Ethics

One prominent newspaper editor dies under embarrassing circumstances. Then a second editor is fired for misleading the paper, which she apparently did to protect the first editor's family.

I'll never forget the time I overheard one of my editors say on the phone to another reporter, "You're a journalist, not a human being!"

He may have been kidding.

Anyway, imagine yourself as the editor whose family friend just died. What would you have done? What if you had just said, "I can't talk about that." Would that have been the right way out?

Should she have been fired?

Was there ever a time in your own career when you had trouble reconciling your journalist-self with your human-self?