Story by Leanne Stahulak
Photos provided by Rachel Berry and Maddie Mitchell
When intern Ceili Doyle got the call, she was only half an hour away from Columbus. But it didn’t matter—her editor at the Columbus Dispatch needed to know how quickly she could get to Dayton.
Ceili had read the news. She knew why he wanted her to go. But she couldn’t help feeling nervous and unsure about how she was going to cover the mass shooting.
Only a few hours earlier, just after 1 a.m. on that Sunday, August 4, a masked and armored gunman opened fire on civilians in the popular Oregon District in Dayton. Nine people died in under 25 seconds, including the gunman’s sister. Another 27 were injured. Police shot and killed the gunman in less than a minute after he started shooting.
Pulling over at a Dollar Tree on the side of I-75, Ceili stocked up on pens, notepads, Cheez-Its and Gatorade. She changed out of her pajamas and into her clothes from the day before—she’d been helping a friend move into her apartment in Cincinnati— and rushed back to her car to turn around and head back to Dayton.
Adrenaline overcame sleep deprivation, and for the rest of the day Ceili concentrated on the task at hand. She talked to the distraught and shell-shocked citizens milling around the Oregon District. She attended four out of the five press conferences held in the wake of the shooting. And she let the business of writing and reporting on the tragedy occupy her mind, instead of the shock she was still trying to process.
Fifty-four miles away, at the Cincinnati Enquirer newsroom, breaking news intern Rachel Berry also watched those press conferences. Her editor had been awake since 3 a.m., calling and reaching out to reporters to see if anyone could get up to Dayton and cover the shooting. He got ahold of Rachel at 9 a.m., and by 10, she was in the office.
Rachel spent the day researching and recording notes from the live-streamed press conferences. She scoured social media and other news outlets for updates on the event, compiling information and helping with breaking news coverage. She was the only intern in the office.
For Rachel, the first day covering the shooting didn’t hit her as hard emotionally. That would come later, after reporting on and, to an extent, reliving those 24 seconds over and over and over again.
But when Erin Glynn first heard about the shooting, her initial thought was that maybe this time politicians would finally enact some legislation. Maybe people would stop thinking, “Again?” when they heard about another mass shooting.
Over the summer, Erin worked in an Amazon warehouse in northern Kentucky. While taking her break on Saturday, August 3, she read about the El Paso, Texas, shooting. During her break on Sunday, she read about Dayton.
In two days, she was supposed to start her fall internship at the Cincinnati Enquirer. She was supposed to be running the election guide and working under the politics editor. But, after reading the news, Erin knew her first few days would follow a different trajectory.
Throughout the rest of that Sunday shift, her mind whirled with question after pointed question:
“Are we gonna do something about this?”
“What’s the tipping point?”
“Is two in one weekend enough?”
Maddie Mitchell’s Sunday afternoon didn’t go much better.
Initially on that Sunday, Maddie was ecstatic. After graduating from Miami in the spring, she’d applied for a full-time position at the Cincinnati Enquirer, where she’d interned last summer. She found out in mid-July that she’d gotten the job, and within the week had upended her life in Chicago to move out to the Queen City.
As she was moving into her new apartment, she kept getting notifications on her phone about a mass shooting. She didn’t have time to sit down and read about it until she was sitting in the car with her dad. They’d just left an antique mall, brand new table in tow, when Maddie started reading up on the Enquirer’s coverage of the Dayton shooting.
Within minutes, she started sobbing. Her dad turned down the radio immediately, asking her what was wrong, what was going on. She just started reading the articles aloud to him.
In the back of her mind, the same throbbing thought beat around her head: Tomorrow was her first day at her first full-time job. And she would have to cover one of the most horrific incidents to ever hit her this close to home.
***
Fewer reporters bustled around the newsroom than Maddie expected on her first day at the Enquirer. But she quickly realized that most of them had already been sent up to Dayton.
As soon as she walked in, Maddie’s editor directed her towards a table of other reporters and interns. He handed them a list of all of the victims from the shooting and directed them to start calling the families to gather information. They needed to learn more about the victims, start writing obituaries and find out when funeral services would take place.
Before jumping in, Maddie paused to consider her situation. She didn’t have an email address. She didn’t know how to pull up the proper programs on her computer. She didn’t even know how to turn on her computer. But she pushed all that aside and got to work.
“It was very bizarre. That first day, I felt kind of useless, because there was so much going on and this is such a huge event that the whole newsroom was on Dayton,” Maddie said. “I remember calling my mom on the way home and just being kind of frustrated because it was such a weird environment to walk into.”
Over the next week, Maddie continued cold calling various people related to the victims. She combed through Facebook, looking for mutual friends and other connected parties who were willing to talk about their lost loved ones. Eventually, she wrote a story about a fundraiser for two baby girls who’d lost their mother during the shooting. Despite how emotional her conversations were with the cousin and mother of the victim, Maddie just reminded herself that she was on the job, and that she had a task to accomplish.
“I’d be at work and I’d come home, and those were separate things. I felt pretty emotionless at work about the whole thing because it’s a job, and it’s processing information, and I don’t think I allowed myself to really process anything emotionally or mentally on a personal level,” Maddie said.
Her breaking point didn’t come until the end of the week. On Friday night, she sat at her brand new kitchen table, eating a home cooked meal and scrolling through Twitter on her phone. A video popped up o a little girl crying for her father, and at that point, Maddie gave in to the emotions she’d been holding back all week.
“I had not cried that hard since my friend Audrey passed away in December. I mean I just completely lost it and had to lie down. My entire body was exhausted,” Maddie said. “And I don’t know why that video triggered everything, but it did. I saw that one thing, and it was like everything that I’d been dealing with all week, all of a sudden I had to face that.”
Facing tough situations was all in a day’s work for Rachel. As a breaking news intern, she had to cover countless crime stories over the summer, reading in-depth police reports and court documents, and even attending crime scenes by herself. But those experiences paled in comparison to the trials of covering a mass shooting.
“I was doing so much research on the victims that I felt like I kind of knew them, in a way,” Rachel said. “I spent so much time digging through Facebook pages; another one of my jobs was to call their family members. I spent a lot of time calling the victims’ family members.”
For three days straight, Rachel tried to balance her empathy and compassion for the victims with her responsibilities and duties as a journalist. No matter how she felt, she still had to get the facts.
“It was really hard—honestly, one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I don’t think there’s anything that can prepare you for something like that,” Rachel said.
On Wednesday, she finally got out of the newsroom and traveled to Dayton. It was time for Rachel to walk around and observe for herself the grieving Oregon District—but planted among the grief were several seeds of hope.
“For me, at least, going up there on Wednesday was actually kind of freeing. There were so many memorials, so many flowers—just seeing all the hope and watching that community come together and stay strong in spite of this tragedy kind of showed that there is still good in the world,” Rachel said.
“Even though this did happen and this was a terrible thing, they’re still coming together, they’re still staying strong. I feel like it got me out of thinking just in those seconds right after the shooting happened. It showed how they can try to move on.”
Overnight, at least one resilient Dayton resident had gone around the Oregon District and put up several Post-It notes on the windows and walls of the buildings. They contained encouraging messages such as “The world is a better place with you in it,” and “We rise by lifting others.”
Rachel had traveled with Erin to Dayton that Wednesday morning. President Trump was due to visit the city, and Erin was responsible for live-Tweeting the event for the politics section of the Enquirer.
But as she walked around the “ghost town” with Rachel, reading these notes and seeing rows of flowers lining the curbside, she started tearing up. The only Enquirer story Erin wrote on the shooting was about this experience, but she was glad to report on at least one happy outcome from the horrific event.
“It was really touching and not as sad as it could’ve been, because you could see all these people trying to help each other through it,” Erin said. “And I think whether you’re reporting on something like this or just living through it, you need to find something to cling to so you don’t get bogged down the entire time, so that’s really what I was trying to focus on.”
While wandering around and interviewing the protesters and ralliers lining the streets, the one source who stuck out to her the most was a woman named Anette. Anette didn’t come to the Oregon District to see Trump or talk politics. She told Erin that she’d come to fix up the flowers and memorials that were threatened to be trampled by the increasing crowds.
One by one, she shifted every flower that rested in front of Ned Pepper’s Bar, where the shooting had taken place.
“She said that the reason she moved the flowers was she didn’t want any mothers to feel like their loss had been overshadowed by anything else, and I thought that was the right mindset,” Erin said.
Anette knew how those mothers felt, having lost her son when he was shot in a homicide.
Erin’s conversation with Anette reminded her of the burden journalists’ carry—the burden of telling stories of other people’s pain.
“The people in this community have had hopefully the worst thing that is ever gonna happen to them has just happened, and it was definitely a moment of thinking, ‘Can I do this professionally? Talk to people who are in pain all of the time?’” Erin said. “But it was in some ways a relief to know that their voices were being heard, and I could be a part of that.”
Ceili listened to several voices as she sat and nursed her Coke at the bar of Blind Bob’s tavern. She watched the patrons embrace one another, leaning up against bar stools and letting themselves cry. The man sitting to her left barely touched his White Claw, holding his head in his hands as if the weight of his thoughts were too heavy to keep upright.
After spending most of Sunday in Dayton talking to people on the streets, Ceili returned to the Oregon District on Monday to talk with those who lived on Fifth Street and witnessed the fatal event. Blind Bob’s sits less than 100 feet away from where the shooting took place.
For 45 minutes, Ceili sat at that bar and let the man get used to her presence. She talked to the man on her right and the bartender, making it known that she was a journalist but not pushing anybody to talk. Finally, she turned to the other man and asked if he had anything to say.
Ceili wrote an entire story for the Columbus Dispatch based on the conversation she had with that man and several others at Blind Bob’s. She listened to people who were there the night of the shooting, unharmed but not unscarred. She heard them describe the bodies and the bullets and the blood on the ground, taking notes and giving them her undivided attention.
She hoped that talking through the event helped the witnesses process what they experienced rather than make them relive it.
“I feel like that’s a question that a lot of journalists are asking each other right now in a national context: How much of this bombardment and making you relive your experience is actually worthwhile? Like is any of this helpful or is all of this just hurtful, and what is our role and what is our ethical responsibility [in] that?” Ceili said.
On Tuesday, Ceili spent a lot of time thinking about journalists’ ethical responsibility in covering traumatic events like the Dayton shooting. Eventually, she poured these thoughts into a column for the Dispatch, calling on other journalists to remember that the people they talked to were human beings, not fodder for quotes or sound bites.
“After spending three days talking to people in a grieving city during the aftermath of a mass shooting, I have seen first-hand how desperately we need heart in this industry,” Ceili wrote in the article. “As reporters, it’s our job to inform our communities about what is happening, but sharing someone’s story is a privilege, not a right.”
Ceili’s spent years cultivating her journalistic skills and talents, but during that week, she learned a valuable lesson in approaching distraught sources with the utmost respect and compassion.
“The way you approach people matters, and the way you tell your stories [matters],” Ceili said. “Whether you’re just trying to get a quick soundbite, or you [actually] care about and you’re trying to empathize with these people, and why they are the way they are.”
***
Despite the shock, the horror, the weeping, the stress and the heartbreak of covering the Dayton shooting, all four journalists agree: They wouldn’t give up this job for the world.
“I think it’s a really controversial and difficult thing to do right now, but I can’t imagine being in any other job, because I can’t imagine doing something that I didn’t love doing,” Ceili said.
These four women represent only a fraction of the journalists out there who report on and write about appalling affairs everyday.
Rain or shine, happy stories or troubling truths, journalists are bound by the same code of ethics that has defined the industry for more than one hundred years: Duty to tell the truth. Duty to be transparent and accountable. Duty to share others’ stories—even if those stories are painful and difficult to share.
“As a journalist you can’t really run from danger— you have to run towards it,” Rachel said. “But I feel like it also kind of taught me it’s okay to get emotional at this kind of stuff. It’s human if you have to work through it, [because] you have to do your job, in the midst of all of that.”
Journalists are human beings. Period. They just channel their humanity through their words, shifting and adapting themselves to fit the tone of their stories—because the best stories are told from the heart, by people who care about who and what they’re writing about.
Ceili, Rachel, Erin and Maddie may have learned this lesson the hard way this summer, but it’s still a lesson that they’ll carry with them throughout the rest of their journalistic careers. In the event that they have to cover a traumatic circumstance again, they’ll go into it knowing that it’s okay to feel affected by what happened. It’s okay to connect with people over shared pain. It’s okay to remind society that behind every newspaper column, every magazine article, every broadcast clip, is a person who put his or her heart and soul into sharing that story with the world.
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