Today, I was speaking to two family members of a deceased person who had a criminal history. The two family members provided essentially the same story about the person. He was an excellent family member, they said, and had a lot of care for everyone in his life. He had gone astray here and there in his youth, but was turning things around.

His death involved a specific illegal substance. I asked both of them if he had a history with the substance; one person said yes, the other no.

I don’t know which is true, but I know this: when someone dies, you want to take care of them. If it’s the case that one of the family members lied to me to protect their loved one’s reputation, I am honestly not bothered by it. I cannot take her word for granted on such issues in the future, but her context is very different from mine.

As a follow-up to the last post, I just have to say: any law that allows for the restriction of a public record as a result of an ongoing investigation without just cause seems foolhardy at best. Twice now, I’ve encountered this: one was in the death by suicide of Rylie Wagner, where we saw a medical examiner’s office withhold an autopsy report for months because they presumed there was an ongoing investigation (it was a legal misunderstanding, in the end); the second was when two police departments refused to confirm information regarding the arrest of four separate suspects in a double homicide. Why? They didn’t say, and continually provided non-answers. Arguably they could easily block my access on the grounds of there being an active investigation, but why? If I, as a police administrator, found ways to continually lengthen an investigation that is personally inconvenient for me or someone I know, how would the press know?

Plus, an exemption under open records laws regarding disclosure of public records because of issues like public safety or an active investigation does not seem to me to be a blanket reason to prevent the release of said record. It simply provides the option to do so; a criminal justice system acting in good faith with the public would not apply these exemptions across the board wherever they might apply.

These were not the concerns the officers were considering. They were concerned with doing their jobs. But so was I, and they sure made it harder.

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.

Generally, word count can indicate the depth of reporting you have to do on a given subject, which in turn can indicate how much time you’ll spend on that reporting.

This is not always true.

I already knew this, in a way: when I was freelancing for Maryland Matters, my research for a given article could take a day or a couple of weeks, depending on the subject. But sometimes, even for the least-involved of articles – say, a 2-3 graf brief – the amount of time invested can balloon.

Take this most recent example: I was tasked with writing a brief on Columbia’s weather the next day. The editor who assigned it to me anticipated I’d run into issues, because of the complexity of the National Weather Service’s web site. She was right.

Not counting interruptions from class and meetings, writing this brief on the temperature took me hours. I had to find temperature extreme charts, averages, and trends to make sure that the high temperature of that day was or was not unusual.

Then, I had to tie it to drought figures, and see whether or not the current drought was going to be alleviated this month.

Navigating the U.S. Drought Monitor site and the NWS’s byzantine layout turned what could have been a one hour story at max into a slog. Another learning experience, I guess.