Your Week in Metro Detroit: A word from our executive editor
To our readers,
Our hearts go out to the families of those lost in the Oxford High School shooting, to those wounded, to the students, faculty and staff of the school, and to the entire community.
School shootings are depressingly common in our country and one so close to home has an even greater impact.
It might sound a little insensitive, but it really isn’t: As journalists, we feel deeply obligated to cover such stories in depth, to help you understand exactly what happened and to bring to you the facts. When news of the shooting broke, we scrambled reporters and photographers to the scene and to hospitals, and eventually courtrooms, homes and businesses.
Since Tuesday, a majority of our staff has been involved in the coverage. One story reconstructing the day of the shooting – it appears in the Sunday paper and is on freep.com Sunday morning – includes reporting from more than 20 reporters. We had reporters working all night Friday into Saturday morning as the parents were found and arrested in Detroit.
The Free Press staff is a remarkable collection of professionals and people. My colleagues are great human beings, smart, fun, interesting and even a little quirky. It takes a certain mindset to be a journalist – asking questions in sometimes awkward situations isn’t for everyone – but it's important to remember we are sons and daughters, parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, and the gravity of these situations is felt.
That’s why our reporters and photographers are always sensitive to not overstep bounds, are respectful of requests when individuals ask for privacy and avoid intruding on grief. We always will be aggressive in getting information and we don’t take kindly to incidents such as one yesterday where a deputy told our reporter she couldn’t be interviewing people at the public gathering to celebrate the organ donation of one of the shooting victims at McLaren Oakland hospital. She did do interviews of those willing to talk and wrote a lovely story.
We understand there is a great deal of hostility toward the media, created largely by false accusations and rhetoric, and the craziness of cable TV news. But it only makes us more determined to continue the tradition of truth-telling we have at the Free Press and to keep covering well the stories that matter here.
As subscribers, we are very grateful to you for financially supporting our work. We quite literally couldn’t do it without you. Please consider this writing a virtual fist or elbow bump, or handshake. Your support means everything and increases our resolve to get the stories for you.
Wishing you the best holidays and if you haven’t gotten your booster, please do it soon.
—Peter Bhatia, executive editor
More exclusive journalism from Oxford
• Inside the prosecutor's decision to charge the Oxford High School shooting suspect's parents
• Before the deadly shooting, officials repeatedly told parents school was safe
• Oxford High student escaped likely death by running from bathroom, source says
📊 Oxford High School shooting is nation's deadliest school shooting since 2018
🎞 Multiple dead, a small town grieves: A visual look inside Oxford
🔊 Listen to "On The Line," our weekly news podcast, on the Oxford school shooting
In your E-edition: Michigan-Iowa postgame coverage
Since Saturday night's Big Ten Championship game ended too late, we were unable to get the Michigan-Iowa postgame coverage into our Sunday newspaper. But we do have a four-page special section available online in our E-edition this morning, exclusively for subscribers. Get your full coverage there and at freep.com/sports.
And as always, thank you for being a Free Press subscriber.
See below for more subscriber exclusives.
— Brian Manzullo, social, search & audience editor
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Your Week in Metro Detroit: A word from our executive editor
