At Trolley Square on Monday, six people died and several other were seriously wounded when a young man went on a shooting rampage. For loved ones left behind, life has changed forever. It is theirs to agonize, to ponder the senselessness of it all, to grieve.

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Put a name on the victim then. It was Vanessa Quinn that was all over the news. She was killed in front of the Bath and Body Works. Perhaps we should ask her husband, Rich Quinn, how he felt about? He learned of her death indirectly through the photo. I posted the story elsewhere, but he lost contact with her during the events in the mall. He tried calling and texting to no avail. His brother saw the body on the internet and mentioned it to him. He then used a news photographer's camera at Trolley Square to zoom in and see his wife. I regret he had to learn that way, but apparently the police were not giving out any information immediately afterwards to him.

I am not one for censored news. It is sometimes hoped that the shock of seeing the reality of the news (not just the headline of x people were killed) may move people into caring more about what is going on.

dailyherald wrote:

At Trolley Square on Monday, six people died and several other were seriously wounded when a young man went on a shooting rampage. For loved ones left behind, life has changed forever. It is theirs to agonize, to ponder the senselessness of it all, to grieve.

Read more...


As hard as the decision to publish is, it serves a public purpose. Pictures have the power to make the unthinkable real whether the pictures are from a mall or a war. It can be argued that a Pulitzer Prize winning photo by Eddie Adams stopped a war. We all hate these pictures that force reality into an event but they provide a higher service beyond our raw emotion and pain.

Norcal wrote:

dailyherald wrote:

At Trolley Square on Monday, six people died and several other were seriously wounded when a young man went on a shooting rampage. For loved ones left behind, life has changed forever. It is theirs to agonize, to ponder the senselessness of it all, to grieve.

Read more...


As hard as the decision to publish is, it serves a public purpose. Pictures have the power to make the unthinkable real whether the pictures are from a mall or a war. It can be argued that a Pulitzer Prize winning photo by Eddie Adams stopped a war. We all hate these pictures that force reality into an event but they provide a higher service beyond our raw emotion and pain.


Thank you. CNN has a headline article showing a dead Iraqi soldier on the front of their website, I am sure no complaints are heard. Censoring the news will only desensitize us to the reality of what we are reading about. People will care more about the violence in our world and how to stop it if it is more than a few letters pieced together.

I recall, as a sophomore in high school, a classmate coming up to me and showing me a picture. Not knowing what it was, I looked. There was dead man on a floor with the top of his head blown off and his brains on the floor.

This was big news 10 years earlier. A man had come home from work, told the kids to go play with the neighbors, shot his wife and killed himself.

It was shocking and deeply disturbing to me as a 15 year old. I had just moved into that school from California, and wondered what kind of place we had just moved to. It was devastating to another young man that went to the school when he saw the picture being passed around. The man in the picture was his father. The student passing it around was the son of a photographer whose job it was to take the picture. The boy knew whose father it was and was telling that as he passed the picture.

If the story at Trolley square had been reported without a single picture, it would have still been a story to read about and learn from.

And yet, what would be the cost to a community if a newspaper were to sanitize its depiction of the world, publishing only Kodak moments of smiles and balloons and vibrant children, as though difficulty doesn't exist?

Nice try. However, there are many shades of gray (sanitizing) between frank depiction of an awful reality and your stated Kodak moments. Certainly you must know this, else you would have published a close up of the victim's body or injuries.(Maybe you would have if a photographer could have gotten the shot.) You choose what shade of gray to color your world and not every one is pleased with your choice. My initial reaction upon seeing the photo was "wow...so much for being sensitive to the victim's friends and family." Perhaps our society has moved past the need for such sensitivities and respect for the dead. Too bad.

It's all too true that bad news sells and I don't expect this to change. Not everyone needs to see to believe, or to understand the horror of the moment. Choose your shade of gray as you will...just don't try and support your choice with such spurious reasoning.