Tragedy isn’t something that we have to worry about much here at Ashland University; the truth is, we don’t have much hard news happening here.

That’s one of the reasons why the news about Mitch Ramsey has hit the campus so hard. Unfortunately, it has also caused a number of communication gaffes.

From the first campus communication email notifying students of the prayer vigil Nov. 13, there was a sense of uncertainty about what really had happened. When I read that email the first time, I only comprehended the first half of the first sentence before I lost my breath.

I was under the assumption that Mitch had passed away. He was my neighbor last year and I felt compelled to notify my friends on the floor this year of the news.

It wasn’t until one of them frantically opened the email before we realized that my assumption was not true.

In talking to others, I realized that I wasn’t alone in that reaction.

Even among his close circles of friends, people at the vigil were referring to Mitch in the past tense, talking about how he was, not how he is.

Yes, I realize that he has suffered a head trauma, but he’s certainly alive, recovering and in stable condition.

I know that everyone cares enough about him to be praying for a full recovery. I saw a very encouraging turnout at that vigil. Monday morning, I also was delighted to se the fraternity rocks tagged with his initials and the phrase “In Mitch We Pray.”

I don’t understand then why there has been such contradictory behaviors.

We ran into a similar contradition when researching the cover story about the accident. One of the primary concerns from our sources was that they “weren’t sure if his family wanted this getting out yet,” as if the news of this terrible accident was being limited to only his closest friends and family.

That makes very little sense. Why, if there was a prayer vigil held for Mitch, would anyone want to keep news of the accident under wraps?

As a newspaper, we sometimes will run into stories where we must analyze the ethics of publishing.

This story was certainly not one of them, though.

With this story, our only concern was making sure that the goal of the story itself lined up with the goal that we had in mind for it. We weren’t going to publish something macabre that paints Mitch in a poor light, because that would be bad journalism and unethical.

And if we needed to defend publishing the story, this is it: by running the story, we are getting the news out about what happened, and encouraging our readers to keep Mitch in their thoughts in the coming days, until he is back on campus.

We are showing everyone who isn’t fortunate enough to know Mitch what a great person he is.

When a news event like this happens, everyone deserves to know because it affects us all. That need is only magnified on such a small campus.

If there was anything that we learned in interviewing for this story, it was how interconnected that we all are. While Mitch is only in his third semester at AU, it seems as though everyone knows him or knows of him.

Had the news about the accident been witheld to only his “closest” friends, countless others would have been deprived of a story that they deserved to know.