I should have listened to my mother.
She was fond of telling me, when I was whining or begging her for something, "Be careful what you ask for."
This week I had that experience with readers. With mixed results.
This started on Tuesday, when there was a fatal crash on the Conchester Highway Route 322 out in Upper Chichester.
Our photographers were all tied up, besides it would take them forever to traverse the county from here in Primos to get to the crash scene.
So I did something we find ourselves doing increasingly in this business. We turned to our readers. I posted a quick note on Twitter and Facebook asking if anyone had photos of the scene. Within five minutes I had several, which we used on both our website as well as in print the next day.
Later that evening, tragedy struck again. A teen lost control of his car on a particularly notorious stretch of Smithbridge Road in Concord, crossed into the other lane, and was struck by another car. The young driver was killed.
The next morningI was again looking for images from the scene, so I again took to Twitter and Facebook. I even penned an item in this blog detailing how we are now engaging readers to take part in the news-gathering process.
Then something I had not anticipated happened.
People started to let me know they didn't particularly like that approach. Maybe it was because it involved a young person, which always heightens the tragedy of a fatal crash.
Most people simply thought it was in poor taste.
They might have been right.
Let me say that we have specific policies of what we will show in a photo from a crime scene or accident. We specifically will never show any image of a person who has died.
To be honest, that was not really what I wanted when I made the pitch, but in my normal haste I didn't particulary word it especially well.
Part of both of these stories were the roads these tragedies occurred on. Dangerous roads. Both the Conchester and Smithbridge Road have a long, troubled history of fatal crashes. They don't call Route 322 the "Killer Conchester" for nothing. This stretch of Smithbridge is right down the street from Garnet Valley High School, which means crashes there often involve young people.
What I hoped is that someone had an image that would show part of the danger involved in these roads.
Readers didn't see it that way. In looking back at it, I don't really blame them.
Instead they saw it as the worst of what the media often does: Circling like vultures over a tragedy.
Here's a sampling of some of the responses they posted on our Facebook page:
"Very disrespectful."
"Scumbags."
"Pretty classless."
"That's why it's called the Daily Slime."
"Disgusting."
"Media ghouls."
You get the idea. But aside from being upset, there was something else at play here as well. Many readers made it a point to question if it was necessary to have photos from a crash scene at all.
It's an interesting question, especially when you do what I do for a living.
I can tell you that any story about a fatal crash immediately zooms to the top of our most-read stories of the day on DelcoTimes.com. I don't know why, I just know it does. Maybe for the same reason we all slow down and gawk at accident scenes.
I want to make sure the family and friends of Kip Taviano, the young man killed in the crash on Smithbridge, know that we never meant any disrespect.
I think our coverage proves that. We focused on the reactions of those who knew and loved him, as well as the problems associated with the road.
We are not going to stop using photos submitted by readers. While my preference will always be to have one of our staff photographers do this work, that's not always possible.
I will, however, start questioning myself when it comes to photos from an accident scene.
Feel free to join the conversation.
But here's a caution: Be careful what you ask for.
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