Knowledgeable vs. conscious

Last year, my most commented and memorable article for the DTH was "Art or Vandalism?" about stencil art around campus. Fifteen people commented on it, primarily because readers felt the need to answer the question in the headline.
My first story earning me a byline for CNN has 149 comments, and 1,549 people have recommended it on Facebook. It's about the implications of a highly active hurricane season with the oil spill, and a little about Haiti, less so after a few edits.
Today I wrote an article titled "Pacific submarine volcano issues 'big burp'" about a volcano eruption on an uninhabited island-- the headline was the most intriguing thing about it. I didn't realize it until I read the reader's comments, but this awful phrase lies in the second sentence of the story: "the vent..issued a cloud 40,000 reaching feet in the air."
That typo, which would make my skin to crawl whether I produced it or not, is reaching thousands of readers who are deceived by the headline into thinking this is a more interesting story than it is.
One of the stencil artists whose work I wrote about for the DTH very nastily corrected what he perceived were errors in my story and said in his final email to me, "I hate you as a journalist and a person." I don't know who that person is, but I don't believe he would ever say those things to me in person. Even for the DTH, estimated readership 35,000, I was just a name on a that paper someone felt comfortable to rip me apart. Working for a brand whose site has more online hits than any other news site in the world, there is no hope for reader sympathy for mistakes.
It goes the other way too. My first "anonymous" CNN article (it doesn't have my name on it because I didn't conduct the interviews in the story) is about investigators identifying the body of a 12-year-old girl who went missing in March on her way to a birthday party. Watching the press conference, I was concentrating on catching every word for quotes. Looking at the finished product online, I was enchanted by the CNN logo on top of the page. I wasn't thinking about the little girl's family or the community whose lives would never be the same.
Media, as essential as it is for people to stay globally knowledgeable, sterilizes news for both the reader and reporter. We get so distant that we forget living beings lie at the other end of a story.
The subjects of news, particularly national news, are usually enduring life-altering times in the public eye. We as news consumers and reporters need to stay globally conscious, not just knowledgeable, and see the faces among the crowds in stories. If we see the little pictures within the picture in the product, then maybe we producers and consumers can tolerate each other a little more as well.