It’s one thing to cover the world of crime from within the courthouse. It’s another story to cover it moments after the disaster happens.
The print journalism students got the exciting opportunity to participate in the mock disaster on Monday. Two of us went and covered the mock disaster as a college event and four of us covered it as if it were really a shooting.
I was one of those four. I thought being at the courthouse when Rick Buis pleaded guilty earlier this year was crazy, being there when the guilty plea was announced and then crowding around Buis’s lawyer, Balfour Der, outside in a media scrum.
This was reporting from the other side. It was being on-scene of a shooting in the moments after it happened. It was about trying to get accurate information from statements that were sometimes contradictory between the police and the EMS.
The assignment seemed simple: 10 usable photos, two stand ups, shooting some b-roll to accompany those stand ups, Tweeting about it and finally a 400-word story when it all ended. That’s nothing, I thought.
I thought wrong. At the scene of the mock shooting, it was chaos. Ambulance sirens screamed from down the street as they rushed there. Cops (actually Criminal Justice students) flocked around the premises of the yellow crime scene tape. The victims (portrayed by students) were being taken out on stretchers, their fates unknown.
In the first few seconds I got there, everything I had learned in two years seemed to escape me. For those few seconds in the craziness, I had to somehow do everything outlined in the assignment and figure this mess out.
I remember thinking one thing: where do I start?
So I did it the only way I knew how with what journalistic experience I had. I jumped right in, multitasking and figuring out some time management in what little time there was. It was a bit of a waiting game to start with because the cops weren’t sure what happened.
As the victims were taken out on stretchers in a bloody mess, answers started coming out. The fate of the victims wasn’t being released, as was the answer that most of reporters got throughout the morning.
It was a lot of running back and forth from the scene to the hospital (stationed on the second floor of the college). There wasn’t a lot of time to think and there wasn’t any margin for error in the information.
In between talking to people, I was taking pictures and getting video. At one point, I had my camera in one hand on auto-focus taking pictures and an iPod touch in the other hand filming video as victims were put into the ambulance.
The mock disaster was about bringing the three programs together to bring a deeper level of understanding amongst each other. When we get out into the real world and the disaster is no longer a mock one, we have to know how we all work and understand what our jobs are.
At the end of the day when we all go back to our stations and newsrooms, all three professions that flocked to that scene touch the same people. The better we understand each other and work together, the easier it makes our jobs.
One of the broadcast journalism teachers said it best: “We all serve the same people.”
Photos from the mock disaster can be found on the Endeavour Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=390779&id=174217563573&saved