Yesterday, a colleague browsing the Haiti wire photos for a new one for the top of our homepage asked my help. The photos were so depressing she wanted to turn away, and knew readers would, too.

"Try to find somebody smiling," I said. (In the 1960s, Save the Children found that their best response ever to a series of weekly full-page NYT Sunday Magazine ads came from a photo of a little ragged girl with a beaming smile. It said, "You can make this happen.")

I heard, "Well she sure looks happy." She had found this:

AP Photo/The Miami Herald, Patrick Farrell
Gladys Louis Jeune is pulled alive from the rubble of her home in Port-au-Prince nearly 43 hours after Tuesday's earthquake, where she was greeted by her ecstatic daughter Thursday, Jan. 14, 2010.

In a slow news week, the Haiti package leading the homepage showed up in traffic as the #7 story. Readers care a lot, but many seem to be detouring around painful images and stories that only frustrate and upset them. They'll donate, financially and especially spiritually, but detailed reporting takes us there, and we are grateful we're not there.

Reporting has made clear that getting aid in was so much more difficult because the world had already largely abandoned Haiti before the quake.

I have more "Soul of the World" thoughts, but I'm really writing this because I wonder if there's a higher octave of this -- not just getting the story out, but getting stories that change the world.