The fine line

Everyone's probably heard that there's a fine line that journalists walk between doing their jobs and getting too involved in their stories.

Everyone's probably heard that journalists have to "have hard shells," that "we just move from story to story" and "that we don't really care, we're just focused on making deadlines."

And that's partially true. Good journalists, in my opinion, need to try to be as empathetic as they possibly can, but there comes a point when we have a job to do.

We have to write.

I thought I had it all figured out, until week seven of work, when I got my first murder story.

I went to work thinking it was going to be like any other day, kinda quite with a few interesting cases, mostly drunken driving arrests and a couple drugs tickets.

But by the time I left the Sheriff's Office at 9 a.m., I knew I was in for a heck of a morning.

There was an arrest for first-degree murder in the jail log — something that, thankfully, doesn't happen very often.

The three of us news people raced over to the police department because it was their case and we were hoping for the juicy details — horrible sounding, I know.

I shot my editor a text saying both of them better plan for a late deadline, because there had been a murder, and then the report....

I'm not going to list every detail here because it is a really sad thing and a really sad case and I've had to write about it every week since.

A 3-year-old boy lost his life at Children's Hospital in Aurora, Colorado, and died of bleeding in the brain.

Police suspected child abuse because the story the 20-year-old man told officers was not consistent with how the boy had been hurt, and the injuries had eventually taken his life.

I sat in court last week and listened to the police detective who investigated the case share what he knew, once it was an active investigation.

So, I'm pretty sure I will be sitting in court for this guy for a long time, and every time something new gets introduced to the case, it is hard and it is sad and all I want to do is cry for this family.

But I have to do my job, and my job is to report on it, not to get too emotional and not to intervene too much. I walk this fine line every day. One one side: caring enough. And on the other: caring too much.

Off the job, I am allowed to fall off the tightrope and collapse a bit. I wrote about my initial feelings a lot, but eventually you have to realize that you have no personal connections to the people in the case. Yes, what happened is terrible, but as the crime reporter, I write about terrible things every day.

You have to separate yourself at some point.

It's not that we're heartless, and it's not that we're so after a story that we appear that way. Journalists have to have fairly hard shells, and to keep ourselves sane, we have to have some time when we can forget about the job and go be regular humans.

I'm surviving these stories and this trial, but I am sure more stories will come.