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Comment on How Not to Report on Suicide: Sharon Herald Story Crossed the Line by Joanie
['Sydney Smith']
Comments for iMediaEthics
Readers were shocked after daily Pennsylvania newspaper The Sharon Herald published an insensitive and gratuitous story that horrifically detailed a local man’s death by suicide. “This is a great example of how not to report a suicide death,” Ken Norton, executive director of the National Alliance for Mental Illness, New Hampshire, told iMediaEthics by e-mail. News outlets have a significant responsibility to carefully report on suicide deaths because unnecessarily detailed and insensitive news reports on suicides can risk causing additional deaths by suicide — the contagion factor.