Tasty Edits

Reporting on suicides — or declining to do so — is one of the most fraught aspects of community journalism. The Burbank Leader is unlikely to have the Pentagon Papers leaked to one of our reporters, or to have matters affecting national policy or millions of lives pass through its pages. This paper does, however, write about things that impact individuals. As such, it has the power to honor or harm people in our community more acutely than publications of a much larger scope.

Last Saturday, our intrepid reporter, Christopher Cadelago, wrote this story about a woman who leapt to her death from the top floor of the Holiday Inn in Burbank. We generally do not write about suicides, but we did in this instance. Why?

First, let me go into the reasons why we do not generally write about suicides. For the most part, suicides are conducted in private. Often mental illness is involved. Additionally, many religious traditions find the taking of one’s life to be morally reprehensible, often heaping shame on the family left behind. For all these reasons, it makes little sense for the paper to write about such events.

So then, when would this paper deem it necessary to write about a suicide? To my mind, there are three main reasons: the suicide occurred in public, the suicide happened as part of another crime (e.g., a murder-suicide), or the suicide is part of a larger trend (e.g. anorexia among high-school sophomores). Once the decision to write about a suicide has been made, another set of choices needs to be made: how much information should be printed?

Often, this is a function of how much information the police have provided to us. Police departments in our area vary greatly in the amount — and timeliness — of information they provide to us. Burbank does not rank highly in terms of transparency, as we have opined in recent editorials. However, in this instance, the Burbank Police Department was responsive to our requests, and provided us with more information than we printed.

During the evening of Sept. 12, a 47-year-old Burbank woman checked into the Holiday Inn, requested a top-floor room, and — according to police — decided to end her life by jumping from the hotel. We had the name of the woman, but chose not to print it. She was not a person that had injected herself into public life, and printing her name would not have increased readers’ understanding of what happened — but likely would have caused her family additional pain and anguish.

There have been calls for us to release this information, but I have declined. I feel it would be ghoulish and unnecessary to do so. And, in the end, the information is indeed public. People who desire the information can discover it for themselves.