It seems the entire country has weighed in about whether President Barack Obama ought to release pictures proving Osama bin Laden is dead.

Some people were passionate in their views, even polarized. Others were torn. Whether it was pundits, office colleagues or family friends, the nation talked on Facebook, over dinner, on television.

Within the newsroom, we debated different questions: Whether and how to publish? Should we publish what most certainly would be a graphic photo in the paper? Online at sacbee.com? Should we make different decisions for each medium?

It's not a new subject for newspaper editors. I've worked in The Bee's newsroom for 23 years and was named executive editor when Melanie Sill recently announced she was leaving. During that time, I've been part of many similar discussions as we weighed whether the news value of graphic images – the need for the public to know – outweighed possible offense.

Yet that discussion is different today. You and I and even our children and parents have access to images online that weren't widely available years ago. At The Bee we still take seriously our journalistic responsibility to weigh the value of publishing such photos against the potential impact. But we do so knowing that readers have gradually become more accustomed to strong images.

In 1995 The Bee decided not to publish on Page A1 what later became the iconic picture from the Oklahoma City bombing – the photograph of a fireman holding an infant pulled from the rubble. We didn't yet know if the infant was dead, and we thought the image was too graphic for unprepared readers. At the time I was a young parent, as were many of my colleagues on the city desk. I've thought many times since then that played a role in how we viewed the image.

I would make a different decision today – and Bee editors already have, though we've been careful to explain ourselves. We published in print a picture of American contractors in Fallujah burned to death by Iraqi insurgents in 2004.

Before Obama decided not to release pictures of bin Laden, I and others were planning to publish them online and possibly in print, pending review.

Managing Editor for Production Tom Negrete said, "What went through my mind for the Web was how could we possibly defend to our readers censoring information our government wanted to share with the public? Usually we are on the opposite end of that fight."

Senior Editor for Multimedia Mark Morris said he believed "any photograph of bin Laden's corpse would quickly become the most viewed image in history, and the question for me was not should we run it, but rather how."

We weigh impact differently online, where readers search out information by choice. The paper doesn't give readers that choice.

Our discussions this week took place separately from the editorial board's deliberations on how Obama should handle his decision on possible release. Although the editorial board opined Wednesday that Obama was right not to release the photos immediately, that opinion is separate from our news decisions.

The newsroom conversation continued once Reuters released photographs from bin Laden's compound obtained from a Pakistani that included three stark images of unidentified men, dead in pools of blood.

Several editors quickly surrounded Linda Gonzales, who heads our digital news desk, to discuss how to handle the photographs. Ultimately, we decided only to show readers how to find them, linking from sacbee.com to a story that then linked to the photos with a warning about their graphic nature. We knew some readers would want to see them, but since the bodies were not identified we felt the news value was diminished.

As Gonzales said, "The Web is a place where users want to make their own choices. The trick for us is offering up choices responsibly."

We did not publish the photographs in print. I did not think they served a purpose other than to show the aftermath of a shootout.

As Senior Editor/Investigations Scott Lebar said, "We can describe (the scene) in measured words. Pictures like that just blast it, unvarnished and grim."

As we've all learned from WikiLeaks, even documents that leaders want to keep secret can be leaked. That may happen with the bin Laden photographs as well. If they ever become public, we'll continue our debate. Until then, I'd be interested in how you weigh in.

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Reach Executive Editor Joyce Terhaar at (916) 321-1004.

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