Newspaper reporters often come to the office after sitting through a trial involving particularly sad testimony or gory evidence. After talking to people who have lost their homes to wildfires, their children to drunk drivers, their parents to Alzheimer’s.
Often, we have to take a moment. We tease each other about being vultures, scavengers who benefit from the misfortune of others. Sometimes there is some grisly laughter that makes it possible to get through the process of not only learning these horrible things, but telling the world about them.
We have a job to do and we usually do it surprisingly well, under deadline pressure, with a need to set aside some — but not all — of our natural human emotions to tell the stories that need telling.