American Legion Auxiliary President Ruth Harris of the John Day Unit 77 and other auxiliary members will have a poppy booth at Chester's Thriftway in John Day Thursday through Saturday, May 17-19, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

We’ve gotten a bit of pushback for our Nov. 22 story on the sad state of the late Ruth Harris’s former residence at 250 NE Dayton St. in John Day. There have been complaints on our Facebook page and even a letter to the editor (which we printed in our Dec. 6 issue).

The commenters wondered why we found it necessary to besmirch the memory of a beloved local resident by writing about the deplorable condition that her home is in. They seemed to suggest that we wanted to belittle Ruth Harris, to hold her up to ridicule, in order to sell more papers.

That’s not the case. We wrote about the house because it had become news. It was in bad shape before Ruth died on April 9 at the age of 95, but we didn’t write about it then — or in our May 31 posthumous profile of Ruth — because no one had complained about it, at least not yet. The complaints came after.

Neighbors of the property, including the pastor of a nearby church, were concerned about the piles of garbage both inside and outside the residence, the dilapidated camp trailers on the property, the bad smells emanating from the place.

The neighbors told us they had asked the city to take action to clean up the property, but that action never came. The People Mover, whose headquarters are next door, had an agreement to buy the house with plans to tear it down to expand its facilities, but the deal was being held up in probate.

We wrote our Nov. 22 story with the hope that, by shining a light on the problem, it might help move things along toward a solution.

We knew that friends and relatives of the late Ms. Harris might be upset by the story, and we regret any dismay we may have caused them. But we believed that our duty to the community to report on civic affairs outweighed that possibility.

Deciding which stories to cover often involves calculations like this: Will publishing this story cause more good than harm? Will the good that might be accomplished outweigh the harm that may result?

Doctors take an oath to do no harm to their patients. The journalist’s creed, as expressed in the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, is similar but not identical. It calls on us to minimize harm in our reporting. It’s an important distinction, because it recognizes that covering the news can have negative consequences for some of the subjects of our stories. That is something we always try to bear in mind.

There are stories that we walk away from, despite their news value, because of the harm they might do. And there are others, like the story of Ruth Harris’ former home, that we decide to report — even though we know some people will be unhappy with the result — because we believe it will serve the greater good.

There will always be people who think we’ve made the wrong call, and we understand that. We just want you to know we weighed the pros and cons the best we could before we made that decision.