By now, you're up to speed on the situation that took place in Portsmouth Thursday.  A man is dead and two women are in critical condition as we speak.  Police tell us the deceased man was responsible for the injuries to the two women.

Here's a little background on how the story unfolded in our newsroom.  It was shortly after 9 this morning, when one of our morning news producers, Brenda Bryan, took a call from someone in the Portsmouth community.  Randy Yohe called his police contacts who let him know that they were checking out a call, but that indeed something happened at Notre Dame Elementary school.

Randy and one of our photographers, Jon Smith, took off for Portsmouth.  A few minutes later, we decided to send Carrie Cline and Earl Ward up there too to help out.  We knew that since we were talking about an elementary school, there would be several community members and parents rushing to the school.

There are many parents in our newsroom.  I am the father of two daughters and I have to tell you when any of us hears talk of something happening like this at a school, our hearts sink.  (My oldest daughter is going off to kindergarten next year and I personally can't fathom it.)

We also directed our satellite vehicle that allows us to broadcast live pictures up to Portsmouth so we can make sure we got coverage back as soon as possible.

Here is what happens in every breaking news situation.  We start getting calls.  People tell us wild stories about what is taking place.  We get emails with wild stories.  We also get comments into our webchannel with wild stories.  I say wild stories, because the information is not confirmed.  We do not, under any circumstance, want to put unconfirmed information on the air.  I have to tell you there is a great deal of pressure on us to get it out there, though, and we all try to check ourselves to double and triple confirm information with our sources.  This was hard, because we knew parents would want to know what's going on immediately. 

We also knew we had a bit of distance between Huntington and Portsmouth, so it would be a little while before our reporters were on the scene to gather information.  They were making cell phone calls.  I was contacting my sources within Ohio government.   Rob Johnson, our morning and noon anchor, thought to call Shawnee State and see if a student reporter was there to help.  Turns out a young man named Chris Dunham was up for helping and really did a fine job sending us pictures and some information.

It didn't take us long to learn that even our informed sources had trouble getting information.  There were a lot of conflicting details, so we waited.  We said what we knew at the time -- that someone was shot at the school.  And we waited to gather more information.

We were able to establish a live video feed from the situation on Argonne Road shortly before noon and started showing it on our webchannel for interested viewers.  At this time, we also broke into programming with the information.  That is always a tough call too and one we don't take lightly.  However, at the time, we were concerned with public safety and felt we needed to inform our viewers on WSAZ as well.  The live video feed presented challenges as well.  We wanted to help illustrate what was going on, while also keeping a respectful distance to not disrupt a police situation.  The natural instinct from our photographers is to zoom in to see what is happening, but we had to physically remind ourselves that the person inside the home could theoretically be watching us.  We didn't want to tip anyone off to the whereabouts of the officers.  So we kept reminding our folks to move back.

One other tough decision here today involved the interview we did with a student who was in the classroom at the time of this incident.  Our policy is not to interview children in these types of situations without consent and approval of parents or guardians.  She was well-spoken and helped us inform the community about this horror better than any other example this day.  We talked with her grandmother right by her side.  We wanted to make sure we didn't victimize her or traumatize her and we thank her for sharing her story.

Our goal in these situations is to bring the information clearly and respectfully.  It is a very subjective business and we know that some people may not agree with some of the decisions we make, but we try to make calls to serve the greater good.  This is a situation we're going to continue to cover and when it calms down, we're going to talk about it.  We always talk about volatile situations, how we handled them and what we need to do better.

Our prayers are with the Loop and Layne families tonight.