If it bleeds, it leads, right?

It's Saturday morning. I’m standing in my kitchen, preparing food for a dinner party that evening, when I get the call from the newsroom. There’s breaking news. A U.S. Congresswoman has been shot in the head. Several others are probably dead. This is big. My heart starts racing. I abandon my culinary masterpiece (ahem) and grab my car keys. By the time I’m on the road, I’m told we’re doing a “network interruption” — disrupting regular programming to break this news to the viewing public.

Definitely big.

I start barking out orders through my cell phone about the elements we’ll need to get seamlessly on the air. LIVE feed? Check. Reporter? Check. Video? Check.

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There’s an excitement that comes over a journalist when something big breaks. Unfortunately, that ‘something big’ is usually an event that claims lives — a shuttle crashing upon re-entry, Canadian casualties in Afghanistan, a massacre at the hands of a deranged gunman.

Until Saturday’s mass shooting in Arizona, it had been a relatively slow news week. Of course, there is always news happening somewhere, but guaranteed, there were more than a few people in every newsroom, lamenting the lack of ‘real’ news — i.e. news that gets our adrenaline pumping, news that you know every single broadcast will be leading with that night. Something big.

Journalists always want to be rushing to get somewhere or do something. As sad as it is, someone else’s tragedy is a boon for people in my business.

Saturday night, when it’s finally quieted down enough for me to return home to try and salvage my dinner party, I’m in the elevator with an elderly neighbour.

“Busy day?” he asks.

Yes, I tell him. The words flow out of me. Shooting in Arizona. Nineteen people shot, 6 dead. A U.S. Congresswoman is fighting for her life. "They have the gunman and he had a semi-automatic.”

“Wow. That’s terrible,” he says. “Hey, why don’t you guys ever report the good stuff? It’s all about death and mayhem with you news folks. All you do is scare people.”

What do you mean? We only report what’s out there, I tell him defensively. It’s not like we make this stuff up. If there’s good news to report, we’ll report it.

He looked at me with skepticism.

“When you get a chance,” he says, “Google Los Angeles and murder.”

Well, today, I did as he asked.

So, for my neighbour who thinks we only report bad news: the homicide rate in Los Angeles is the lowest it’s been in almost 45 years. There were 297 murders in the California city last year, down from more than 1,000 in 1992.

Yes neighbour, that is good news.

But there’s no way we’re leading with it.

Rosa is Global National's senior producer, based in Vancouver.