EVA RUSSO | RICHMOND (VA.) TIMES-DISPATCH Virginia Tech freshman Jessica Hawkins, of Churchville, Va., and sophomore Chase Appich, of Midlothian, Va., grieve during a vigil April 17 at the drillfield, on the Virginia Tech campus. The vigil was held in honor of those killed in the April 16 campus shooting.

John Witt is multimedia editor for the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch

WE GOT WORD OF THE SHOOTINGS during our Monday morning editors’ meeting on April 16. Reporters, photographers and a supervising editor were immediately dispatched for the four-hour drive to Blacksburg.

Other reporters began working the phones from Richmond, and we quickly posted audio recordings of interviews with students. We opened a breaking news blog on our Web site, updating as information arrived in bits and pieces.

Plans were set in motion for a four-page extra edition published Monday afternoon. You can find electronic copies of those pages on the Tech tribute page set up on our Web site, inRich.com.

Our technology director arranged with WSLS, our sister Media General TV station in Roanoke, to set up a command post in the station's Blacksburg bureau. He took equipment to allow high-speed filing of photos as well as on-site video editing.

By Wednesday we had 18 people in Blacksburg.

The photos arrived thick and fast, and they packed incredible emotional impact. Fortunately, we had just purchased and trained in the use of Soundslides, so the images that didn’t make the newspaper were put to good use in audio slideshows that combined interviews, news conferences, even a bagpipe rendition of Amazing Grace played at a memorial service.

In all there were 15 separate slideshows prepared in the five days following the shootings. In the first 10 days, the newspaper published 71 pages of coverage on the shootings, the victims and the aftermath.

Perhaps the best example of finding hidden talents in staffers and putting the multi in our media came on the day after the tragedy, when Tech held a student convocation in Cassell Coliseum. We had a still photographer there and a video photographer in the overflow crowd at Lane Stadium. Neither was able to get decent audio of the speakers. One of our part-time copy messengers, a video major at Virginia Commonwealth University, downloaded audio of poet Nikki Giovanni's rousing speech from Tech's Web site and quickly mixed it with the stills and video for a moving piece that perfectly captured the spirit of the event.

Media General's Interactive Media Division set up a central page to catch all the stories published by the Times-Dispatch and other Media General newspapers and TV stations.

We have continued to cover the story with every tool at our disposal, including an hour of live streaming video with analysis from our reporters Aug. 30 when Gov. Tim Kaine released the report of his investigative panel. And when Tech students came together for a commemorative concert Sept. 6, we posted video clips on the Web as soon as they were delivered by satellite uplink.

The Virginia Tech shootings were a tough test of our fledgling multimedia capabilities. Not everything worked, but we learned valuable lessons that increased our confidence in the ability to break news online and enhance print coverage with audio and video. *

EVA RUSSO | RICHMOND (VA.) TIMES-DISPATCH “I told her she’s going to be OK,”" said Lt. Tea Poulin, of the North Carolina Highway Patrol. She came to the drill field at the Virginia Tech campus Thursday morning to show her support and saw a young lady sitting all by herself. Here, Lt. Poulin consoles the young lady, Laurel Marburg (center), a research assistant at Virginia Tech, as Elina Terushkin (left), a student at the Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine, in Blacksburg, sits nearby. Lt. Poulin had been in Blacksburg since Monday, the day of the deadly Virginia Tech campus shootings, to offer peer support for the local officers.