I don't know what to make of what happened at Virginia Tech. Does anybody?
But I do know this, as soon as I heard about it, I tried to get in touch with Roland Lazenby. TrueHoop readers probably know him as the guy who runs LakerNoise, or who wrote all those NBA books, including "The Show," which is a great history of the Lakers.
In real life, however, he teaches journalism at Virginia Tech. Last night, he responded to my email wondering if he was in Blacksburg teaching at the time of the shootings:
Yes, I've been reporting with my students all day, starting at 9:30 when my class room was locked down. Students on the floor in the darkened room making phone calls to start reporting the story. I'm very proud of them.
Lazenby and some students started the website Planet Blacksburg some time ago, and now it's really serving an incredible role. This is great first-hand reporting. For instance, Omar Maglalang and Tricia Sangalang write:
Ruiqi Zhang, a junior computer engineering major, experienced the incident first hand in his class on the second floor of Norris.
"A student rushed in and told everybody to get down," said Zhang. "We put a table against the door and when the gunman tried to shoulder his way in and when he saw that he couldn't, he put two shots through the door.
"It was the scariest moment of my life."
Pam Tickle, who works as a housekeeper in Norris, was moving through another quiet, easy morning at her post in the second floor of Norris when a little after 9:30 a.m., she heard numerous gunshots coming from the hallway.
"We weren't quite sure what happened at first," said Tickle. "We didn't hear anybody screaming, but we heard lots of shots."
Gene Cole, a building worker from the Pulaski County community of Belspring, had heard the shots and was on his way to look for Tickle, when he came around a corner on the second floor of Norris and saw a body on the floor.
"Across the hall, I caught sight of the shooter, and he loaded his gun at me," said Cole. "I ran down the steps to get out of the there."
But even more important, consider that particular story has close to 300 comments already, which says to me that this is not just an information resource. This is a place online, possibly the place , where people who were close to the events are coming to talk about tragedy.
That's not even the most commented on story. A timeline of events, at the moment of this writing, already has more than 500 comments. There are many others with lots of comments.
A lot of the media covering this shooting has felt bizarre to me, even a little exploitative. But this journalistic work, by students, for the university community, and with real-time responses from all concerned? This seems very real and important.
