Mike Gangloff, a federal courts reporter, was the lead reporter/editor of The Roanoke Times’ breaking news blog covering the Virginia Tech shootings.

I’VE HAD THE PRIVILEGE, over the course of a couple of community disasters, of helping to create our style and method of online updates.

Privilege and disaster sounds flippant, but I mean it seriously. As a Virginia Tech graduate and longtime resident in and around Blacksburg, the April 16 shootings were brutal. As a believer in the power and value of good journalism, I think our newspaper serves a vital role in responding to tragedy by telling the story in the quickest, most complete way we can.

Online is the way to do this. It’s where we need to be if we want to be relevant in terms of breaking news. I think people look to print for detail and context — and for good stories that may not emerge immediately. But we only get to break news in print to those rare readers who haven’t happened to catch something somewhere more immediate than a once-per-day stack of paper.

The Tech shootings came on my first day back from vacation, a few weeks after I’d shifted from editing in our bureau near Blacksburg to writing in the main Roanoke newsroom. I was driving to Roanoke when I got the call to turn around, head to the bureau and take charge of our online updates. I stayed with this duty since the first few days of coverage.

Our online update style is something we’d developed eight or nine months earlier as we covered a fatal gas leak at a small local college, then a manhunt for an accused double-murderer (also an event that spilled onto Tech campus). My role was the relay task of communicating with reporters then posting the information online — though this was complicated by technical problems resulting from traffic overwhelming our site.

I also was involved in aggregating information from different reporters and other sources — official closings announcements, wire stories, etc. — and acting as an old school rewrite man. I tried to maintain a coherent and consistent voice in our coverage, and at the same time vary our pitches — to offer an ongoing mix of breaking news, scene pieces, official statements and announcements.

I’ve encouraged reporters to think in terms of old-school “This just in!” dispatches but to also include scene-setters and quote roundups in their plans. I didn’t need it so much during the Tech shootings and their aftermath, because the pace of events rarely let up.

But I tried to have a loosely scheduled rotation of scene descriptions on tap from reporters in different parts of our coverage area ready to plug in if the flow of news seemed to slow — a set of “Here’s how this big event is affecting this part of our community right now” vignettes ready to pull.

I wanted to post something new every few minutes.

The first goal, of course, was to get info out as quickly as possible. The Web frees us from our print publishing schedule and lets us compete with our television and radio (and blog and Facebook and Wikipedia and whatever else) counterparts in terms of up-to-the-moment accounts. At the same time, we are preserving our newspaper advantage of having time and space to dig into stories in a more comprehensive fashion — by gathering string for print stories, letting reporters write what amount to early drafts of print stories (drafts that sometimes generate new comments and leads) and by otherwise augmenting print coverage.

Second, we know our community better than other media outlets, and I want our online presentation to reflect that — not only to give the latest breaking news, but also to give a local sense of that news and its impact on the community. It’s important to me to get the voices of regular people, not just victims, officials and spokespeople, into our coverage.

Multimedia is a big part of our presentation. We try to tie video, slideshows and audio into the succession of breaking pieces. And we try to link from our breaking news blog to our other content as explicitly as possible, whether it be the periodically updated write-through story that an editor was preparing throughout April 16, or a previously published profile of a slain police officer that we were able to find and put up immediately during the manhunt of last fall.

What the Tech shootings taught me, in terms of online updates, was two things:

• First, a technical point, which was (once again) how important it is to create the right framing and presentation of all the rapidly accumulating information. We needed headlines, read-ins, links and an overall presentation that worked both for the reader who’d followed us post-by-post from the start and for someone who’d just landed on the site from some search engine.
• Second (also once again), people read these things. I got immediate feedback about our updates from readers locally and around the country, and had people asking about them in casual conversations for weeks afterward.

In a broader sense, it sounds corny, but April 16 reinforced for me how deeply I care about this community, and how important I think our role as journalists can be. *