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When my wife messaged me last Saturday about a stabbing at Bondi Junction shopping center in Sydney, she had just left the shopping center and didn’t seem particularly worried. I was in Maui, traveling with my son and father-in-law, and she mostly just kept me informed — as she often does — to make sure the Times didn’t miss a potential story. .
I contacted my colleagues at the Seoul Editorial Center. They were already monitoring the situation and initially, with zero information on casualties, we all assumed it was a small, targeted incident – maybe a bar fight or domestic violence. Yes, it would be horrific, but probably not worth reporting for a global audience.
Then things changed. Suddenly, there are reports that five or more people have died. My son, who goes to school near the mall and hangs out with friends, started receiving messages and photos from classmates who were either present during the attack or connected to someone who was there. A friend and father I know reported that his son had been working in a store there and escaped safely. My son showed me a video someone shared with him of a shopper using some kind of bollard to block a knife-wielding man on an escalator. What follows are more gruesome photos of injured or dead victims, their bright red blood staining the shiny white tile floor.
I warned him that just looking at the images would affect his mood, and contributed a few paragraphs to a first draft of the story that was posted on the Times website a few minutes later. Since then, I have largely handed over work to my colleagues, including several Australians who began their New York Times careers in our Sydney bureau before moving to new offices in London and Seoul. Work.
We are all shocked by the horrific violence in a city and country that is usually so safe. Early on, I worried that this would be a case of terrorism, a spillover effect from the Israel-Gaza conflict. Two-thirds of Sydney’s Jews live in the eastern suburbs where the attacks took place, and Westfield, the company building the shopping center, was co-founded by one of Australia’s most prominent Jewish businessmen.
There were similar competing rumors among my son’s teen messaging network—one said the attacker was pro-Israel, another said he looked Arab. Both statements are wrong. Likewise, the warning said there were two attackers, one of whom had fled.
“There’s a lot of misinformation,” my son said.
We managed to keep all this false content out of our articles. If nothing else, the experience served as a lesson to my 15-year-old son about the challenges of parsing truth from speculation and alarmism in the age of smartphone-driven social media.
For me, it’s also a reminder of the need for caution and skepticism in exciting news moments. I was even more nervous than usual in this situation because the crime scene was so familiar and personal – Westfield in Bondi Junction was where we went to the movies as a family; it was our back-to-school purchase A place for costumes; my two kids played and flirted there.
Just minutes before the man started his attack, my wife and daughter left a supermarket in the mall (as my wife’s receipt shows), Stabbed nearly 20 people, killing six people, including a 9-month-old girl. As the names of the victims emerge, we receive bad news about their close ties. One of the victims was the mother of a girl we had known for years through shared children’s activities, from our circle of friends and from our local warm and supportive community.
The first night after the attack, I woke at 3am in the darkness of a hotel room far away from Sydney, listening to my son breathing in the bed next to me and thinking: What would I have done if I had been there? Do? Have I seen the attacker?
My first thought was not to take pictures or record them for an article, as I had done in the past when covering wars or other disasters. Instead, I imagined grabbing something from the store and throwing it to the man with the knife—maybe a glass from Target, or something hard and heavy. I thought about ground balls. If only I could find the bocce ball.
These are fever dreams of wild ideas, jet lag, and helplessness, but perhaps in all of this, there is one thing for readers to remember: News media is more than a business, more than a subscription, a favorite, or Disgusting service. Journalism, at its core, is just a collection of regular people, your neighbor, the people you see in the store.
Sometimes the news — and the worst news, involving death and tragedy — is as close to our hearts as the people we write about.
Now here’s our story for the week.
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