BROOKE GLADSTONE: Reporter Susanne Mc Carroll at KCNC-TV in Denver knows how to do it. She's on what amounts to permanent assignment to the Bummer Beat. She believes in the power of the survivor's perspective. She sees the sharing of it as a gift.

SUSANNE Mc CARROLL: You know a lot of times we treat them like you owe us an interview! And that's so untrue! They're inviting us into their homes to talk about personal things, and that's a privilege! You know the Constitution doesn't guarantee us the right to get interviews with people going through tragedies, and a lot of times we act like it's our journalist-given right, and we don't afford them the opportunity to say no.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Many years ago, Mc Carroll did a story that she says she'll never forget that hurt the participants. She said it changed the way she worked. She's careful about the way she portrays the victims of tragedy. She approaches them gently and with apologies. When possible she'll drop a note at the door. She'll get the facts right -- the names - the ages - the jobs - the photographs the family prefers - and she'll never ask "how are you feeling?"

SUSANNE Mc CARROLL: I ask the simple question "How are you doing?" -- I mean "How are you feeling?" is such a silly question -- they've lost a loved one -of course they're feeling lousy. So "How are you doing?" can afford them the opportunity to talk about, you know, how they're coping with the tragedy and how they go on from there.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Rebecca Oakes is now a victim's advocate with the Denver District Attorney's office, but she is a victim too, marked permanently in December of '93 when an angry ex-employee took aim at the staff of a suburban Chucky Cheese Restaurant.

REBECCA OAKES: He waited until all the customers were gone. He came out of the bathroom and just systematically shot everyone who was there. He shot, let's see, Ben, and Ben died. He shot Colleen, and Colleen died. He shot Sylvia -- Sylvia died. He shot Bobby, who lived. And he shot my Mom, who also died.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Rebecca Oakes found her misery compounded by an overzealous press.

REBECCA OAKES:There was a gag order on the case, because of the publicity surrounding it. The only information that we really had was that my mom was shot in the head. Probably about two months after this happened, I opened up the paper one day and saw that she was shot twice in the head, once in each ear, from a distance of no more than 6 inches away. And reading that in the paper-- I felt like it was happening all over again. I felt like I was going to faint. I felt like I was going to throw up, and more than anything, I was furious.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Family members, she says, don't want to get information like that, in the newspaper, without warning. Some family members, she says, would skip the paper that day if they knew. The public might wonder why a person in Rebecca Oakes' situation would subject herself to the media at all. She did, because she, like many survivors, wanted the world to recognize her loss.

REBECCA OAKES: It always irritated me that the papers would always say Nathan Dunlap shot and killed four people, and I always wondered why they didn't say some guy shot and killed Marge Kohlberg, Ben Grant, Sylvia Crowell, and Colleen O'Connor. There's a great need to let people know about my mom! I mean you hear about murders all the time, and you don't know the people, so it doesn't really affect you. Well, if you know something about those people, I think that you're going to think about it a little bit more.

EDNA BUCHANAN: Yeah, I used to pride myself on knowing every homicide case in Miami, and of course one year we had 637.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's Edna Buchanan, a journalist devoted to the reporting of mayhem who spent 18 years with the Miami Herald. When she returned from out of town, she would check on the murders she missed.

EDNA BUCHANAN: And one was the murder of this young man who lived with his grandmother, and I happened to find myself in that neighborhood, and I stopped by, knocked at the door, and she opened it and I introduced myself and said I wanted to talk to her about her grandson. And she took a deep breath, stepped back, threw the door open wide and invited me in, and she said I wondered why nobody came.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Buchanan always knew she was calling a person in pain. She also knew that for many of them, there was only one brief moment to tell their story as reporters rushed past yesterday's tragedies in pursuit of tomorrow's. She developed this approach: she'd call once. If they hung up, she'd count to 60 and call again. More than half the time, they would want to speak on the second attempt. She would never call a third time. In 1981 she had 637 families to call.

EDNA BUCHANAN: My goal that year was to get every single case, every single victim into the paper. At the end, I'm convinced I was sort of shell-shocked and numb, but I did it, and I thought it was important because we're all in trouble when these victims begin to just be statistics, to be numbers. It's so important to have them stay in our consciousness, to make us all aware of what's going on and who they were.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Any one of us could be a family member at an airport hotel, submerged in sorrow, spied through the looking glass of a camera lens.

DAUGHTER OF CRASH VICTIM: [WEEPING] My mother's dead.

REPORTER: Yeah, she was on the plane that--

DAUGHTER OF CRASH VICTIM: [WEEPING] I'm one of those people now who everybody else is watching and saying "That poor person."

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Edna Buchanan says those people are us. After more than a decade on the bummer beat, Susanne Mc Carroll says every day brings a constant reminder of her own loved ones, safe at home. When a survivor talks to the media, they not only share their sorrow; they remind us all to take nothing for granted. [MUSIC]

BOB GARFIELD:That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price and Katya Rogers with Megan Ryan and Emily Ford; engineered by Dylan Keefe, Rob Christiansen and George Edwards, and edited-- by Brooke. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Capello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts at onthemedia.org and e-mail us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.