When the News Section Enters the News

Even though we report murders, crime, and other tragedies on a daily basis, it’s still a shock to the system when one of our own is involved.

When we at the news desk heard that deputy news editor Dan Amzallag had been hit by a car while en route to cover a murder in Harlem Wednesday evening, we faced three major problems. First and foremost, everyone was deeply concerned about Dan who is, as my co-news editor put it in today’s paper, “a good reporter and a better friend.” Second, Dan had been scheduled to write three articles for Thursday’s paper that would either have to be given to other writers or otherwise replaced. Third, we had to decide whether or not to cover the accident itself.

Since we found out so quickly that Dan had been injured, editor in chief Tom Faure was able to get to the St. Luke’s ER before even Dan’s parents and confirm that, though banged up, Dan was going to be okay, which was a major relief to all of us in the office. A steady stream of concerned Speccies passed through the emergency room to check on Dan’s condition throughout the evening.

The city news staff stepped up valiantly to fill in the holes in Wednesday nights reporting left by Dan’s absence—most notably Alix Pianin who, though upset about Dan’s accident and facing a midterm Thursday, took over the reporting on a recent murder in Harlem.

We had the most trouble deciding whether or not Dan’s accident merited an article. When stories crop up that directly involve Spectator or any of our staffers, the decisions are inherently more complicated because it’s hard to know how objective our sense of the story’s importance is and whether or not we can fairly report it. In addition, since we all consider Dan a good friend, we were uncomfortable invading Dan and his family’s privacy by digging for facts at a scary moment.

But what we ultimately realized was that if any other Columbia student had been hit by a car, we would have had no qualms about covering the story in a second (to confirm this, I actually looked through our bound volume archives and found a precedent from a recent semester). So we put together a brief for Thursday’s paper about the accident, treating the story as we would if anyone else had been involved. I would hope that Dan - our crime beat reporter - of all people understands the rationale.

I don’t think that it’s such a bad thing that we felt so conflicted about this article and had to go through the process of soul-searching that covering it entailed. While it is of course a tragedy when anyone is injured in such an accident, and it is especially painful when he’s a member of the Spec family, it’s good for us to sometimes get a reality check about the things that we cover without thought on a daily basis. It’s easy to intellectualize away concerns about the sensitivity of the situation when we’re covering an incident across Harlem, but it’s important for us to keep in mind that all accident victims come with the same family and emotional complications as Dan does.

I think that we made the right decision in this case, and of course we’ll continue to cover tragedies as they occur in the Columbia and West Harlem community, but I hope that we can look back on this week as a growing experience, using our fraught emotions about Dan’s situation to renew our efforts to report with respect for the humanity of everyone we cover.