Late last January, Rick Malwitz, a columnist for the Woodbridge, New Jersey, News Tribune, was winding down for the weekend when he heard urgent voices on the newsroom police scanner: a gunman was holding hostages at the suburban offices of Wilentz, Goldman & Spitzer, one of the state's largest law firms. Malwitz hopped in his car and drove there.

By talking with the police and the panicked employees who had left the eleven-story building, he learned that a disgruntled client of the firm was on the ninth floor, holding a secretary and a receptionist at gunpoint. Thirty police officers were fanning out through the building and Malwitz, a twenty-two-year veteran of the newspaper, saw them taking in guns and ammunition.

At that point, he became part of the story: the hostage-taker wanted to speak to a reporter; the chief hostage negotiator planned to pose as one. The police needed a press pass, and asked Malwitz for his. He complied.

"I realized immediately that I was violating certain ethical standards of journalism," Malwitz says. "At the same time, ethical standards could wait, because of the gravity and the immediacy of the situation."

The chief negotiator was Lieutenant Carl Gurney of the Woodbridge police. Dressed in street clothes and wearing a concealed bullet-proof vest, he went up to the ninth floor, notebook in hand. After a brief conversation, Gurney persuaded the gunman to accompany him -- in handcuffs -- to his "newsroom," where a secretary would transcribe the interview. The ruse worked. The ninety-minute episode ended with the gunman, fifty-five-year-old Ciro Briganti, in police custody, charged with kidnapping, possession of illegal weapons, and aggravated assault.

At least one group was unhappy with Malwitz's decision -- the New Jersey chapter of The Society of Professional Journalists. "We're happy there was no life lost, but the deception is deplorable," says Wilson Barto, a society official. Press credentials, he adds, "mark us as somebody trustworthy whom everybody can talk to, including the hostagetaker's family and friends. If the gunman was asking for a newspaperman, the reporter could have gone in."

Did the police ever consider sending in a real reporter? "No, absolutely not. We would never put a civilian in that situation," says officer Gurney, who notes that the gunman was "very wild, yelling, screaming, definitely out of control."

Barto concedes that Malwitz faced a difficult choice. "It's one of the toughest decisions a reporter has to make," he says. "When the police ask for special help, it's hard for a reporter who may have to depend on the police the next day to turn down a request."

Malwitz stands by his decision. "I much prefer the debate being conducted under these circumstances, rather than if I had refused to participate and something bad had happened," he says. James Flachsenhaar, the News Tribune's editor, backs up his reporter. "If I had reached the conclusion that Rick Malwitz did, that two lives were in the balance, I would have helped the police as well. Newsgathering was not at stake."

Still, two days after the hostage-taking, Malwitz tried to interview the gunman's wife, and she wouldn't talk. "How do I know you're even a newspaper reporter?" she asked. "They told my husband that he was talking to a reporter, and it was a cop."

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