Making Change

Today I helped make a change. It was minor, but not unimportant. The local paper has been covering a story about a man who, when questioned about another crime, told police where the body of a Canadian woman who has been missing for 4 or 5 years was. The body was found and today's headline was "Stripper's Remains Confirmed."

Yeah.

I emailed the paper right away, saying: I was very disappointed in your paper's decision to use the following
headline on the October 7th edition of the paper: "Stripper's Remains Confirmed." Surely we are more than what we do for a living. I did not know (the name of the murdered woman) but I am certain she was a friend, a daughter, a woman, a person, among many other things. The fact that her employment was in an industry about which people make moral judgements makes your use of her job title more problematic. A better headline would have been "Missing Women's Remains Confirmed."

Not an hour later, the editor emailed me at work (we know each other through my job, but I didn't submit the letter in my professional capacity) to apologize and to admit they had used poor judgement. And while it was obviously too late to change the headline on the paper paper, the online edition now says: "Quebec Woman's Remains Confirmed."