COMM 337: Quotes and description

Moved from my blog The Mackerel Wrapper for students in COMM 150 and 207.

When you can't be on the scene of a story, you have to get the who's, where's and what's through interviews. You'll never get as much detail as you would if you were there, but you can get enough to convey a sense of what it was like.

This CNN account of the shootings at Virginia Tech in April, posted to the web that day, fills in a lot of the gaps by quoting eyewitnesses. For example the lede:

BLACKSBURG, Virginia (CNN) -- A gunman who killed at least 30 people in one of two shootings on the campus of Virginia Tech was dressed "almost like a Boy Scout," said a student who survived by pretending to lie dead on a classroom floor.

"He just stepped within five feet of the door and just started firing," said Erin Sheehan, who was in one of the Norris Hall classrooms where the second shooting incident took place.

Sheehan described the gunman -- who later shot and killed himself, according to police -- as a young man wearing a short-sleeved tan shirt and black ammunition vest.

"He seemed very thorough about it -- getting almost everyone down -- I pretended to be dead," she said. (Watch student describe surviving by playing dead )

"He was very silent," said Sheehan, one of only four students in her 25-student German class who were not shot.

The gunman left but returned in about 30 seconds. "I guess he heard us still talking," said Sheehan.

"We forced ourselves against the door so he couldn't come in again, because the door would not lock."

The man tried three more times to force his way in and then began firing through the door, she said.

The story is a "sidebar," i.e. a story that runs off to the side of the main story and elaborates on it, so it doesn't have a nut graf. Instead, it quotes other witnesses all the way through to give us an overall picture of the scene. Note how this one has a little less information than than the first:

Student Tiffany Otey was taking a test inside Norris Hall when the shooting began. She and about 20 other people took refuge behind a locked door in a teacher's office.

Police officers with bulletproof vests and machine guns were in the area.(Watch a student's recording of police responding to loud bangs )

"They were telling us to put our hands above our head and if we didn't cooperate and put our hands above our heads they would shoot," Otey said. "I guess they were afraid, like us -- like the shooter was going to be among one of us." (Watch students react to shooting )

The quoted details get fewer and fewer as we get deeper and deeper into the story. In this sense it's a classic inverted pyramid, with the most interesting stuff on top trailing off to filler on the bottom. The last graf, for example:

Before Monday, the deadliest mass shooting in the United States occurred in 1991, when George Hennard drove a pickup truck into a Killeen, Texas, cafeteria and fatally shot 23 people, before shooting and killing himself.

Please note: I left in the links to audio and video links in the CNN story, since they're such a good example of cross-platform convergence.