An inside look at a multimedia newsroom covering the I-35W bridge collapse.

Kate Parry is the reader representative at the Star Tribune, Minneapolis.

REPORTER KEVIN GILES WOULD LATER WRITE that he thought the “huge brown cloud” he could see from University Avenue on his way home was from Interstate 35W bridge construction.

But as he neared the ramp onto 35W past the bridge, he observed odd behavior: A cluster of people staring south toward the city. Construction workers at a dead run. He called night editor Pam Miller and told her, “Something’s wrong on the bridge.”

Turning onto 35W north, the bridge behind him, Giles glanced in his rearview mirror. There were absolutely no cars following him. He turned around and headed back.

Heather Munro, a former Star Tribune imaging technician, had her camera along as she took a walk with a friend near the bridge. It was almost 6:05 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 1. Seconds later, she was photographing a catastrophe.

In the newsroom, the usually flat, incessant chatter of the police radio turned staccato. News assistant Tim Labatt noticed the change and announced that it looked like a bridge had collapsed.

Managing Editor Scott Gillespie walked out of a meeting, plans for the next day’s Page 1 just finished. He heard the announcement and the scanner, turned to Duchesne Drew, assistant managing editor for local news, and simply said “flood it.”

“Almost instantaneously, people began to bolt from the newsroom. It was so clear so fast that it was close, so people could literally run there,” said Rene Sanchez, deputy managing editor for content.

“The reporters knew the terrain. They knew the neighborhood,” said Jill Burcum, assistant managing editor for enterprise.

Will Tacy, editor of StarTribune.com, got an instant message that the police radio was saying bridge collapsed. He diverted multimedia intern Vanessa House from a Timberwolves news conference. She followed a firetruck and ambulance to the scene and began shooting video and interviewing witnesses and people who had been on the bridge when it collapsed.

“There was a part of me that didn’t want to film at all. I mean, I was sort of in shock. I had never seen anything like this before. Then it snapped in my mind that I had to do my job. I pushed the record button and went from there. It was incredibly hard to walk up to someone who was just injured and ask to interview them. I could tell later, looking at my tape, that I was shaking,” said House, 22. She began to team up with print reporters who were arriving.

On the other bank of the Mississippi, Jenni Pinkley, multimedia producer, had climbed down the river bank to a staging area where rescuers were helping injured victims who had managed to get themselves out of the river into any vehicle possible to get them to help, often sliding them into the backs of pickup trucks.

It was 6:15 p.m. Ellen Lorentzson, photo editor for news, called a Blaine airport to rent a helicopter. They told her Dave Denney, another photo editor who lives nearby, was already there.

At 6:25 p.m., photographer Richard Tsong-Taatarii called Lorentzson. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

Deadline for the first press run was just three hours away. “It’s an incredibly narrow window. It’s enough time to have some aspiration, but not a lot of time to craft a coherent report,” Sanchez said. He wanted to provide more than the “shards” he saw TV and radio reporting.

Editors and reporters on their way home hopped off buses, turned their cars around and headed back. People who normally cover theater became disaster reporters. Editors became reporters. I shed my ombudsman’s role and became an editor for the night.

Kevin Duchschere was one of the first reporters out the door. As he ran toward the bridge, he first met children who had been on a school bus. “They were shaken and crying, talking about the bus falling,” he recalled. A man showed him his cell phone, a call to 911 recorded at 6:05 p.m.

“My only thought was I’ve got to talk to people and find out what happened,” Duchschere said. Then he saw Peter Siddons, a Wells Fargo executive. “He was clearly in shock and looked so incredibly sad and shaken. He told me he thought he was going to die.” The next day, Siddons’ description of falling in his car was the headline on page one: “BUCKLING AND SWAYING, THEN ‘DOWN, DOWN, DOWN’ ”

Photographer Brian Peterson, struggling for a vantage point, peered up at the Riverview Condos. He saw a woman, many floors up, on her balcony. “Can I come up?” he yelled. “Sure,” she replied. Photographers have camped in her condo ever since.

Reporters were dictating from the scene to writers crafting stories for the Web site and printed newspaper. Photographers started returning by 7 p.m. with the first glimpses of what happened. Lorentzson stared at an image taken by Tsong-Taatarii of a solitary woman huddled on a slab of concrete. “That hit me in the gut,” she said. “Had I not been here, I would have cried.”

Regina McCombs, senior multimedia producer, put the first video of victims online less than two hours after the collapse – the first recollections of people, still shaken, who had been on the bridge when it fell. One was Star Tribune Circulation Customer Service Manager Kris West, whose car was in the middle of the bridge when it collapsed. She found herself surrounded by water and wreckage. She was rescued a half hour later by a boat.

“Seeing the first videos, seeing the first interview, was remarkable. TV was still doing stand-ups,” Tacy said. The interview with West, he said “was the most striking, it was this incredibly visceral moment.”

“TV had been live all night, there was no way to beat them. But the goal was to tell good stories,” McCombs said. “We had as good a video as any of the TV stations. House and Pinkley had captured the sense of chaos and the somewhat organization of the rescue effort. Having the two angles from different sides of the river was great.” McCombs, with a background in television, is the Star Tribune’s fastest video editor. She served as a central editor of all video, something she remembered reading had helped the Roanoke Times’ Web site during the Virginia Tech shootings.

“You can write all you want. It’s a very different experience hearing people’s voices as they’d just been through it. It was very raw. If it’s done well, it dumps you into the moment and makes you feel like you’re there. It’s so immediate and emotional,” McCombs said.

As Tacy talked to videographers and reporters in the field, “I was hearing the tension in their voices. They were working incredibly hard to get the story and get it in what was potentially an incredible tragedy.”

Editor Nancy Barnes added four pages to those already cleared for the coverage. She thought about the scope the stories needed: “There were two stories we were trying to tell: One was the human story, the other was how the hell did this happen?”

Reporter Dan Browning began probing for data on the condition of the bridge. He knew the National Institute of Computer Assisted Reporting in Columbia, Mo., had a national database of bridge inspection reports. He got a staff member there to copy him the most current records on the collapsed bridge in Minneapolis.

Soon other investigative reporters joined him in an intensive hunt for bridge records. By 11 p.m., they were writing a story on inspections that had raised serious questions about the bridge. Despite the late hour, Barnes had Page 1 torn up to get the story out there. About 100 journalists worked to get it all done by deadline, after midnight.

The online staff updated the Web site all night. “We were fed by print reporters all through the night,” Tacy said. “We had hundreds of photos in a slide show that developed over two or three hours. It grew to be something powerful and interesting.” Through the next few days, he added, “every four or six hours, we stepped back and asked ‘How do we have to rethink this?’ It was no longer a story about the event, but about the aftermath.”

It was 1 a.m. when Tacy finally had a chance to examine everything that had been posted on the Web site since 6:05 p.m. “An incredible sense of pride over what we accomplished in six hours came over me,” he said. Tacy managed to sleep a couple of hours that night in an editing room, in a nest of foam used to pack camera gear.

Staff members haven’t let up since. They’re trying to answer the tough questions readers keep posing: How could this happen? How can we prevent it from happening again?

When Minnesota journalists tell a story well, they know their fellow Minnesotans will reliably respond. That’s why the most constant question from readers since this happened has been, “What can I do to help?” It’s a moment when the power of superb journalism to inspire our community comes clearly into focus.

The next morning, Burcum’s sister called her to say she couldn’t get a newspaper, they were sold out.

Tacy said the Web site received more than 4.6 million page views that Thursday, the day after the collapse. It was a record. Single copy sales of the printed newspaper that day were 97,296, up nearly 36,000 from the previous Thursday.

“This is a newsroom that’s taken a lot of bruises this year, and to be able to shake that off in an instant is a testimony to what pros they are,” Sanchez said.

“This is an awful story, and we wish it hadn’t happened,” Duchschere added. “But it has shown again that this staff has what it takes on a story like this.”

“I am very proud of how our newsroom covered this story,” said Editor Nancy Barnes. “Our reporters were out there, literally round-the-clock, breaking the news in print and online, with words, photos and showing again that this staff has what it takes on a story like this. More important, though, they asked the tough questions right from the start, and from Day 1, broke stories about how and why this bridge collapsed in a way that reminded the community about just how important our work is to them.” *