When tragedy struck an Amish community in Lancaster, Pa., reporters and editors faced the challenge of aggressively covering the story without offending a peaceful people who shun much of the modern world.

Konrad Marshall is a Lifestyle reporter for The Florida Times-Union, Jacksonville. He can be reached at konrad.marshall@jacksonville.com

RESPONDING TO THE CALL OF AN EDITOR, Jennifer Todd interrupted her daily errands and made her way to the scene, unshowered, and unready to embrace the new day of a new week.

“We didn’t know what was going on yet,” said Todd, a general assignment reporter with Lancaster’s morning newspaper, the Intelligencer Journal. “The whole time you’re driving down there, you’re thinking – wishing – ‘I hope this turns out to be nothing.’”

Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.

The truth was that shortly after recess on Oct. 2, 2006, a milk truck driver named Charles Carl Roberts IV entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pa., where he shot 10 girls before turning the gun on himself. Five girls – Naomi Rose Ebersol, Marian Fisher, Anna Mae Stoltzfus, and sisters Len and Mary Liz Miller – were killed.

It was the third fatal school shooting in the country in a week, and although the tragic nature of the event brought the news to an international level, it was the fact that it had happened to the Amish – a private people who shun much of the modern world – that captivated people.

And yet, as readers around the country and the world followed the story – for weeks it seemed – journalists like Jennifer Todd were grappling with the news gathering challenge that follows any tragedy.

How do you ask those awful questions – “How does it make you feel?" – when such a public moment is being experienced by such a private people? What methods do you employ?

There is no real method for working with the Amish, said Todd.

Only an understanding.

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Understand, first of all, that the experience will be challenging, and unique.

“You want to be sensitive, but you want to be your normal aggressive self,” said Peter Mekeel, managing editor of the New Era, Lancaster’s afternoon paper. “It really was the most difficult experience I have ever had putting out the newspaper."

Mekeel, and Editor Ernie Schreiber, got everyone at the Lancaster New Era on the story, until a kind of quiet calm descended on the newsroom – the buzz that accompanies moments in which everyone is doing their job well.

The 20 or so writers at the New Era are mostly older, averaging 19 years per stint in the virtually turnover-free newsroom, giving them experience not only in hard news events but also valuable contact with and knowledge of the Amish community.

They had the understanding.

“There’s a certain way you approach the Amish, and it has a lot to do with respect and patience,” Schreiber said. “My modus operandi was always to park my car at the edge of the farm line and walk the three-quarters of a mile down to the house."

Like Todd, local reporters understood that interviews about what happened in the West Nickel Mines School would only come from personal visits to Bart Township’s Amish farms. They understood that names would not always be proffered, and that “No” to an interview – in this case especially – meant No.

“But I have to say that we didn’t get that too much,” Todd said. “The times that someone went down to the homes, people were willing to talk. Sometimes I think they wanted to, like they needed to.”

Schreiber said his reporters knew to wear dark colors – “You don’t want to go walking down there in a plaid shirt.” Also, he said, they understood that questions met with initial silence from the Amish do not necessarily go unanswered.

“Sometimes, they might say, ‘I’ll be right with you,’ and that means they have to go out to the barn for half an hour and do something, and then they’ll be back,” Schreiber said.

This method – this understanding – was successful.

“I do think the Amish were more open to us,” Todd said. “I think in a way they sensed that we were respectful of them. And I think they felt safe."

Chris Corrigan, a municipal reporter with The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., about an hour away, grew up in the area around Mennonites. The fact that he was even able to make the distinction between Amish and Mennonites was the kind of advantage many Pennsylvania papers had over national and international media.

“They were just busy being fascinated by the Amish, whereas we live with them every day,” Corrigan said. “We grew up with these people around us, with the horse and buggies, so were able to more quickly get past that and get into the story."

Mark Scolforo, with the Harrisburg bureau of The Associated Press, said his approach to covering the Nickel Mines murders was actually far more similar to that of other tragedies than people might imagine.

Scolforo negotiated his professional and behavioral balance between shyness and aggression by simply starting off at the withdrawn end of the continuum – as he would with any grieving interview subject. “In the end, they’re strangers going through a horrible time,” Scolforo said. “And that’s a human issue, not a religious or cultural issue.”

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The greater issue though, for many journalists covering the tragedy, was photography.

Guy Wathen, of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in Greensburg, came from five hours away to shoot the story. Wathen has been part of media hoards before, covering Flight 93 and Sept. 11 in general, as well as the Quecreek Mines rescue, but this was different.

The verdant green farmland and quaint culture mean Lancaster County is something of a tourist area anyway. The Amish are used to talking to the English. But they do not approve of having their photograph taken in an identifying way – front on – believing it glorifies the individual before God.

So Wathen shot silhouettes, and barely removed the telephoto lens from his camera all week – a week he spent asking himself questions: Am I crossing a line? Am I being too intrusive? Am I going too far? Does the news value here – in this shot – outweigh the individual’s need for privacy? And is that privacy different in this case than in others?

“The story – particularly because it had happened to the Amish – had to be told, and it had to be told photographically,” Wathen said. “It really brought home just this sense of increasing violence in the world in general – these people trying to avoid these things, just getting thrust into the middle of it.”

Dan Marschka, visuals editor at the Intelligencer Journal, has seen his fair share of large-scale stories, beginning with the Three Mile Island disaster fresh out of school. Marschka also grew up in the area, had Mennonite baby sitters, and worked on farms accustomed to Amish ways.

“Professionally, do we ignore what we know to be a sensitivity issue and get the photo, or do we be sensitive and miss out on the shot?” In the end, he said, each photographer was left to deal with the question individually. The decision over what to run would come later, after final edits, in conference room debates.

The first main image run in the Intelligencer Journal was of medical personnel carrying out the dead shooter. Another image played high on that day was of an Amish man with his head bowed in quiet observance, obscured by his brimmed hat.

“The one that I think we compromised on – and to this day I still don’t know – was of one of two schoolteachers, brought back to the scene with the gruesome task of identifying the dead,” Marschka said. “It’s a picture of two women, walking up the road with police officers, school house in the background. They were recognizable.”

Mekeel said the New Era similarly chose not to run certain shots, however good, out of respect for the community. But the photographers still had to deal with the reproachful gaze of the public, whether their shots were printed or not.

“It may not get run, but with the Amish it doesn’t matter if you use it or not. The point to the Amish is that you’ve shot it,” Marschka said. “It was tough. It really was.”

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But perhaps it was not so tough for everyone.

The media circus set up camp half a mile from the school, in the parking lot of an old auction house. The encampment was established by late the first night, and then the madness began.

Marschka, among many other journalists interviewed for this story, noted how many national and international networks did themselves a disservice with their behavior.

This was before Virginia Tech, when journalists came under fire for badgering college students through their MySpace pages, and news stations were admonished for releasing Cho Seung-Hui’s video rant. In Lancaster, the harassment and the questionable ethics took the old-fashioned form – microphones and notebooks jammed in stunned faces, lit only by camera flashes. Todd saw it several times. Amish people trying to walk away, reporters following them, hounding them, pouncing again and again.

“Quite frankly, it was disgusting how disrespectful they were, in taking pictures and generally trying to get stories,” Todd said. “They just didn't get it, or they didn’t care.”

Several sources said an international journalist tried to gain access to a memorial service by bringing an apple crisp, and wearing a stitched dress bought from a local store.

“Of course, this person – knowing little about Amish customs – was said to have shown up wearing a pink dress,” Corrigan said. “She was thrown out, I believe.”

The assault has not ended yet, either. One reporter from the national media, said Schreiber, has not let up in his aggressive zeal to interview those affected, to the point that the Amish families now refer to him as “Mr. Mean.”

Then there were the factual errors and the mischaracterizations of their faith. One Amish man complained to Corrigan that the media were making them out to be saints.

“Their lifestyle is different, but they’re not all that different,” Corrigan said. “He felt that people were putting them up on a pedestal that they couldn’t live up to.”

But ultimately, said Schreiber, the humility and action of the Amish speaks volumes, from in their gesture to embrace the family of Roberts, to the quilts they brought to Virginia Tech this year, to their civility following a final incident that sticks in Mekeel’s mind, from the day of the funerals.

A filmmaker came from New York to Lancaster and began shooting footage as part of a possible film pitch. The filmmaker’s car spooked the horse pulling a buggy he was filming, causing the buggy to scratch the car. “He filed a claim against the Amish guy who was driving the buggy,” Mekeel said.

“And they paid the guy’s car bill,” Schreiber added.

“You can’t treat the Amish like they are just anybody,” Mekeel said. “They are just not. Their pace on life and attitude to life is just different.”

The newspapers in Lancaster have received some gracious feedback from the Amish, too.

Though reporters and editors note that praise or thanks usually comes through friends or district bishops appreciative of the respect and restraint shown over the past year.

Ray Shaw, editor of the Intelligencer Journal, speaking to The American Editor on Oct. 1 – the eve of the anniversary of the shootings – said his newspaper was not planning to run an anniversary package of stories. “We had a lot of conversation about it and just decided, ‘What are anniversaries for?’ The press? An easy peg to stick a story to? The Amish are having no observance. They’re mourning in their own way. We’ll honor that.”

“It sounds corny, but there’s been a real bonding,” Schreiber said. “What’s become clear – the silver lining – is that the Amish and the English have gotten a better understanding of each other.” *