In defence of the death knock

A great column in the Scottish Review sees editor Kenneth Roy recount his days as a stringer for the Daily Record, and the first time he ever had to do a death knock.

One evening the Record dispatched me in a taxi to the tiny village of Allandale, between Falkirk and Kilsyth. I am not sure if Allandale exists any longer; it might well have been swallowed up by a motorway. It scarcely existed even then, except as an unprepossessing row of council houses. A young woman of Allandale – about 20 years old, perhaps, a little older than I was myself – had been killed in a road accident and the Record sent me off in search of the collect pic. 

I approached this assignment with disguised dread; to have confided my fears to the chief reporter of our paper, who acted as treasurer of the local stringers' fund, would have been so wimpish as to be potentially career-damaging. The taxi pulled up outside the house and I sat frozen to the seat for a few minutes. The couple inside had just lost their only daughter. How could I do such a thing as I was now expected to do? Many years later, I have still not answered this interesting question to my own satisfaction, but I finally got out of the taxi and knocked on the door of the grieving.

It's a feeling every cub reporter has experienced at one point or another, and what follows next is told well, but unsurprising. Kenneth was welcomed in by the victim's dazed parents, and his errand a success: 'They agreed without hesitation, asking only that the precious photo should be returned as soon as possible.'

But the column ends on a discordant note:

I ask myself how great a stride there is, ethically, between the collect pic and the interception of a dead girl's mobile phone messages. With the collect pic there was consent of a kind; with phone-hacking there was none. One activity was legal; the other was not. But the essential game is much the same: the satisfaction of popular prurience, the pandering to base human desire.

This is, as we've written before, exactly how the general public often see it - but from a journalists' point of view, maybe not quite right. The death knock or collect pic is a horrible job, but a necessary one - and the reason why is that it's not just 'pandering to base human desire' to cover the death of someone who's died, and to include their photo.

Kenneth was door-knocking on behalf of the Daily Record, a national tabloid, so arguably the grieving parents were indifferent to any coverage from that paper. But local papers at least are almost required by their audience to carry what normally is a genuine tribute to victims of accident and crime - and family and friends mind if they do not.

Everyone is different, of course, and in some cases a reporter knocking on the door can be seen as an intrusion. But the family are grieving because of their recent bereavement, not because they have to deal with the local newspaper on top of the police, the doctor, the funeral home and others. And an article in the local paper is often welcomed - one family's press intrusion is another family's mark of respect.

It's definitely not glamorous, and it's not a fun job, but it is necessary. And it's a long way from phone-hacking.