A morning full of bad news

One of the best things about working in news in a place like Wilmington is that we don't have an abundance of bad news. But every now and then, it all catches up to you. This morning was one of those days.

In the first block of our 5 a.m. half hour, we counted 11 dead people: Seven college students killed in a fire in Ocean Isle Beach Sunday morning, a young mother and her five-year-old daughter killed in their Holden Beach home Friday morning apparently by a man who then turned the gun on himself and a so far unidentified man shot and killed last night in the middle of South 2nd Street in Wilmington. What a way to start the morning.

You may wonder what makes these deaths news compared to any others. It's a fair question, and one I often asked myself and others when I worked in Lexington, KY. There we covered just about any fire or car wreck that ended with someone dead. In fact, I once had to drive more than 90 minutes to Newport, KY, which is part of the Cincinnati market, to do a story on a fire that killed a little girl. When I asked why I was going up there, my boss told me it was because there was a technical problem at our sister station in Cincinnati that prevented them from sending us the video. So we took a reporter and photographer out of the loop to cover truly local news just because we had to cover a dead kid out of the market.

These stories we are covering today, though, are news, and here's why:

The Ocean Isle Beach fire and Holden Beach murders have a lot to do with numbers, both the number of people involved and the age of the people involved. Seven college kids in the prime of their life were on vacation at a local beach and will never go home. Think about that? That's why it's even among the top national stories of that day. What's even more is that the firefighters who responded said the smoke alarms were going off. Yet only six of the 13 people inside made it out in time. In Holden Beach, investigators say a 29-year-old mother and her five-year-old daughter were killed by a 23-year-old man. Both of these stories also leave a lot of unanswered questions. What started the fire? What led a Marine who had served three tours of duty in Iraq to kill two neighbors? How could this all happen in our relatively quiet neighborhood? Last night's murder in Wilmington is news for the simple fact that there's a killer on the loose, and that affects all of us in some way.

Unfortunately, not every news outlet uses the same sort of rationale to filter their news decisions. Again, back in Kentucky, all it took was a fatal car wreck or house fire to be considered news. I'm certainly not minimizing those deaths, but the simple act of dying is not newsworthy. We all know every single day countless people die. Why just do stories about people who die in horrible ways? People who die of disease, old age or any other reason have stories, too. But those deaths are not considered news, and probably rightfully so. It's all part of the way news as an industry is struggling to make sense of and for itself.

I think I have pretty good news judgment. I try to look at things from the viewer's point of view and decide what affects the most people the most. So trust me when I tell you we are not pandering in covering these latest sad stories. They affect a lot of people, and they have a lot of people wanting to know more. It may not be the cheeriest of topics, but it is news.