Covering a National Tragedy

The last few days have been particularly hard ones in the office as they have been across campus. We as an office have been deeply affected by Monday's tragic events on the campus of Virginia Tech. A number of people on our staff are from Northern Virginia and have lost people from their towns and counties in a tragedy that hit too close to home.

For us, it was obvious that this was a story that we needed to cover. As a campus with an international student body, devastating events in any part of the world, and especially those here in the United States, have a deep impact on the lives of those who come here.

But at the same time, we don't have the proximity or resources to do the kinds of reporting that are vital at a time like this. We knew that anybody interested in the story would be turning to coverage from The New York Times
the Washington Post and the Collegiate Times for updates.

We considered a number of options. My first thought was to run a story from the Collegiate Times through U-Wire--a wire service which Spec is a member of through which we can use articles from other college newspapers and they can use ours. We considered a number of other angles--getting at-large man-on-the-street type student reaction, trying to do a targeted people-immediately-affected story, or something on the (relatively small) immediate administrative response. It was a hectic news day, with a number of closer-to-home articles covering our front page. There was news of the horifically attacked Journalism school student, the elections of the last of the four undergraduate class council e-boards, and the Pulitzer Prices among other things.

What we ended up with was a story by Amanda about the basic news with quotes from a few student leaders, on Tuesday, my story on Wednesday about increased security precautions and more details about the vigil and today's story about the vigil itself.