More Than a Number
Journalists covering homicide are just doing their jobs. But the way they go about it can either help surviving loved ones, or compound their pain. A Macon, Ga., TV station took a hard look at its role and chose to change.
Are the police reporting one more homicide? Or has the community lost a real person, with a name, a story and a family?
Seeing its own crime coverage from the perspective of victims’ families prompted 13 WMAZ in Macon to reorient the way it tells these stories. Leading the effort has been Digital Content Manager Justin Baxley, whose own father was killed in a home robbery in 2017.
Baxley said in an interview for WMAZ that within two hours of learning about his father’s death, he had received five phone calls asking for interviews.
“I would say I'm not ready yet, and they'd call back in an hour and say, are you ready now,” he said. “There was a lack of empathy and a lack of compassion for what I'd gone through, and it was like I had to be beholden to their 24-hour news cycle.”
From pain to purpose
Justin Baxley, WMAZ
Baxley did not talk to the media in the wake of his father’s death. Five years later, however, he was in a position to use the experience to lead a shift in crime coverage at WMAZ from the inside, after taking a job there in 2022.
Baxley developed More Than A Number, an initiative to bring trauma-informed reporting to WMAZ’s newsroom, as part of a Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship. It debuted in August 2023 and was honored that fall among the best initiatives to come out of the fellowship.
The project’s work includes:
Stories about victims told from the perspective of their surviving loved ones. The stories appear as part of newscasts and on memorial pages hosted by the station’s website.
A survey form that puts power in families hands to share their loved one’s story when they are ready.
An online resource guide that organizes practical information families need in the wake of a violent loss.
Owning past harm, offering better
In a story about the project from Poynter, Baxley said that journalists’ mindset is to continue doing things a certain way, just because that’s how they’ve always done it.
“This is hundreds of years of a practice that is traumatizing to victims’ families,” he said. “We shouldn’t be doing it this way.”
The launch process for the project involved meetings with nonprofits, police, elected officials and the public. The station added memorial pages to its website, then announced the initiative in a half-hour special.
The special opens with a vulnerable acknowledgement about the station’s own coverage practices and the ways they have caused harm:
“In the wake of deadly violent crime, family and friends of the victims, experiencing perhaps the worst moment of their lives. The pain of that loss made worse by news coverage. Journalists simply reporting the facts. But sometimes contributing to the pain. Which may discourage families from speaking out or even sharing memories of their loved ones. Sometimes reducing those losses to simply a number…”
Covering crime — or public safety?
The effort at WMAZ dovetails with this current work at Poynter: Transforming Local Crime Reporting into Public Safety Reporting (2024).
The program is led by Kelly McBride, senior vice president at Poynter and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at The Poynter Institute. McBride described most crime stories as “the junk food of the daily news budget. Nobody wants to run them, but breaking the habit is incredibly difficult.”
The Poynter program is underwritten by philanthropy sponsors, making the cost ($1,000) accessible for newsrooms. The online program involves equipping newsroom leaders to set and maintain policies around what crime stories can be covered and how. It then coaches them throughout the process of implementing those policies in the organization.
McBride offers an inside look at the barriers newsrooms face and how to overcome them: Local newsrooms want to stop sensationalizing crime, but it’s hard.
The first question she asks journalists: Why do you cover crime in the first place? When journalists can articulate a purpose beyond “It’s just interesting,” that’s the first step in shaping coverage around what their community actually needs.
