If your staff plans to localize the Virginia Tech shooting story, consider:

 

Al Tompkins' "Campus Security" piece on Al's Morning Meeting provides links to campus crime statistics and campus security details.  Seek similar information for your own school. What campus security measures does your high school employ?  What types of crimes occur on your campus?  How often? What are the trends?

  

In "Resources for covering school shootings," Tompkins provides more good coverage tips, including "Warning Signs of Youth Violence."  He also talks about the value of student-generated content, such as accounts and reflections on Facebook, MySpace and other networking sites. In another Al's Morning Meeting column last October, after the killings in Colorado and then in the Amish school, Tompkins links to websites that track school violence and others that offer safer school design ideas.

Keep an eye on the A-Blast Online at Annandale High School in Virginia. The A-Blast posted a story the day after the shooting reporting on a alumna, a freshman at Virginia Tech, who died in the massacre. More coverage is planned, including podcasts and video.

 

And see Kelly McBride's Culture of Blame: Ask the Right Questions of the Right People column on Poynter Online and consider the ethics of the coverage you provide. Are you practicing responsible journalism or, in an effort to assign blame, asking the wrong questions of the wrong people? 

Plus, take a look at this Poynter Online story about how print media played the story. Even daily newspapers were printing old news if they simply recast what had already appeared online and on TV news. Remember that your readers will know what happened -- don't write a breaking news story about an event that happened weeks ago.

If your school localizes this story, send us a link or a PDF. We might run it in our blog, Your Turn.