“Fuck.

I know that we all are shocked and probably wish we didn’t have to report on yet another senseless tragedy, but this is what we signed up for. The news isn’t always good; hell, it’s never good, and our feel-good stories are there just to make sure people don’t completely lose faith in the world. Good news isn’t news. No one cares if things are working the way that they’re supposed to.

And it isn’t senseless; there have to be reasons behind this, and we need to lay them out for our readers so that they don’t become hysterical. The last thing we want is to make people panic. What makes him different? What are some things that we should be aware of? We want to be very, very careful about generalizations, because those are what people latch on to. There might be commonalities somewhere, but we should err on the side of caution at all times here. Don’t make any bold claims if you can’t back them up. 

This was an fucking despicable act. I get that. 

But not everyone is evil. There have to be reasons behind this that we don’t understand yet, and our job is to get to the point where we can. I’m not fucking defending his actions. I just think that this used to be someone who couldn’t have done this. Something had to change. Our job is to find out what.”

The editor in chief stopped pacing the room and looked up at the newsroom. Scanning his eyes around the room, he saw carbon copies of reporters: hands on their heads, like they had a headache that had suddenly flared up, people staring down at their fingernails and biting their lower lips, eyes violently clenched together and abruptly opened. His monochrome painting was only interrupted by the new intern that started only two weeks prior. He wasn’t disaffected, no, he was grasping at his hair and blankly staring in front of him, but his eyebrow was slightly raised because of a stupid thought he couldn’t shake.

Why did something feel off about this speech?

Process Notes: 

I feel like I have this habit of having a good idea of what the last line of my piece is going to be, and I started writing with that in mind, only for that first attempt to be just dialogue, with a gut punch at the end, and I wasn’t satisfied with that. This version does also have the same structure: opening speech from the editor in chief, and looking at the reactions of those around him dealing with the tragedy, but I spent a little more time developing the latter than saying something arguably more of a gut punch (at the price of being probably a bit more inaccurate). I ended up pulling ideas from thoughts I’ve seen about coverage of tragedy, real and fictional, including Sabrina (and even maybe a thought or two from Lippman’s Liberty and the News). I think the words you don’t say are just as important as the ones you do, if not more important, and so highlighting a potential discrepancy without painfully attempting to construct one I think ends up being effective.