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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, April 29, 2007

AFTER DEADLINE
Recapping a week of coverage on Va. Tech

By Mark Platte
Advertiser Editor

Katie Thomasson, left, and Laura Williams, both Virginia Tech graduates, hold their candles high during a vigil at George Mason University in Virginia to honor the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings.

JASON HORNICK | Associated Press

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In a span of seven days, the Virginia Tech massacre has gone from the front pages to inside pages, from 24-hour television coverage to sporadic updates and from special online news specials to a random headline here and there.

As it did elsewhere, the news of the shooting that left 33 dead dominated the print and online editions of The Advertiser in the days after the shooting. Here is a recap of our week of coverage that may help you understand our news decisions:

We posted our first online update at 5:21 a.m. Monday, April 16. About an hour later, when it became clear that more than 20 people had been shot, we decided to produce a special online section for the shooting. We kept the section up for four days as we knew there was tremendous interest in updated national and local stories related to the shootings.

By the end of the day Monday, traffic on our Web site reached more than 700,000 page views, an 11 percent increase over the previous Monday. Of that amount, about 39,000 hits were related to the 44 posts and updates we included about the shooting.

With saturation coverage on television and online, our print newspaper for Tuesday, April 17, had to provide more depth and, specifically, attempt to address questions of what happened and whether something could have been done to prevent the violence.

That is why our headline the next morning ("Grief, anger over what wasn't done") wasn't a recitation of what everyone already knew ("33 dead in shooting"), but posed questions that are still being asked today. Remember, readers were seeing the newspaper 24 hours after the shooting.

Some readers objected to the headline, one accusing The Advertiser of playing "the blame game" and another calling the word choice "a poor decision."

"Why would you begin to second-guess the calls that were made in the middle of a crisis situation before you would memorialize the victims?" a Waikiki man asked. "I was literally taken aback when I unrolled the newspaper and saw it."

There wasn't enough known about the victims at that point, but many students and administrators wondered how an e-mail alert of the shooting could have gone out more than two hours after the shooting and why the campus was not evacuated and classes canceled. The headline was appropriate and reflected the questions raised at the time.

We also had to grapple with what photos to publish, knowing what already had been broadcast and posted online throughout the day. We chose an emotional front-page photo of students mourning their classmates that summed up the tragic day.

We continued to post updates around the clock and by the end of Tuesday, April 17, page views on our site topped 800,000, fueled in large part by news of the shooting and some 35,000 page views for Virginia Tech news and our 64 posts.

The morning paper of Wednesday, April 18, focused on the victims as names and faces emerged. We ran photos of 14 victims on Page One (as many as were available at deadline) along with the late-night candlelight vigil from the campus with the headline, "We will move on." At the University of Hawai'i, debate was focused on whether campus security should be allowed to carry firearms. Inside the paper was the first profile of the disturbed Seung-Hui Cho.

Interest in the story online was still high, with 789,000 overall page views for April 18 and 32,000 for the shooting and 48 posts. The number of page views slowly started dropping in the following days.

By Thursday morning, April 19, images of Cho armed with weapons that had been sent to NBC News started emerging. We knew instinctively that we would not be running a front-page photo of Cho waving a firearm in each hand. Nor would we be running the series of other images of Cho defiantly holding a gun directly at the camera or a knife pressed to his neck.

Many newspapers, including the New York Times, did run a Page One picture of Cho holding his weapons and we ran such a photo on Page A2. But making Cho's statement the main image on Page One seemed to play into what he intended: to display his hatred and anger in front of the largest audience possible.

Instead, we focused on a prayer vigil at the University of Hawai'i and used a smaller video frame grab of Cho without weapons. Our headline: "Tragedy felt, across miles."

By Friday, April 19, the story, though still important, seemed to be taking its toll on all of us and we suspected, our readers. That day, and the next, we ran stories along the bottom of the front page. The Friday story described Virginia Tech officials explaining what they did to monitor Cho after his release from a mental hospital 16 months ago. The Saturday story described nationally and locally the increase in calls to police departments and employee assistance programs about those they deemed unstable.

It's always difficult to decide when to take a major ongoing story off the front page but by Sunday, April 22, the story moved inside the newspaper, with a piece about those who came in contact with Cho wondering if there was more they could have done to stop him. At this point, most of the story was known. We had learned quite a bit about the victims, we knew probably too much about the shooter and the remaining questions would be resolved in months to come.

At all times, editors looked at what was happening on the Web and on television throughout the day and examined the dozens of stories and photos that moved across our wire services. We also sought out local angles, such as who from Hawai'i might be enrolled at Virginia Tech.

On big stories like this, we are always trying to anticipate what our readers might want to know or need answered. We also try to sensitively balance the horror of the killings and the disturbing details of the shooter with deep sympathy for the victims, their families and the university.