper would be almost devoid of crime stories, so when I heard the weekend news editor shout out with glee that he was lucky to already have a front page for the next day's paper, I went to investigate.
"Princess Diana's been in a car accident in France, we know she's injured but that's all at this stage," he said, almost clapping his hands at what had fallen into his lap on a lazy Sunday.
The hours rolled on and tiny pieces of info filtered through but in between leaving the office to parking the car on my driveway at home, the announcement came that she had died.
Suffice to say, it was front page all right, across the whole world.
Now what if back then there was Facebook, and my news editor has become excited and made some knee-jerk comment - he probably wouldn't be a senior figure in the Australian news industry now to say the least.
Luckily only I and a handful of journos were the only witnesses to his initial excitement, which in the end turned to shock and dismay like the rest of us.
That day, and September 11, 2001, made me see history in a whole new light. Something had affected me. I FELT the tragedy. Then it hit me how my parents had always spoken of the day that JFK died, and I'd never really given it much thought. Their world at the time had felt that blow hard. It's a horrible feeling but a uniting one at the same time, and tomorrow on the anniversary of 9/11, I'll be reminded of that when I cry at all the horrific TV coverage I'm bound to watch.
So here's my thought for the day, and for tomorrow on September 11 - over time you may not think you'll change, but eventually the world changes you.
(Still trying to figure out how to change the date to an Australian timezone from the current US one - because it says this is Thursday at the top, but I know for a fact that today is Friday in Australia because I live here - did I mention I can't program a VCR either? God help me!
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