If It Bleeds.....I Don't Like It.

After a slow first couple of days, this week at work has become shockingly...and depressingly, violent.

Last night, some lunatic shot two people outside of a hotel in Southington apparently without any provocation. Then he shot himself. That's pretty upsetting, but it wouldn't have been as bad if it hadn't just come after the Cheshire murders.

Twenty minutes down the road from where I work, two guys broke into a home, killed a mother and two kids, and burnt the place to the ground. You would think we had stepped back into the Dark Ages. Something like that extends far beyond the community in which it happens. The mother was also a nurse at a prestigious private school in Cheshire which had several students in Southington. This gave me the agonizing task of talking to these kids who are still shell-shocked and trying to hold back tears.

The story I come up will be more about the fond memories these people had than about the gory details of the incident, but I learned vividly that other papers went about it very differently. The Hartford Courant is essentially the paper of record for our state, but their coverage utterly disgusted me. The writers delved into nauseating, unncessary detail and the whole thing reeked of sick sensationalism.

I seriously considered quitting this profession when I read those stories....but that said just as much about me as it did the Courant.

I've discovered that I prefer to write about good news...and of course, politics (I'll have a lot of fun with the local elections this year). I'm not the type of journalist who salivates at the thought of a grisly story breaking. It's the opposite really, I tend to get full of dread when I realize I have to cover something like that.

Guess I'll never work at the New York Post.