Today, I was tasked with covering a double homicide in Moberly, the circumstances of which were odd and somewhat confusing. That work entailed a lot of care in how I addressed family members of the deceased, as well as how I addressed actors in the criminal justice system. Neither police department that I spoke with would provide me with any information on the ongoing hunt for the four suspects, I’m assuming because of the active investigation (though they could have, should they have chosen to).

That ended up being okay, because a student journalist at another outlet shared the information needed with me and because I worked around these restrictions by relying on empathy and experience to garner that information and discover new details as to why the victims were where they were, and it resulted in more human-sounding verbiage on my part and on the part of my sources. I’m happy with how it turned out, though there are still many holes in the public’s understanding of how and why these two men died.