By: Joe Strupp The editor of The Eagle-Tribune in North Andover, Mass., admitted in a note to readers Sunday that the paper had wrongly withheld the cause of death last week in a story about an 11-year-old who had committed suicide at home.
William Ketter, editor in chief of the 54,453-circulation daily circulation paper, said the story of fifth grader Tomomi Oi, which emphasized the local school district's response to the event with information for parents on how to help their children cope with the death, should have explained how he died.
"The answer was terribly difficult. But the abundance of inquiry and a vigorous staff discussion of the issue have convinced me that we made the wrong call in deliberately omitting the cause of death," Ketter wrote. "We didn't include that fact in the story out of sensitivity to the boy's family and because of the newspaper's policy of only reporting suicide that's committed in public or by a public or well-known figure. Self-inflicted death done in the privacy of a home usually doesn't make the paper. This, however, was not your usual private suicide, if there is such a thing."
The editor went on to explain that, "because of his popularity with his peers, the school's principal felt compelled to reach out to the community with advice on how to handle what she described as an 'untimely death.' That also is unusual. It is the exceptional that often makes life and death especially newsworthy. So does public interest and reader desire to know what happened, why it happened and how it happened."
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