Last Thursday, as my fellow arriving passengers and I made our way down the platform toward the Hoboken NJ Transit station, word started to spread that, “You can’t take the PATH train to Manhattan because a train went through the gate.” Just as I couldn’t believe it when a coworker in my NYC office told me a plane crashed into the World Trade Center, this bit of information seemed like a bad game of telephone.

We turned the corner to head out of the station and there it was. Time stood still. A train had in fact crossed the station’s walkway, plowing into the waiting room, and the roof collapsed on top of it. 发生了什么事? 我们要去哪里？ 有多少人受伤了？ 我看了看，看到一些人举着血淋淋的头。 他们得到了好心人的照顾。 我们怎么离开车站？ 然后我注意到一件从那以后一直困扰着我的事情，无数的相机在拍摄残骸的图像。 People were focused on documenting their presence amid tragedy — before we even knew whether there were bodies trapped under the train.

I’ve given a lot of 认为 to how different 9/11 would have been if citizen 新闻 was a thing 15 years ago. 看新闻报道已经够难受的了。 I can’t imagine — nor do I want to — what people in and around the towers would have captured with their smartphones.

我所在的行业鼓励分享故事和图片，并在社交媒体渠道上进行双向对话。 我凭什么判断底线在哪里？

Then I read an 评论文章 written 通过 a victim who was badly injured in the lead car of the train that crashed. 作为一个直接受到影响的人，他的话是对这个问题的有力陈述：

“All things considered, most people were doing what they could to make the best of a bad situation, but I was unnerved 通过 several people taking pictures rather than offering to help and wondered why someone’s first instinct would be to document, rather than assist, in that type of situation.”

I don’t know how you decide when documenting a tragedy crosses the line from helpful to harmful. 联邦调查人员要求人们提交他们的照片和视频，以帮助了解事故原因。 We’ve also seen many citizen journalists break really important news in recent years because they happened to be on the scene before the media.

But it’s a conversation I think we should be having and we should consider the perspective of the victims and their families before we post anything on any channel. 如果那天你在警局，你觉得你会怎么做？