Speaking in front of a half-filled lecture hall of journalism students, Chris Johnston doesn’t quite seems like the battle-hardened reporter whose job has taken him from the burnt-out wreckage of Black Saturday to rusted railways that saw student after student hurl themselves in front of oncoming trains.

Soft-spoken and gentle, Chris spends more time looking down at his hands than at the class. But he’s not with the students. He’s still standing by a shallow grave by the side of Black Hill Road, beneath a wattle tree.

The day after Jill Meagher was found raped and murdered, Chris wrote about what it was like to stand on that spot after the silent ambulance had left.

“’Shallow grave is not right; a grave implies a burial, and this was no burial. The hole is only shovelled scrapings, and only shovelled from one side. Here it was that she lay.”

Back in the classroom, Chris is remembering the state of a public that had whipped itself into a frenzy following the 29-year-old’s death.

“It was a city being traumatised,” he said.

But what was it about Jill Meagher’s death that, in the words of Nino Bucci, “captured the hearts and minds of Melbourne, and indeed the country”?

Even before her body was found, Jill’s disappearance shocked an increasingly-desensitised public out of the resigned apathy all too common in a media landscape that tends towards to the sensationalist and profane.

While this may sound too harsh on the mainstream media – and certainly, there are always writers and commentators that strive to bring out the hope and humanity in even the most depraved stories – the coverage of Jill Meagher’s disappearance, rape and murder perfectly illustrated the fourth estate’s power to direct the flow of public opinion and discourse following traumatic events.

So what was wrong with the coverage?

Nothing.

It was flawless.

In a guide released by the Dart Centre of Journalism and Trauma, the following advice is given when dealing with death and tragedy:

“Focus on a person’s life. Find out what made the person special: personality, beliefs, environment, and likes and dislikes. Treat the person’s life as carefully as a photographer does in framing a portrait.”

Unanimously, the media coverage of Jill Meagher portrayed the Irish woman not as just another victim of senseless crime, but as a person with hopes and humour and a wicked pair of shoes – helped in no small part by the initial photograph that garnered the missing woman so much sympathy.

“She looked very open and warm in that first and still most enduring picture,” wrote Chris.

“She looked like a young woman many people might know or might like to know.”

In an article for the Herald Sun, Elissa Hunt perfectly expresses the reason for the groundswell of public interest following Jill’s disappearance.

“It struck a chord with so many others regarding Jill’s death: It could have been anyone,” she wrote.

Sara James, reporter for The Age and foreign correspondent with NBC News, lavishly described the profound effect that this random act of violence had on her.

“During my years as a reporter, I’ve covered all too many stories of crime and punishment, in cities, in towns, in the countryside. Yet none has hit as close to home as this terrible murder, just a few kilometres from my door.”

With the entirety of the Australian media devoting page after page to painting a warm, human image around a tragedy that could have been buried under clinical police reporting and the relentless novelty of the 24-hour news cycle, the question is not so much “How could this coverage have been better?”, but the far more confronting “Why her?”

“Why not others?”

Almost a month ago now, African Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram abducted and enslaved over 200 Nigerian schoolgirls. Only in the last week or so has the wider media given this story the attention that it deserves, with the appalling story finally cutting through the endless speculation on the location of doomed Flight MH370 and a squalid street-fight between media magnates. So why should one missing girl garner such warmth and humanity while countless more fade away unmourned?

The answer to this question – if there can be such an answer – lies buried behind a fundamental uncertainty in the role of the media in times of tragedy.

Speaking practically about the job of a reporter, Chris Johnston emphasised the role of empathy in a journalist’s handling of a traumatic event.

“You’ve got to be very victim aware,” he said. “You have to figure out an intuitive way to deal with victims and their families.”

It’s not just a matter of prying the story from grieving relatives – for Chris, budding journalists often inadvertently finds themselves thrust into the role of counsellor and confidante.

“It’s often not until after the event that they start freak out,” Chris told the class of times when emotional family members have bared their grief for him, and countless like him.

“Sometimes it’s just to verbalise what they’ve seen or what they’re experiencing – or how they feel.”

In the days (and weeks, and months) following Jill Meagher’s murder, the media became an almost cathartic force for the Australian public; it mourned with us over her death, celebrated her life and railed for vengeance on the man who desecrated and killed our now-beloved daughter. Going beyond the mere reporting of a tragedy, the media became inextricably woven in the wave of outrage and helplessness that struck Melbourne – and in many cases, amplified it.

No one could suggest that this violates the guidelines of reporting on trauma. If anything, in this coverage we see the tenets of humanist understanding being taken to their farthest extreme, setting aside the role of impartial reporter of facts and keeper of public record for the sake of providing the Australian people with a symbol upon which to heap all their frustrations, their fear and their impotent anger at a world in which monsters still roam the streets and innocence is left under a thin layer of dirt by the side of the road.

Could such a model be applied to the reporting of all acts of tragedy and loss? Perhaps not.

At a certain point, the human mind loses the ability to comprehend the enormity of the death and chaos that assaults us from our screens and papers and phones. For a journalist to fully communicate the human loss in times of tragedy, they must present it on a scale that our minds can comprehend. It is from this seed that we can begin to grasp the true horror of tragedy.

Jill Meagher could have been anyone, and therein lies her strength.

Perhaps Elissa Hunt put it best.

“Jill’s smile on the missing posters and news reports of the preceding days became a beacon for those who’d had enough: Enough of the violence, and of a community’s tacit acceptance of it as just part of life.”

Perhaps this is what was going through Chris Johnston’s mind when he stood alone by the fence staring down at the empty hole that had held Jill Meagher in her last moments. Maybe he saw what she would mean to the people of Melbourne, once they learned what had happened.

Maybe this is what he was thinking when he took out his phone, brought up the camera, and took a picture of her grave.