By Alan Kirkpatrick

Dramatic stories of journalistic stress, camaraderie and dissension unfolded Sept. 19 as leading Front Range news professionals gathered at CU to discuss the trials and errors they faced covering the Columbine

High School massacre in April.

The School sponsored "Covering Columbine: Decision Making During Crisis," a panel discussion held in conjunction with homecoming activities.

About 150 students, alumni and faculty members attended the event, moderated by Associate Professor Meg Moritz.

Panelists were Michelle Fulcher, deputy metro editor of The Denver Post; John Temple, editor and vice president of the Denver Rocky Mountain News; Scott Luxor, deputy managing editor of the Boulder Daily Camera; Dave Kaplar, executive producer for KUSA-TV in Denver, and Vicki Sama, CNN producer and an adjunct faculty member at the School.

Fulcher was on duty late on the morning of April 20 when the first police scanner messages relating to Columbine came across.

"Your first instinct when you hear something like this, quite frankly having started as a reporter and been a police reporter for awhile, is some degree of skepticism," she said. "A lot of things will come over the scanner, and it sounds like Armageddon, and it turns out to be nothing. We had a report of a shooting a few days ago; it turned out to be a wooden pallet that fell off a truck.

"So you send people. You prepare for the worst, but in the back of your head you're thinking, 'Ah, we'll see how this turns out.' It was maybe 10 minutes before it was very, very painfully obvious that we had a huge story on our hands."

The Post sent everyone it could except for a few editors to do rewrites, work phones, track the Internet and provide other support, Fulcher said.

Assistant city editors and reporters were divided into teams and assigned major aspects of the story, including victims, suspects and the police investigation and response.

"We pretty much worked until 1 in the morning. We constantly remade the paper," she said.

Temple said the News' entire operation changed radically on word of what was happening at the high school.

"An event like Columbine can be a defining moment for a news organization," he said. "A newsroom is broken down into fiefdoms. We have a features department, and we have a sports department. Those walls immediately dissolve on a story like this."

He said the most difficult part of the first day's coverage was getting photographs back from Columbine because of all the traffic generated there by family members rushing to the scene and the large law enforcement presence.

"The fella who finally got the film back had so many traffic tickets that there was a cop there with him at the building," he said. That first batch of film, however, provided more problems than solutions.

"We decided very quickly to publish a extra edition on that day," Temple said. "The first pictures that came back were very, very bloody. They were really difficult to look at, and I wouldn't run them." The extra had to wait until less graphic images arrived.
Temple said the logistics of recreating a news hole for such a major story went beyond the newsroom.

"We immediately had to contact advertisers and tell them that we didn't think they would want to be in their current positions." He said that as the stories came in, he was awed by the challenge of covering an unprecedented tragedy.

"How are you going to make this story understandable, and how are you going to do it in a way that is not shocking, revolting, insensitive?" he said.

"One thing I did is assign somebody to not be involved in the coverage and to be a voice of conscience and to be a critic inside the newsroom. I told her, 'This is your job. Tell me I'm wrong.' "

That person was Sue Deans ('75 MA), who was putting in her first day at the News as assistant managing editor/Sunday. In Boulder, Luxor said, the feeling in the newsroom was like nothing he'd experienced.

"I've never seen the mood of a newsroom so serious. It was gradual. It took a little bit of time. But as things sunk in everybody started becoming very quiet, started working very hard, started really thinking about what they were doing and really evaluating how we were going to cover it," he said.

"We could tell the real weight of the story as reporters started phoning back and as photographers started coming back. I've never seen journalists with a more sober feeling about the story they were covering. It was very hard for reporters and photographers to completely pull themselves away and feel like they were observers. When it hits your back yard, it hits your family and hits your kids; you are human, and you have to deal with your human emotions in that kind of situation."

Luxor said the Daily Camera newsroom became incredibly focused.

"People just came together. Everyone was thinking the same thing. I think we came away from it feeling a little bit closer to each other."

KUSA's Dave Kaplar said the first scanner reports about the shooting were heard just 30 minutes before the station's noon newscast.

"Immediately we started rolling the live truck," he said, adding that it took another 10 minutes to ascertain that something extremely serious was happening at the high school.

Kaplar said KUSA producers' original plan was to break into coverage for a few minutes at 11:45 and have the noon newscast pick up the coverage. But as they went on the air, officials confirmed that shots were being fired and bombs were going off inside Columbine. KUSA stayed with the live broadcast.

At 1 p.m., soap opera programming was to begin, and a major decision would have to be made.

"If we pre-empt a soap opera, we get hate calls. People threaten us," Kaplar said. "But by 1 o'clock it was obvious that this was a bigger story than any soap opera was going to be. "

So KUSA, like all other Denver television stations, couldn't go off the air until they knew what had happened, and as it turned out, that wouldn't be for many hours.

"We had videotape of bloody people. We had kids crying and running around. We still didn't know for sure what it was."
Kaplar said that at about 3:15 p.m. it was clear something had been resolved.

"We were seeing the police relaxing a little bit," he said.

For the next several hours Denver stations stayed with live coverage as the horrible facts of the shootings trickled in. The death toll was high, but not as high as had been reported earlier. Fifteen people had died, including the two gunmen, but that wasn't determined until the next day.

Like the other stations, KUSA stayed with its live coverage into prime time.

"A lot of folks don't get home until 6:30 or 7, and there was a lot of interest in the information," Kaplar said.

At 9 p.m., NBC's "Dateline" covered the Columbine shootings, giving KUSA one hour to prepare for the 10 p.m. newscast. "An hour is not a lot of time, but we had been preparing. We took some staff in the afternoon and said, 'What we need you to do is stop working on the live coverage (and) start working on the 10 o'clock news.' "

Other news staff members were assigned to start preparing the live coverage after the 10 p.m. newscast. "Basically, the programming decision was made to stay on until it no longer made sense to stay on. And that ended up falling at about 12:15 or 12:30," he said. "And the next thing to do is start preparing for the 5 a.m. show the next day, which we'd decided to start at 4 a.m."

Kaplar said that on April 20, everyone at KUSA became part of the news operation, mostly because the station was being flooded with phone calls, from complaints about canceled soaps to compliments on the live coverage to requests from TV stations throughout the nation wanting live shots.

"We hauled virtually everyone in the building, from sales to finance to everyone in the newsroom, and sat them down and said, 'You're answering phones.' "

Initially, KUSA had to turn down the requests from out-of-state stations for live shots, but dozens of professionals soon arrived from its parent company, Gannett, and from NBC to help handle networking needs, Kaplar said.

Vicki Sama was helping her "NewsTeam Boulder" class air its weekly live broadcast when a student came to her saying that CNN needed to talk to her immediately.

"So I went to the master control room and I picked up the phone, and as I'm talking to CNN's national assignment editor in Atlanta I'm looking up at the monitor and I see Channel 9 (KUSA), and I see a graphic flashing on the monitor, and it is a map of Littleton, Colorado. I'm being informed in my ear that there's been a shooting and could the students help CNN help cover the story."

She agreed quickly, although at that time she was told only that eight students might be injured at Columbine.

Eight NewsTeam students immediately volunteered to go. "We were right at the end of our newscast, so we were actually very well-equipped to just rush out and get to (Columbine)," she said.

Some of the students had cellular phones, and Sama gave their numbers to a CNN editor who in turn called students in their cars to provide instructions and background. Sama called students' teachers and employers to explain what was happening.
Sama said the students were among the first journalists at the scene, and what they encountered was shocking.

"They saw a lot of students running around crying, a lot of parents running around screaming at police trying to get information, wondering where their loved ones were," she said. Police had set up an area where they could interview students who had escaped the shooting. There were far more students than interviewers, so students started talking to reporters.

"They really felt a connection to the NewsTeam students," Sama said. "I think it was probably because of the age; these were people who were not far from where they were."

CNN reporter Tony Clark was on assignment near Colorado Springs when the story broke, and he arrived at the scene at about 2:30 p.m. Sama's students brought him up to speed.

About 4 p.m. police announced that as many as 25 people inside the school could be dead. It was the first report that anyone had died, and Sama and her students got a raw preview of what they were in for.

"Our hearts just dropped," she said.

It was about then that the names of the gunmen were being reported. Two NewsTeam students obtained photos of the suspects from a Columbine student's yearbook, allowing CNN to be one of the first news outlets to air them. Others played key roles in CNN's broadcasts.

"They did play an instrumental part in the coverage, which was a really nice thing to see. And then CNN asked that they stick around, so several of the students stayed until 6:30 in the morning," Sama said. "There was no mystery as to the fact that they were going to be missing classes the next few days, and I was making lots of phone calls on their behalf."

However, making up lost class time wasn't nearly as trying as dealing with the trauma the CU students encountered the day of the shootings.

"It was so shocking at first that the repercussions didn't set in," Sama said. "In the following days, that's when it really started to get difficult.

"But I was really proud to see that most of them endured it and were able to talk to people, and especially to me, about what they had seen and the experience they had.

"We were reporters, but no one forgot that they were human." In all, 17 CU students helped out with CNN's coverage during the following weeks.