An awful story out of Dubai. A 5-year-old boy fell out of an eighth-story window, and his disconsolate mother then jumped out of the same window moments later. Both died, and a 14-year-old girl, the sister and daughter of the deceased, saw it all happen from the pavement.

An awful story.

What turned it into a journalism discussion was how one of our rivals in the UAE newspaper community handled a graphic device — stick figures, essentially — to illustrate the story.

Helpful … or in really poor taste?

First, let’s get the pertinent link.

Go here to find the story done by The Gulf News on the mother and son …

But scroll to the bottom of the story to find the three-panel drawing depicting how events unfolded.

The Gulf News is more of a downmarket newspaper than is The National. Definitely more interested in the sensational. Not quite like the trashier British tabloids, but not as nearly as careful/cautious as is my newspaper when it comes to potentially offending readers.

The same newspaper in January of 2010 “helpfully” listed, via another graphic device, some of the ways a person could kill him/herself when contemplating suicide. Here is a link to the info, but the actual handling in print was tackier. Suicide, too, is a significant problem in the UAE, with more than 100 suicides every year in a nation where 8 million people live, at any given moment.

You can get a better idea of what the page looked like on this blog post by one of my colleagues.

Back to the child/mother falling to their deaths.

One colleague in our newsroom called the three-part pictorial “awesome; insensitive but great; I wish we did stuff like that.” Others thought it unnecessary and exploitative, arguing that anyone could easily visualize the scene without the drawings, with the pool of blood around the 5-year-old (bottom drawing) the exclamation mark on a ghoulish idea.

At this writing, Gulf News has 182 comments on their story/drawings, and several of them make reference to the graphic device in a negative fashion.

So, what do you think? A useful info-graphic? An exploitative mess? Something else?