Sometimes people outside the news business think that people inside it — or more to the point, the institutions themselves — overreact when a journalist dies in the pursuit of her or his duties. "Big deal. A guy died where I work a couple months ago, and they didn't make such a big deal of that."

My experience is, the comment is not unfair, even if it's also fair to argue that journalists — especially those who work in war zones — are working for the broad general good, and are therefore representing all readers in ways that are different than, say, tradesmen or baristas.

There is also an unreasonable part — the behavior driven by a fairly universal reaction: That guy I knew and admired has died, and it's a big deal in my life, so I'm going to present it as a big deal in our lives, by the amount or placement of coverage.

It's that part I'm indulging in this morning.

I "knew" Tony Shadid, who died of an asthma attack today near the Syria-Turkey border, only a little bit. He worked for the same newspaper I did, but there are lots of reporters who worked for newspapers I worked for whom I never met, because they worked in bureaus downstate, never mind in war zones halfway around the world.

The one interaction I'm sure we had was in 2002, when he was shot while covering an armed confrontation in Israel's occupied territories. My reading of the story was that the Israelis knew he was a noncombatant, but cynically shot at him anyway. I expressed my outrage via e-mail — it was very unusual for me to write to colleagues whom I didn't know and who didn't know me, but the incident inspired an inexplicable feeling of kinship in me — and he answered quickly. He assured me that he wasn't seriously injured, and tried to ease my dudgeon. After *he'd* been shot. "Unfairly." In a war zone.

We corresponded once, maybe twice, after that, and I went out of my way to introduce myself on one of his infrequent trips into the office. Nice guy, in addition to being really talented and committed to an important mission. I'll miss him.

Yes, the loss is meaningful to me, even if our tie was slight, even if you don't get what the big deal is.