Spotlight Delaware typically doesn’t cover a lot of breaking news. But on June 16th, our team jumped into action when a shooting occurred at ChristianaCare’s Wilmington Hospital around 3:30 in the afternoon.
Editor-in-Chief Jacob Owens joins the “Beyond the Headlines” podcast to discuss how the team covered this major event in Delaware’s biggest city and the unique considerations around reporting on breaking news. Jake also shares why Spotlight hasn’t done as much breaking news coverage as other media outlets – and whether that might be changing.
The podcast was hosted by Director of Community Engagement David Stradley.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
We’re going to be talking in terms of news reporting theory during the episode. It might strike some listeners as being a step removed from the heartbreaking reality of this shooting.
One person did lose their life, another is in critical condition. At the time of this recording, the names of the shooting victims have not been released. We want to start out by sending our care and condolences to the families and the loved ones of those involved.
Absolutely.
In the first two-plus years of Spotlight’s operations, readers haven’t seen a lot of breaking news in our coverage. Before we get into the details of this news, can you talk about the philosophy of what Spotlight Delaware has typically covered and why breaking news hasn’t been a major part of that mix?
When we were launched, we really focused on what the industry might call a day two story. This is not necessarily breaking news, not necessarily daily news coverage, but more really trying to dig in and give more in-depth nuanced coverage to some of the debates being had around the state. So we hadn’t necessarily done a lot of breaking news reporting by virtue of that.
At the same time, we have a number of news outlets still, whether they’re print or digital or radio or TV, that do a pretty good job of getting readers, viewers and listeners to the scene of issues. So we hadn’t really put a lot of time and effort into breaking news.
But I think there are just some of those stories out there that if we don’t cover them, the public might have more questions as to why we’re not covering them. While we internally might have this ethos, I think many of our readers and listeners out there really just see us as an additional news outlet and maybe don’t see that nuance all the time, and might question, “Why didn’t you cover one of the big tragedies in our state in recent years?”
You’re a news outlet. This is big news.
Basically, yeah. Why didn’t you cover it? And it’s kind of hard to defend at that point, so I think we have to make some qualifications sometimes to that model.
So specific to this shooting at ChristianaCare’s Wilmington Hospital: why did Spotlight decide to cover this?
When it happened, we weren’t quite sure what it was. We were getting alerts that something was going on. There were gunshots reported. We weren’t quite sure if it was on the street outside of the hospital or in the hospital.
Thankfully, Delaware has never really had to deal with kind of a traditional mass shooting, I guess, in the American sense of the word. We’ve been able to escape some of that violence and bloodshed. So a mass shooting incident within a workplace would be particularly concerning.
At that time, we weren’t really sure how many people may have been injured or killed. And so it definitely rose to the newsworthiness level of what we need to be taking a look at. ,And frankly, in these scenarios, the more good, accurate information that’s getting out to the public, the better.
So we felt it was the right time to get over there. We’re already in the city, so it’s happening less than a couple miles from where we sit every day. It would seem almost kind of journalistically irresponsible to not go to the scene.
This may be a somewhat obvious question, but what are the biggest differences when you’re covering breaking news versus other kinds of reporting?
First and foremost is speed.
When we’re working on a typical story, we don’t really stress too hard about going to a hearing and getting it out a couple hours later so that people can read about it. Our role is to really kind of absorb, question, dig in further, talk to more sources, compare it to primary sources and see if the arguments that are being had hold their weight.
You don’t really have that luxury in breaking news, obviously. You need to be there.
What I tell young reporters is, “Really use your five senses.” That’s our role there. We need to be able to convey what does it feel like, what does it look like. How can we provide some level of clarity in a really chaotic, uncertain time to the wider public so that they have some degree of certainty of what’s going on.
Let’s talk through the process of covering this event. June 16th was a Tuesday afternoon. It happened to be a day that several of us were in the Spotlight office, which is at CSC Station, right next to the train station in downtown Wilmington. Late that afternoon, several people in the office started getting push alerts from social media or texts directly from contacts about this shooting.
You and deputy editor Karl Baker stopped what you were doing and just started reporting on this story. Why the two of you? There were other people in the office.
There were a couple more. We were a bit short-staffed from the start of summer vacation season and it was the end of a long workday in which we had reporters all over the state working on things. Karl and I and maybe one other reporter were still here.
I think initially it was, “Well, we don’t really know what this is.” And, Karl lives just north of the city, so he’s like, “Well, I’ll stop by on my way home and see if it’s turning out to be something.” And so Karl did go first and maybe ten minutes later he texted me, called me, and he said, “Yeah, this is something serious. There’s a lot of police here.”
So I said, “Okay, I’ll, I’ll come up.”
There’s a little bit of muscle memory that kicks in. I’ve been working in journalism for almost 20 years and covered a lot of shootings and crashes and fires, and there’s kind of a checklist in your mind that you go through when you’re like: Okay, we need laptops, we need cameras, we need the things to be able to report from a scene to be able to really tell the public what’s going on.
We have a young staff, and so I think there was probably a quick mental math of – this might be easier or faster for me to just run up and do. There just is also a comfort level of being in that chaos, of being able to walk up to people that may have just come out of something, being able to talk to police officers who probably really don’t want to have to talk to members of the press in that moment.
So when Karl gets there first, what’s he doing?
Karl is on scene. Like I say, breaking news is kind of a five senses kind of reporting. He’s taking notes on what he sees, what he doesn’t see. He’s talking to anybody that’s come out of the building about what it is they were told, what they heard, what they saw.
We’re talking to police officers about who’s responded, who hasn’t responded. Do we think the shooter’s still in the building? What’s going on? We’re talking to other journalists about what they’ve heard on the ground.
Can I pause you there? One of the things I’ve learned working in news for two or three years is that journalists are notoriously like, “I want to get this. I don’t want the other journalists to get it.”
But in breaking news, you purposely are talking to other journalists?
Journalism is a club in many ways. There’s not that many of us doing it. We’ve all kind of been through similar scenarios. We’ve oftentimes had the same bosses through the years.
We all enjoy being first on a really great story. I don’t think there are too many of us that wouldn’t ask a colleague for their thoughts, their impression, their help on something – especially when it comes to breaking news. We really want to be accurate, and we don’t want inaccurate or misleading information being filtered out to the public.
So often if we think we’ve heard something, we’ll ask around to other reporters, “Have you guys heard this?” And if nobody else has heard it, it might give you pause about reporting something like that versus, “I’ve kinda heard something like that, too.” Now it gives you a little bit more faith that the, you know, spider network of who’s hearing what is starting to grow a little bit.
So when Karl shows up, he’s just trying to discern what literally happened. He then calls you and says, “All right, this is something. Get up here.” When you show up, what are you adding to the mix?
At that point I knew Karl kind of had the text reporting under some wraps. I knew that I could really help provide some of that visual representation. So I really came really focused on taking photos and video, that I knew would help to convey what the scene was like.
I spent the better part of two hours or so kind of roaming in and around the grounds – in the streets around the hospital, climbed up on top of a parking garage at one point (not the ChristianaCare one, but an adjoining one).
When I got back to the office I had about 525 photos, something like that. So just really trying to convey a sense of chaos, the size of scale of how many police officers were there, the mix of patients and doctors and nurses and SWAT team members, and everybody coming in and out of one of the more well-known public facilities in Wilmington.
This was not a typical Tuesday, for sure.
There was a press conference later in the evening. Are both you and Karl still there for that press conference?
It was at that point that Karl looked at me. He said, “I need to go pick up my child from daycare.”
And I said, “Karl, please go take care of the family.” I was somewhat lucky that summer break had already started, and so my kids were away for the week. I didn’t have to worry about going to get mine. So I said “I will cover the press conference. You take the night, Karl.”
And so I wandered over to WPD.
As you are covering a press conference at a tragic event like this, are there any ethical considerations on your mind as you’re in that sort of atmosphere?
It’s an emotionally charged atmosphere. We got the sense that someone may have died. Typically, when you’re immediately calling a press conference after something like this, it’s not good news that they’re sharing.
You want to be respectful of what these people are going through. The mayor and governor were there. The chief of police was there, and the incoming CEO of ChristianaCare was there. From what we believed at that point, one of her employees had been murdered.
So, you want to be respectful. You don’t want to kind of pry and push, but at the same time we are there to really represent the public’s interest. And there were many questions about, you know, did they have the shooter?
Did they not have the shooter? Should the public be worried? Should they not be worried? That really hadn’t been answered until that 7:30 PM press conference, and we really needed to push those who knew the answers to some of those questions on what they knew.
You had a line in the article that mentioned a “visibly shaken Mayor John Carney” at this press conference. What is the balance between reporting on the emotions and just, “Here are the facts”?
I’m a firm believer that your own eyeballs tend to not betray you. Even in our normal reporting, how somebody says something can be newsworthy, and how someone appears can be newsworthy.
I think in this case, you know, I’ve known John Carney for quite some time now, as both governor and mayor. I knew him all through COVID. I’m not sure that I really recall him being this visibly shaken. He really looked distraught, having to talk about this episode in a city that is his hometown city and he clearly loves.
I think putting the reader in the room and really connecting that I think he felt the way that many people in the city felt, was an appropriate thing to do.
You and Karl published one article early in the evening that basically covered what you all knew. From a literal basis, where did you write that?
We are always not the most well-prepared group. In this case, I will call it coincidence or kismet or whatever you want to call it, but Karl had his laptop with him and he had a hotspot with him. So he was able to literally sit in the grass outside of ChristianaCare and write the first draft of the story and upload it to the website from there.
Similarly, I don’t normally have my USB adapter to my camera with me, but that day it was in my bag. And so I was able to shoot a couple hundred photos, give some to Karl to add to the story, and then go back to shooting. And, we did those early drafts all from the scene.
You updated the article later in the night. How do you decide what to include in an update like that and what you’re going to collect for future reporting?
I think it’s really important in these breaking news situations to really say what you’re confident in and what you feel is factually based and properly cited. If we had official information from the police department or the mayor’s office or ChristianaCare about who the shooter was or how they got in the building or what their motivations might’ve been, those are things that we want to report out.
There were lots of other conjecture, rumors going around that we didn’t really get a straight answer to. I don’t think it’s appropriate to continue pushing the things that we’re not confident in. That I think is something that sometimes we file that away and we say, you know, maybe it’s something I heard at the scene, but nobody else is saying it, so we have to follow up and see if other people would confirm that.
In the early goings, your story is likely to be shared on Facebook or texted to employees, like I know in my own family it was. So you don’t want to have “according to rumors” in your reporting.
One of the key things you added in that update was, “Suspect has been apprehended” – which is probably the big thing on everybody’s mind. Is this person still out here, and do I need to be worried about this?
Those are the major concerns. Ss this person in custody, and if they’re not, should I be concerned? So, we tried to provide as much information that we could to that fact.
Once you left Wilmington Hospital, made the update to the initial article, is your night done, or are you continuing the process?
I think I got home around 9:00, 9:30 or so that night and I was probably getting ready for bed and laying in bed about 10:30 or so when somebody texted me or I got an email that the shooter had been apprehended in Philadelphia. At that point, I tapped some other team members who I know to be night owls to please jump in and update the coverage so that whoever woke up the next morning or might be reading overnight as well would have the most up-to-date, accurate information available that the public should not be concerned at this point because the alleged shooter had been apprehended.
But I imagine you’re still trying to stay updated as you’re falling asleep.
I mean, look, you get into that doom scroll mode, and like everybody else, I’m on Facebook and Twitter, and as you’re going along, other people are talking about it and retweeting other news stories about it. So I’m reading everything and it’s like, yeah, I think we all kind of were on the same page. We didn’t miss anything obvious, and we had complete reporting live from the scene, that is free and accessible to everybody.
So I think we accomplished what we set out to do.
That doom scrolling did show up in the editorial meeting the next day. You come into that editorial meeting and you’re like, “Hey, guys, there are some additional threads that we need to look into here.” And you spouted off some things that you had heard, weren’t sure if they were true or not.
Those things actually haven’t turned into other reporting yet for Spotlight Delaware. Is that standard fare with breaking news, that there will be all these other threads that you’re trying to track down but they may not actually play out?
Absolutely. There’s stories, anecdotes, people saying things, people taking credit for things. There wasn’t a lot of evidence to back some of this chatter up. And so, you know, we verify before we publish, and we haven’t been able to verify some of those things, so they’ve been kind of sitting and dwelling. Maybe one day they will be verified. To date, they haven’t been.
That’s where I hope we make a difference. There are probably other journalists out there that might tweet something like that and would say, “Unverified,” and, “But this is what’s being said.” I just don’t think it’s right to amplify things that you really have not been able to verify. So that’s why we haven’t done those things.
Last question: Should Spotlight Delaware readers expect to see more breaking news coverage in the future?
I think so. We’ve done some of it over the first two years. We did cover the shooting of Ty Snook, the Delaware State Police trooper, at the DMV. We have live blogged our end of legislative session. We’re actually going to be starting that here this week as well. And some of the major kind of political policy moments, we will do more updated breaking information.
But I think, unfortunately, we’re always going to have a need for good accurate reporting in times of great uncertainty. And so I don’t suspect that this will be the last time we ever head to the scene of something going on.
Thank you and the whole team for doing all you can to get accurate information in times like these.
Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.