"Hi, is your son dead?"
Everyone's sending in their worst news assignments to Romenesko today. The best so far, from R. Bonapace:
I was an intern at Newsday in the mid-1970s when a jetliner crashed at JFK. Bob Green was the night editor and when the passenger list came over the wire, he divided the Suffolk County phone book up among the staff and we were told to call anyone in the book with the same last names as the deceased and ask them if any of their relatives were on the plane in order to get a local angle. Naturally, being a college intern, I did as I was told but after waking a few people up around 11 pm or so with this horrifying question, I decided that this was very cruel and I just started dialing my own number and pretending to talk to people.
