Murder by numbers
We got this e-mail as a letter to the editor:
Thank you for covering the murder of Satwinder Singh. I know there are difficult decisions involved with this sort of thing, but why this isn't front page news? Greensboro isn't a huge city, and we have a murderer on the loose, a man killed in front of his son, and this doesn't make the front page? If this were plastered on the front page, perhaps we would have a chance of smoking out this criminal before the case grows cold. This crime happened just across the street from me, and I was a "regular" at Satwinder's store. I saw him and his son just 40 minutes before this took place.
Greensboro has always seemed like a "big" small town to me, and I don't want to believe that this is being written off as "just another unlucky convenience store clerk" in the "bad part of town". Satwinder was always a kind fellow to me, and he was one of our own... I think he and his son deserve better. I saw last week's shooting in New York City made front page news the day after Satwinder was murdered, and his story was just a blurb in the B section. That just doesn't seem right. The community should come first.
A man was arrested and charged in the case late last night.
The writer raises a couple interesting questions:
Does every homicide tear a hole in the fabric of the community at large? As such, should we treat each -- Guilford County normally has three or four dozen homicides a year -- as a front page story?
There are several reasons homicides are treated differently in the newspaper, among them: lack of information on the case from police; lack of information from friends and family of the victim; the crime occurred late in the news cycle, giving us little time to gather information; competition for the news space from other stories; and the circumstances in the case are less compelling, such as a drug deal gone bad.
But, as a rule -- and we don't have a rule on this -- do you think we should treat homicides more prominently than we do?
