Have a plan
- Do you have all the equipment you need to cover a breaking news situation?
- Pens, pencils, notebooks, cameras, audio equipment, batteries, change of clothes, food, water, gas in your car.
- Do you know how you’ll keep yourself safe while reporting on breaking news?
- What are emergency procedures like to keep your newsroom safe during potentially dangerous breaking news situations?
- What will your first reports look like?
- An independent story? A liveblog? Photographs? Video?
- What is your news organization’s policy on user generated content? How will you verify that content?
- What is your news organization’s line of communication for breaking stories?
- Who will go out in the field?
- Who will research or monitor external wires?
- Who will edit incoming content?
- To whom should reporters file their copy, photographs or video?
Talking to survivors or family members
- Breaking news situations:
- Be respectful and polite. These people’s priority probably isn’t talking to a journalist.
- Conduct interviews in a safe, quiet place away from the scene.
- Allow victims or family members to bring companions with them while they talk to you. It may lend them emotional support or a feeling of safety.
- Eye witnesses are not always the most reliable sources. Ask what survivors experienced rather than what they saw or heard and be prepared to verify it.
- Be aware that your equipment is foreign and potentially frightening. To someone who just experienced an active shooter situation, a boom mic or camera could provoke a visceral response.
- Follow up situations:
- Tell survivors or family members you want to tell their story or the story of a deceased loved one, survivors say. Such approaches are most successful, survivors and family members say.
- Allow sources to set the terms of their interviews, such as location and duration.
- If you’re asking personally difficult and emotional questions, be prepared to open up about yourself. You can remain objective while also being empathetic.
- Tell sources what comes next. Publication could result in more media attention or public backlash.
Guidelines for content
Keep in mind these guidelines could run contrary to your publication’s style guide. Engage your newsroom’s leaders on the rationale of that style guide and discuss potential changes with community sources to ensure your content is comprehensive and accurate.
- Assure language accuracy.
- Shooters, dead or alive, are still entitled to due process of law. Attribute accusations to law enforcement officials, witnesses, survivors or public officials.
- Ask victims or survivors which term is preferred to describe them in published content.
- Confirm details about casualties before publishing.
- Avoid single causality.
- Mass shootings, and crime in general, rarely occur because of a single cause.
- Do not, for example, attribute a shooting at a place of business because the shooter recently lost their job.
- Mass shootings, and crime in general, rarely occur because of a single cause.
- Avoid inclusion of irrelevant details.
- Details such as a shooter’s religious affiliation or ethnic background are rarely applicable to the events of an active shooter situation.
- Similarly irrelevant details should not be included in news reports.
- Decide with what frequency to use the name or image of a shooter.
- Displaying prominently the name and likeness of a shooter could reinjure survivors or a recovering community.
- Establish policies on interviewing children or minors.
- Do not interview children or minors without a parent or guardian’s permission or supervision.
- Provide information on access to resources.
- Communities may make available mental health or grief counseling resources. Include details on how to access these resources.
- Verify everything.
- It is never wrong or impolite to ask, “How do you know that?”
Breaking News Checklist
These tips work even if you’re reporting on breaking news.
Mass Shooting Journalism 