The world watched Charleston, S.C., in June 2015 after a white supremacist shot and killed nine parishioners in a historically black church and injured one more. The Post and Courier, circulation 86,000, had the story of the summer, covering the aftermath of the attack and the subsequent push to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina State House.
I spoke with Post and Courier Executive Editor Mitch Pugh about his paper’s approach to coverage of the events.
The following transcript has been edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
What’s the scene the night of June 17, and how do you guys determine this is a big event?
I don’t remember exactly what the time was, I think it was after 9 o’clock. At that point and time, there’s very few reporters in the newsroom. There’s usually a night cops reporter. We have a copy desk. We still do all of our own design here, so there’s a decent sized copy desk and a night editor. Other than that, it’s pretty quiet.
That night our political reporter actually got a call from a source right as this was happening and the police were arriving and said, ‘Something big is happening. You need to get somebody over there. It’s a pretty big deal.’ He called Glen Smith, who lives about a block and a half from the church, and Glen was at a barbecue and ran over in shorts and flip-flops, ran home, got a notebook, told his family to stay inside and ran over to the church. I think he was the first person on the scene and our night cops reporter was there shortly after him.
At that point they were hearing rumors there were multiple people shot and killed, but they didn’t have a lot of hard information. He called me actually at home as he was running to the church. Glen’s a pretty calm guy. He doesn’t get rattled by much, but I could tell when he called me by the sound of voice that something big was happening. So we were in constant communication at that point about what was happening.
Can you talk about the struggle to confirm a lot of details quickly?
We knew things very early on that we couldn’t report or we didn’t feel comfortable reporting from sources who were not willing to go on the record yet. We were very careful in the first couple hours about what we reported. We were obviously able to report pretty quickly that there had been a shooting. We reported quickly that there were multiple victims and likely multiple casualties, but we were very careful about identifying people.
Like we knew that night, I would say within a couple hours, that Sen. Pickney was one of those who was shot and killed, but we didn’t have it from a source who was willing to go on the record and we didn’t have it in a way that we felt comfortable publishing. We just knew that was going to be a big deal and that it was going to be already hard enough on his family. From talking to our source, it was unclear whether his family knew what had happened, so we held off on that until the morning. I know some TV stations, some other folks reported it, but we did not and we were okay with that.
What was the impact like on your newsroom? Were there people who were shaken up?
People in our newsroom knew people who went to that church, or knew people who knew people who were victims. It was tough for a lot of people in our newsroom, but they’re professional and this is what they do. I think they were able to set that aside. If anybody needed help, we were willing to offer it. I think they did a really good job of talking to each other and we tried to be very mindful of giving people breaks. You know, with a story like that, the first 10 days it’s 24/7, so we tried to make sure people got breaks, got time away, got time to spend with family and digest what’s happening around them. We were very mindful of that. We had to force some people to go home because it was a big deal for them. They were emotionally tied to the story.
That’s a good thing in a lot of ways, because I think it led to great coverage, but I think you also have to be careful to not let people get too engrossed in it, burnt out. It can be harmful.
What’s the local legacy of an event like this and how do you continue developing newsworthy angles for it?
There’s a couple things:
1) Obviously there’s a natural narrative that follows after something like this. You got a mass shooting suspect who’s going to go to trial so we’re covering the ins and outs of the hearings and the filings of the case and that’s a natural storyline. We’re also trying to keep in touch with the victims and the families of the victims, people who survived. There were a couple survivors that sometimes get left behind when the national media talks about this, so we try to stay in touch with those folks.
I think what’s interesting in terms of the longer tale of this story, that we’re talking about now only four months out from the one year anniversary, the nation saw for those 10 days a city that didn’t devolve into protests, riots, violence and we were sort of held up as this model as to how you respond to a situation like that. And I think that was warranted and I think that all of us are proud of how the city responded, but I think in the aftermath, the reality is a little more complicated. There’s a lot of things in South Carolina and Charleston that are problems and the black community has suspicions, I think, rightfully so, of what the long-term impact of this is going to be. We talked about ‘Charleston Strong,’ and we marched across the bridge and held hands and did all those things, and now I think we’re grappling with some of the issues that developed out of this, the inequities in the school system, economic opportunity. There’s a lot of fear that has sort of bubbled up to the surface that people are paying more attention to in light of this and that’s a good thing.
I think for a lot of folks in the black community, they’re wondering, ‘Okay is this all going to be all feel-good, hold hands talk, or are we actually going to get some concrete results out of this?’ I think that’s the big question and the thing that we’re trying to look at moving forward.
And 2) to the credit of Charleston police department, the police chief has gotten together with a group of community leaders and they’re doing something they call, The Illumination Project. It’s going to be a series of meetings in the community to discuss how we move forward. They’re going to be getting input from these listening posts over the spring and summer, so there’s some really interesting things happening and I think the question for us and the way that we’re going to cover this moving forward is, What is that long-term impact and legacy of the Charleston shootings and is this something that’s going to make the community stronger and better, or is it something that’s going to be one of those anniversaries that you come to when we talk about it for a week and then we move on?
Mass Shooting Journalism 