Poynter Online - Virginia Tech Shooting: Romenesko items

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18, 2007

Virginia Tech gunman sent "disturbing" material to NBC News
MSNBC.com
Sometime after he killed two people in a dormitory but before he fatally shot 30 more in a classroom building Monday morning, Cho Seung-Hui sent NBC News a rambling communication and videos about his grievances. The network turned the "disturbing" material over to the FBI and said it wouldn't immediately disclose its contents.
Posted at 5:04:40 PM
E-mail this item | QuickLink this item: A121712

Will Sun-Times gossip Sneed apologize for false VT report?

Fallows@Large | Beachwood Reporter
"My guess is no," says James Fallows. Michael Sneed reported that the Virginia Tech gunman was a 25-year-old Chinese national who came to the United States last year on a student visa. Fallows writes: "1.3 billion Chinese people are grateful to you, Michael Sneed -- grateful the alarm created singlehandedly by you proved false." || Steve Rhodes: "When will Michael Sneed be held accountable?"

Posted at 2:04:07 PM

News orgs did a "competent" job covering massacre, but...

Los Angeles Times
Tim Rutten says it's not surprising that taken as a whole, the news media did a "thorough, competent and humane job" of covering the massacre "because we've all been here before, in one way or another ...and know how to cover these events. Perhaps because the reflexes we use to respond to outrages like the Virginia killings are so well conditioned, we blow right past a normative response that deserves far more deference than it now receives. The simple question: Why?"
> "This story really lends itself to the Internet," other new media (Sun)
> Was VT student Albarghouti acting as a CNN correspondent, or... (SPT)
> "We're seeing a benchmark moment for digital media, no doubt" (PP-G)

Posted at 12:14:01 PM

"We're getting like 10 billion phone calls," says VT editor

Los Angeles Times
Reporters for the Virginia Tech student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, continued to report and write stories even as phones failed and police evacuated them from their offices. "We knew there was going to be some kind of reliance on us, and we couldn't let people down," says managing editor Joe Kendall. Reporter Saira Haider, who lost a good friend in the massacre, says: "I don't want to be biased -- I just want to report. It is kind of hard to separate the two -- the emotional side and the news side."
> Ex-Collegiate Times staffer: It's surreal to see this happening (Keynoter)
> Cable newscasts doing little but guessing and second-guessing (USAT)
> Bianculli: Cable news regained a bit of its focus, if not its soul (NYDN)
> CNN's all-day average viewership of 1.4M was up 186% Monday (ChiTrib)
> Reporters at VT should be guided more by etiquette than ethics (Slate)

Posted at 11:11:24 AM

TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 2007

AAJA president: Our position was mischaracterized by Suh

Romenesko Letters
Asian American Journalists Association president Jeanne Mariani-Belding says Christine Suh's letter mischaracterizes the organization's position. "AAJA never advocated 'ignoring the identity of the shooter,' as Ms. Suh stated. Our media advisory, which was issued yesterday prior to the identity of the shooter being released, dealt specifically with using race as an identifier."

Posted at 6:45:37 PM

Ex-AAJA member blasts group's racial identifiers advisory

Romenesko Letters
The Asian American Journalists Association is urging journalists "to avoid using racial identifiers [in Virginia Tech stories] unless there is a compelling or germane reason." Former AAJA member Christine Suh says: "I hope members out there are as perplexed as I am by the advisory, but the fact that the group's leadership thought to promote such a poor practice tells me there are members out there who agree that ignoring the identity of the shooter would be acceptable in this story."

Posted at 4:21:34 PM

WP chatter complains about "excessive" massacre coverage

washingtonpost.com
From Post reporter Paul Farhi's chat:

Too much coverage or not enough?: Am I the only one who thought the coverage was excessive? From the parts I saw around 7 p.m., while not prime time, it seemed like the stations were reporting the same information over and over again to the point that it seemed a little ridiculous as there was no new information being released.
Paul Farhi: Don't get me wrong: I'm not arguing for repetition. I AM arguing for putting important news in front of people during the hours most them watch TV. I also found interesting the comments from Tom Kunkel at the Univ. of Md. and Tom Rosenstiel at the Project for Excellence in Journalism, who said putting the news in primetime is *symbolically* important because it says to the public "This is what we should be focused on as a nation."

> Student paper staffers worked through the night on victims list (E&P)

Posted at 1:31:45 PM

Virginia Tech student Albarghouti becomes CNN's "I-reporter"

Philadelphia Daily News | Baltimore Sun
Grad student Jamal Albarghouti's cell-phone video from the Virginia Tech campus was viewed more than 900,000 times on CNN.com by 3:14 p.m. Monday. A network veep says: "Let's face it, right now, his material is still the best of the day in terms of capturing on video what took place there. User-generated words and pictures have always been part of the culture of CNN, and now you have these kids today who are pretty savvy - and very good at navigating the technology of cell phones and digital cameras."
> Shales: What made Albarghouti's video unique was the soundtrack (WP)
> "The count of the fatalities was a lot slower on CNN than on Digg" (LAT)
> Asian student newspaper photog mistakenly nabbed as a suspect (CT)
> Many reporters used social networking sites to find sources (cybersoc)
> A campus massacre isn't enough to interrupt some network shows (WP)
> Bark: Gibson should have joined his competitors at Virginia Tech (UB)
Postedat 11:33:39 AM

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