When journalists are shot and killed while on the air

UPDATED

As you can’t help but know by now, yesterday morning two Virginia television journalists were killed when a former employee of the television station showed up at their live broadcast and shot them.  The gunman then fled the scene, eventually killing himself while in his car on Interstate 66.

To tell you the truth, this is a really hard blog post to work on today.  I don’t want to talk about journalists being shot on the streets here in the U.S. I feel deeply of the families of victims Alison Parker and Adam Ward, along with all of their colleagues at WDBJ.

So I’m just going to post a series of links for right now.

• Journalists at WDBJ debate whether online video should have autoplay
  I much prefer having a choice as to whether I see a certain video.
• Virginia journalists first to be killed in US since 2007
  The last American journalist to be killed in the US in the course of working as a journalist was Chauncey Bailey, editor-in-chief of the Oakland Post in California.
• Virginia cops try to force journalists to erase video of gunman
  Journalists have the right to cover the news even when police don’t like it.
• Handling violent breaking news on social media
  Lots to think about in this excellent blog post from Prof. Jeremy Littau.
• How do journalists handle it when their colleagues are the story?
  This was a brutal story for the reporters at WDBJ to cover.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the 2007 On The Media story about Chauncey Baily’s death.  Thanks to my friend Jerry White for reminding me more about the case.