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T
he murders committed Dec. 14, 2012, by
Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary
School shook this nation’s moral and emotional
core. He shot and killed 20 children and six
adults, rekindling national debates about gun
control and mental illness.
Predictably, mainstream American media
descended upon Newtown, Conn., to cover
the story. News websites and newspapers
produced special sections. Cable television
created attractive logos to anchor their coverage each time they returned from a commercial
break. To help their readers and viewers understand the context of the shooting, professional
media threw around words like “Columbine”
and “Virginia Tech.”
An unspoken truth of academia is that from
tragedies come opportunities for research.
Lost among the coverage of Sandy Hook
was that which was produced by high school
journalists. High school journalists found themselves uniquely positioned in the Sandy Hook
dialogue. As students, they could identify with
Sandy Hook’s victims. As journalists, they operated within traditional media boundaries.
Because of that, a study was conducted to
learn how high school journalists cover nationally mediated tragedies, particularly those that
affect their peer groups. Results indicated that
high school journalists maintained journalistic
principles throughout their coverage of Sandy
Hook, but their approaches to articles deviated in tone from their professional counterparts in
one key way: high school journalists used personal
memories to create journalistic narratives, while
professional media primarily used media memory,
which can loosely be defined as the media using
itself to contextualize the present.
Think of it this way: to explain Sandy Hook,
national media referenced the Columbine shootings. They showed old footage of Columbine and
brou