Another newsroom with painful memories

JOURNALISTS killed, kidnapped or plunged into peril on some foreign field are not alone. There are families, friends and offices full of anxious people thinking about them back home. Rupert Hamer's death in Afghanistan produced moving tributes from Mirror colleagues last week. He will be remembered not just for his reporting, but for the way he died, the victim of yet another roadside bomb. And Afghanistan, around his old newsroom, will have a special resonance. In just the same way, the Observer still remembers Farzad Bazoft , an innocent executed by Saddam Hussein. And, month by month, that arc of remembered revulsion widens. Some 132 media men and women died last year, according to the International News Safety Institute. Should that colour views, stir anger and despair as well as sadness? Surely not: that's not why Hamer went to Afghanistan. He went to do a dangerous, unglamorous, necessary job. But memory can't always stop so short just as his colleagues wince over sudden tragedy and know what it is to be not some simple note-taking bystander, but involved.