It depends on who you ask, I guess. Lately, we’ve been criticized both for putting shooting stories on the front page and for putting them inside the newspaper. I wanted to explain our reasoning.
When a gunman murdered 19 children and two teachers at a Uvalde, Texas, school on May 24, we made this tragic news our lead story and lead photo on Wednesday, May 25. I received no complaints. I think readers agreed that it was shocking news — the most casualties in a mass school shooting since Sandy Hook in 2012. It’s a terrible story, of course, that spawned daily follow-ups.
I would say how we played those follow-up stories followed a traditional news pattern.
The Uvalde shooting stayed in the lead position for the next three days as witnesses questioned whether the police responded to the call properly, and it was revealed that armed officers took many minutes before unlocking a door and going after the killer.
On Sunday, the story moved to the bottom of A1, and it didn’t make the front page of our Monday Memorial Day edition. (Don’t forget, if you have a home delivery subscription, you have a Monday newspaper waiting for you at epaper.columbian.com.)
It also didn’t make Tuesday’s front page. For Wednesday, June 1, we chose a story headlined “Guns No. 1 cause of death for kids” as our top story. I thought it was a good choice because it was news — for the first time in our lifetimes, auto accidents aren’t the top killer of children and teens. I also thought that since the Texas shooting was still in the news, it would give people some context.
But someone emailed me a complaint. I didn’t really understand it — “You omitted the attribution, Reputin Political party and the No Regard for Anyone super pac,” it read in part, then went on to complain about the story’s proximity to Memorial Day.
On Wednesday afternoon, there was a report of a mass shooting at a Tulsa, Okla., medical facility. The news broke late in the day, after major elements of our Thursday paper were already put together, so we played the story on Page A6. Four people were killed.
The A6 placement led to a complaint from a different reader about the story not being on the front page. To me, this was a lesser incident, although it bore a strong resemblance to a 2020 shooting at PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center in Vancouver. For one thing, it didn’t appear to be random, and police acted swiftly. Plus, there was the practicality of making deadline if we had torn up multiple pages of the paper.
Another factor that plays into our decision-making on these national stories is whether our readers will already know everything they want to know about the story by the time the paper comes out. Columbian readers are smart; they watch TV news and look at news online. I think that was the case in the Tulsa shooting.
Guns in schools
Although I didn’t hear from readers, it also took some thinking to decide what to do with two post-Uvalde stories about two local high school students who were caught bringing pistols to school. No one was hurt, or, according to police, even threatened with a weapon. I thought deviating from our normal policy would be sensationalizing the issue. So we played them in the local section, where we normally print the crime news.
I’ll be the first to admit that news judgment and deciding what stories to place where is not a science. Instead, it’s more of an informed hunch. We want to present as full a report as possible of the day’s news, starting with local and regional news, but also national and international. I thought we handled all these stories about right. But I’ll respect your right to disagree.
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