Greg Esposito is the higher education reporter for The Roanoke Times and based in its bureau near Virginia Tech.

I FIRST HEARD ABOUT THE SHOOTINGS when a source of mine called me shortly after 9 a.m. He didn't work at Tech and couldn't confirm anything, so I told my editors and started making calls to everyone I knew at the university.

A student I reached on his cell phone was on campus but hadn't heard about any shootings. No one else I contacted knew anything and no one was picking up the phones in public relations. We sent a photographer and our police reporter to Tech, and I was told to continue working the phones.

I went to Tech's Web site and found nothing there, but I kept refreshing it every minute or so. Then, at 9:26 a.m., the university's first public statement about the shootings popped up on the home page. The message confirmed that a "shooting incident" had occurred at West Ambler Johnston dormitory and police were investigating. Less than a minute later I sent a very short e-mail to our online editor in the bureau and our first report of the shootings was on our Web site.

So, the first mention of the shootings by the mainstream media was essentially a one-paragraph message passed on from one Web site to another.

I left for Tech about 9:30 a.m. with another reporter. On our way we were told by an editor listening to the police scanner that there was a live shooting at Norris, not at West AJ. For the rest of the day my cell phone and various campus phones would connect me with editors to feed information as part of a streaming list of online updates.

I had been through this drill before, most notably the previous August when a prisoner escaped from a local jail and led police on a 37-hour manhunt that spilled onto the Tech campus. Shooting Suspect Caught In Blacksburg

When that happened, the editors were initiating contact with me to ask for updates. This time, I was calling in after every significant interview or observation, so we could get it on the site. The information flow went both ways, with editors giving me a birds-eye view that I wouldn't have had otherwise.

Looking back, I wish I spent a little more time with each person I interviewed that day. I was looking for a witness who could give me a detailed account of the shootings or break major news, so my discussions were short and to the point, and then I moved on.

I realize now that even people who just heard shots could have possibly provided detail that may not have made it into the print version but would have been interesting accounts at 11 a.m.

The paper's focus on online coverage has been growing for years, but never before has this concept of a constant deadline been more evident than in covering the shootings and their aftermath amidst national competition. It's late August as I write this, and I've just left a meeting to plan our coverage of the release of the state panel's report on the shootings. Our basic strategy continues to today - we'll get as many eyes reading the report as soon as possible, so we can get the information on our Web site instantaneously. *