Whether to cover the students' return to classes in August at the repaired Columbine High School. "This probably provoked the most sustained debate that we had," Fulcher said, and Post editors eventually decided cover the event with a low-key approach. "You say to the kid, 'Do you want to talk,' and if the kid doesn't want to talk, fine."

David Kaplar
KUSA-TV

KUSA reporters couldn't confirm the identity of one of the suspects, meanwhile KCNC-TV was reporting the name. Kaplar decided to hold off reporting the second gunman's name until KUSA could confirm it. Not everyone in the newsroom agreed.

"I had two reporters screaming at me that we were getting our butts kicked," he said.

"We want to be right, and we want to be first. But we want to be right more than we want to be first. "He said the station's biggest mistake happened when a phony source made it onto the air.
Someone called KUSA claiming to be a student still in the building and was interviewed live. The caller was actually in Florida. AP and some newspapers picked up the report.

"We got caught with our pants down, frankly," Kaplar said, noting that KUSA has changed relevant policies as a result.

John Temple
Denver Rocky Mountain News

The News encountered problems with graphic photos. The most notable was the one of a murdered student sprawled on a sidewalk outside the high school. It was shot from a helicopter the News rented.

"That ran big on the front page of the L.A. Daily News. That ran big all over the world. Dead boy on sidewalk. How, when you have a story like this, you have a story this horrific, how far do you go to depict it in your newspaper?" Temple asked.
Parents of missing students hadn't yet been notified that their children were dead. Temple knew that if the News ran the photo the parents would recognize their son.

"I knew the parents would know. I mean, I'm a father. I have three children. The photo director is a mother. The person who took the photo is a father. We knew that the parents would know by the morning that that kid was dead."

Temple said he made the decision to run the photo "because this is history."

The parents did indeed open the newspaper and identify their son, he said. Temple said they were furious that law enforcement officers had left his body on the sidewalk all night. An angry relative of the boy's called and Temple had a long conversation with her and later the boy's mother. He told the audience he has had several subsequent conversations with the boy's mother.

"It turns out that she carried that photograph around for days and days. It was of great comfort to her because she knew how her son died" and no one else would tell her, he said.

Scott Luxor
Boulder Daily Camera

Several consecutive editions focused on grief coverage. Luxor said he still wonders if that was overkill.

"Did we weigh too heavily on grieving emotions, and in so doing did we exploit the situation?"

Vicki Sama
CNN

For the students, the biggest ethical question was, "How close do you get to people?" For CNN, it was, "When do we leave?"
Sama helped students understand how and when to approach victims.

"I remember there was one girl who was crying hysterically, and she saw the cameras coming toward her. She ran over to a car and pushed her face into the (open) window of a car so she could cry without anyone seeing her.

"I turned to my students and said, 'This is where you stop.' "
For CNN, which had dozens of people at the scene providing 24-hour coverage, the answer arrived in the form of a deadly tornado that ripped through a town in Oklahoma.

Sama said half the crew was assigned to go there, and it was the beginning of the end of CNN's Columbine coverage.

"I talked to one of the gentlemen who ran the live truck for both the Columbine and Oklahoma stories. He said he was so depressed after the Columbine story and then having to go deal with grief and death again on another story back to back. He said that had really affected him even after being in journalism for 25 years."