Julian  Wood is a 3-year-old boy who was stabbed to death in a Giant Eagle parking lot in North Olmsted on June 3, 2024. We opted not to publish A video of his accused attacker appearing to choose him as a victim in the store minutes before the parking lot attack. Readers mostly agreed with our decision.

Where is the line between reporting the news and enabling voyeurs?

That’s a question we’ve been discussing here for the past week, with a lot of heartening thoughts from our readers.

Here’s a message I sent June 7 to the 2,400+ people who subscribe to my weekday texts about what the newsroom is working on, questions we’re trying to answer or decisions we’ve made:

Yesterday gave us a tough call on video from a North Olmsted grocery, where a knife-carrying woman spotted and then followed her victims outside, killing a 3-year-old. The footage contains no violence. The question: Should we publish it? The news value is it showed how random the victim choice was and how brazenly the attacker carried the knife through the store. But it’s awful, knowing what comes next. Many will disagee, but we didn’t publish. Did we violate our duty to the news? Maybe. Our newsroom was divided. It was basic humanity in the end. We don’t want to add to the family’s suffering with voyeuristic video.

My texts have a character limit – you can subscribe for free at https://joinsubtext.com/chrisquinn -- so I could add no details. Most people in Northeast Ohio knew the story already, as it had to be the most talked about news of the week. For the record: Julian Wood is the 3-year-old who was stabbed to death. His mom, Margot Wood, is recovering from stab wounds. Bionca Ellis, 32, in is jail on an aggravated murder charge. The selection of the victims appears random, and mental health issues seem evident. 

When I sent my text, I thought I’d receive a mixed reaction, but the overwhelming majority of the 475 responses I received supported our decision not to publish the video. And if you need to read something to renew your faith in human nature, the reason people supported the decision was basic human decency. 

I didn’t make the decision not to publish lightly. I was conflicted enough that I took a page from the book of Tom O’Hara, the Plain Dealer’s managing editor n the 2000s. When he faced a sticky decision, he gathered anyone in earshot to seek thoughts. My version was sending an email to the newsroom . More people in the newsroom than not said we should publish it, but the passion and reasoning in the notes from those opposed was moving.

With the newsroom divided, I thought the public would be, but a striking but common element in the public’s was that no one needs to see video like this. One after another said describing what happened was all the storytelling necessary. The video, they said, was simply sensational. 

These three are representative:

You made the correct choice, Chris. We live in an era in which teasing shock and horror presented by the media is all too common. So called “breaking news” is a crock. Readers and viewers are seldom credited with being intelligent and caring humans. Regardless of what it showed, that tragic story doesn’t need video to help us better understand what happened. We know what happened. Why do we need to see an additionally sad preview of a nightmare. We are better than that, and you are better than that. You made the correct choice, Chris. Thank you.

Thank you. I believe your were right. Click bait towards our base instincts. No redeeming value to posting this.

A baby was violently killed. A woman was maimed and her baby was taken. Another woman’s life is utterly shattered with no future and no hope. Multiple families are tragically impacted with wounds that will never heal. There is no good reason to pander to the bloodlust of the morbidly curious under the guise of journalistic integrity.

I keep thinking about that notion of the bloodlust of the morbidly curious. There was a time when American newsrooms didn’t pander to it. Of course, back then we did not have cameras everywhere generating video of news events. All we had were police reports and witness accounts. News was more sterile.

Times change. I mentioned to a few editors here that if this issue had come up 10 or 15 years ago, I don’t think I would have hesitated to use the video. Am I getting too soft? Am I a worse journalist now than I was then? I hope I’m a better person, but the fact that we debated the video might solely be the result of that notion that times do change.

Our Right to be Forgotten effort, for example, is something that would not have happened a decade ago. It’s our practice of removing names from or unpublishing dated stories about minor crimes people committed or mistakes they made, so they are not dogged by them for all their lives. Many newsrooms have similar policies now.

Another example: For decades we used mug shots any time they were provided, but a half decade ago we stopped, with the realization that they gave a false impression that non-white people committed the vast majority of crimes. 

Times change.

Is it time to stop publishing video of violent crime because of how it impacts victims? Or how it impacts viewers? Is it healthy to bombard people with horrifying video? Would we be more civilized if we were not faced so regularly with so much vivid violence?

I have similar reservations about 9-1-1 calls, which we rarely publish. The calls are the rawest moments in peoples’ lives, amid horrible trauma, when they need help.  They make those calls with no thought that recordings will be played for the masses. The strain, fear and anxiety in their voices can be soul-crushing. Shouldn’t those moments be private?

Technological advances have improved newsgathering, but they also have turned the audiences for news into voyeurs, mainly because newsrooms reflexively publish almost anything they can get their hands on. 

Just because we can does not mean we should.

Most of those 475 people who responded to my text get that. I hope their sentiment effectively guides our future decisions.

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