The longer he talked, the more angry the guy was getting. He had left his name on my voicemail so quickly that I couldn't quite understand it, but I got his drift: The editor is a jerk. 'Stuff like this turns my stomach,' he said. He was talking about the photo from Haiti on the newspaper's front page, a graphic image that showed a man stepping awkwardly through a pile of bodies. 'You guys,' he said, 'ain't got much couth to put this in there. I don't think you're sending out a very good message.' On the last point, I would have agreed with him. The photo sent an awful message. And we chose it to do just that. Every editor knows that Americans have a limited tolerance for photos that graphically show death. Sometimes we talk about the 'Post Toasties Test,' the weighing of what we might publish against what could sicken someone as they're sitting down to breakfast. It's a useful standard. We usually bypass photos from war zones and natural disasters that our readers may consider distasteful. We apply the rule even more stringently in covering such local news as car accidents and homicides. After all, people usually can understand a story fully without a visual assault on their sensibilities. Words alone can powerfully tell of tragedy. And to be purely pragmatic, the fact that people don't like this kind of photography suggests you'll sell fewer papers if you offend them. But journalism isn't best practiced based on a set of inviolate rules. It's a human exercise in communication, requiring judgments by people with an eye to how best to convey the truth. And by that standard, editors decided that the front page needed an image showing the horrible reality of Haiti: piles of corpses, the stench of rotting flesh, the sorrow and desperation of a collapsing society. We had taken a different course on Thursday's front page, picking as our centerpiece a photo that focused on a small boy, crying, as he sat alongside a road. It was an image that prompted a woman to call us in a vain effort to find out the boy's name, so she might help one person in Haiti personally. 'You want to hug him. You want to take care of him,' she said. Unlike the man on my voicemail, she wasn't upset by the photo of piled bodies the next day. 'That's the reality,' she said. 'I have no sympathy for people who want to ignore reality.' A different challenge now confronts our newsroom. Haiti's misery is likely to be a daily reality for a long time. How can that best be presented in a newspaper that primarily focuses on local news? Consider the fact that the original story of the Haiti earthquake didn't get front-page treatment in the Times Union. In retrospect, I'd like to have that decision to make again. But it wasn't a thoughtless choice. The core of our coverage most days is local news and sports, as well as reporting from the state Capitol. That's because we can give you that package better than anyone else, while you can find breaking news on the world and national scene from many other sources (including a real-time feed of wire dispatches on timesunion.com). When the first reports from Haiti came to us last Tuesday evening, we opted not to pull our state and local coverage off the front page to make way for news of the earthquake. Instead, we put a Haiti story and photo inside the main news section. Similar decisions were made by editors elsewhere in our time zone, including in Syracuse and Providence, R.I., while editors in Rochester and Newark, N.J., for example, put the early stories from Haiti on their newspaper covers. By the morning after the quake, the scope of the disaster was clear. Given the breadth of the human tragedy at hand, we have opted to give the Haiti story extensive coverage since then, both in our news columns and on our opinion pages. You'll be reading about Haiti in the Times Union for a long time to come. That's only partly because the U.S. aid our tax dollars support will be involved in rebuilding Haiti. It's also because we all need to understand quite fully the experience of our neighbors in this hemisphere, even when the reality is heart-breaking or revolting to see. The truth, tragic as it may be and unsettling as you may find it, is exactly what we owe you. (Rex Smith is editor of the Albany, N.Y., Times Union. Share your thoughts at http://blogs.timesunion.com/editors.) 