News can be competitive. As online readers, when big news is breaking, none of us thinks, “I’ll go to the website I know won’t have it.”

So in crime reporting and other on-the-spot coverage, we try to get there first, report it first and, just as important, report it right.

Two pieces of significant world and local crime news from the past week illustrate the polar opposites of how a news outlet can handle another aspect of this line of work: the judgment calls on what to leave out of a story.

Part of that is, can we back it up? Do we have it on authority, on the record, in a document, an interview or a press release? If an official said it, or sometimes an immediate family member or a neighbor who witnessed it, that gets us part of the way there on whether or not to publish.

The rest of the way is messier — filtering what we can use, because we have it, down to what we should use. Sometimes, ‘all’ is too much.

On Tuesday night, national media showed the moments before, and the moment of, an apparent suicide bombing at an airport in Turkey. The terrorist act was a horror and a crime and it was major news, but for anyone who may have had a hand in the attacks, the footage’s repeated airing amounted to an extended ad in prime time. Just as a report on a fatal accident avoids showing the victim’s remains, a report on terrorism doesn’t have to show someone blowing himself up.

Last week, we reported on sexual abuse charges against a Lincoln County sheriff’s deputy. Then we learned more about the allegations in an affidavit filed with the court. Gina Hamilton reports a number of those details this week. But as she notes in her report, she left out other ones to protect the privacy of the minor the deputy allegedly abused.

Crimes and accidents are some of our most-read stories, as a look at our website’s top 10, to the right of our river of news on the home page, will bear out most any day. We work to meet that reader interest while respecting the reader, and the people in the stories, by sometimes holding something back.