It was Sunday morning in the Boston Globe newsroom. Editor Marty Baron and foreign editor Jim Smith were trying to gather as much information as they could about Anthony Shadid, a foreign correspondent who, they’d just learned, had been shot in the shoulder while reporting from Ramallah.

Within an hour, Smith says, Baron decided to check in on Shadid himself to assess how badly he’d been injured and whether he was getting the proper treatment. "He thought it was important to be with Anthony," Smith says. By Sunday night, Baron was on a jet bound for Israel.

Baron’s decision was an important statement from an editor who’s won high marks for the focus and rigor he’s brought to the paper, but who isn’t exactly known as Mr. Warmth. Baron’s demeanor may be all business, but by flying to the bedside of his injured reporter, he showed that his actions speak louder than words.

"I think that it’s not only a caring act, but it’s so important when you’re abroad to know that the home office is thinking about you," says Bob Zelnick, a former foreign correspondent who now chairs Boston University’s journalism department. "I know that many times when I was overseas, I thought that I had walked off the flat end of the earth."

Foreign editor Smith — who came to the Globe a month ago from the Los Angeles Times after a 22-year career as a foreign correspondent — says Shadid was "extraordinarily lucky, if you can be shot and be said to be lucky." Three bullet fragments had entered his shoulder, one of which was lodged just a centimeter from his spine. He was initially treated at an Arab clinic in Ramallah, but was evacuated to an Israeli hospital after Israeli troops raided the clinic.

Shadid has reportedly said that he believes he was shot by an Israeli security officer, which Israeli officials have replied was unlikely. Baron, Smith says, intends to make inquiries of both Israeli and Palestinian authorities, "asking both sides what they know about this."

Shadid may have run afoul, if inadvertently, of Israeli restrictions on the foreign press. On Tuesday, the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) sent a letter to Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon "to express its alarm at official Israeli attempts to restrict media coverage in the West Bank, as well as several incidents in which Israeli troops have fired on working journalists." The shooting of Shadid and several other incidents are cited in the CPJ’s letter.

Baron was scheduled to catch a return trip to Boston sometime on Thursday, as soon as Shadid’s wife could arrive in Israel.