The great H.L. Mencken wrote of journalism, "[As] I look back over a misspent life, I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It really is the life of kings."
No one could accuse Matt Altizer of having lived a misspent life. It is with hope - and immense sadness and regret - that during his too-short 16 years at the Prince George Citizen he enjoyed Mencken's life of kings that is the newspaper business.
Altizer, 40, died Thursday a few minutes north of McLeese Lake after the vehicle he was driving collided with a semi truck. His wife, Leah, children Jonathan and Emily, and his sister, Heather Kress, also died in the accident.
This newspaper, in the decades it has served this community, has written about a thousand such tragedies, both close to home and on distant shores. For some, we've written, perhaps too lyrically at times, about the fragility of life and the moment, about the inexplicable nature of circumstance and how, though it's little comfort, there are sparse lessons in tragedy.
Such words, however apt, hurt today. They hurt a great deal because today the ink that was spilled was our own.
Of more help was the treatment and condolences we received from our friends and colleagues, be they in radio, TV, print and the Internet. At a time when the community and family that is this newspaper perhaps has never been so wounded, they treated all of us with dignity, commiseration and respect.
Thank you. It was a reminder that the best of this profession need not be carrion.
They had a story to tell last night and today and so do we. We told it last night and told it today, of Matt and his family.
You probably didn't know Matt because his words never appeared in this paper nor did his pictures grace these pages. But, as the IT systems manager, perhaps better described as a latter-day shaman in this bizarre age of technology we live in, he touched everything that we do, every word we type, every picture we produce.
It was an irony not lost on many in this newspaper that the only reason we could tell you about Matt's death was because of the work he did at the Citizen. He was very much the sinews and nerve endings of this newspaper and he enabled the tragic news of his family to go from the phone to the screen to the plate to the page that ended up on your doorstep.
Another authority on our business, Marshall McLuhan, famously said the medium is the message. If Matt Altizer - father, son, husband, respected colleague, friend and member of the Prince George Citizen family - was the medium through which we did our jobs, this newspaper can be proud of that message. Even as it is heartbroken the ranks of newspaper people is a little bit smaller, a little poorer today.
So, yes, you probably didn't know Matt Altizer. He wasn't a storyteller.
But he made sure our stories were told.
And that's why we'll miss him.
-- Prince George Citizen
