Exactly one year ago today - Wait a minute. I can't launch into this without explaining something first. I'm going to tell you about an event that happened a year ago, but I'll only tell enough to make you understand that it's probably best to just let the whole subject lie undisturbed. Yes, I know there's a bizarre incongruity at work here. It's like pointing out that it's impolite to comment on the homeliness of some unfortunate folks -- "like that ugly guy over there."

Still, here goes: Exactly one year ago today, a 26-year-old Raleigh man was arrested and charged with committing four robberies during a weekend-long crime spree. He made the paper, naturally, because that's what we do. We inform you of the news events of the day. But in this case, we also printed the names of the suspect's mother and father, and their occupations -- respectively, a local church pastor and (drum roll here) a former cop reporter turned college journalism professor.

That's right. The fellow who teaches the reporters of tomorrow found himself on the other side of the news-gathering process.

I caught up with the professor by phone last week. I wanted to know whether his thoughts about the practice of journalism had changed as a result of having his name, occupation, place of employment and relationship to a crime suspect published in the paper. It is my long-held belief that everyone in the media should be written about at some point. It would be good for us to understand how it feels to have your life reduced to a few stark sentences, or to find yourself tied to some unhappy bit of business that was none of your making. The point, of course, would not be to discourage us from doing our jobs. Only to help us be more sensitive to the aftershocks.

I imagined that the professor and I would have a long, thoughtful discussion about this. We didn't. Instead, we had a short, poignant conversation, most of it focused on the professor's son. The young man, who had a substance abuse problem, admitted his wrongdoing and served a 10-month prison sentence. He is now rehabilitating his life, the professor said. Having his name in the paper again would be a setback, both to his job prospects and to his emotional stability.

The professor understood that I had the right, and maybe even the duty, to identify the family. He knows that it's all part of the journalistic process. But the father in him asked me not to.

"It's my son," he said.

That simple utterance hit a tangle of emotions. I'm a father, too.

The professor was well aware of the irony in his role reversal. He'd once been the guy who put people's names in the paper. Now he wanted to keep his son's name out. I was aware of a different irony. I wanted to give the professor an opportunity to remind people like me that our jobs can sometimes leave people feeling exposed, but to do so he'd have to agree to have a family tragedy exposed all over again.

His irony won. "I don't want to pile on," I said.

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