when reporting on crisis communications and current situations in the media, it is inherently necessary to discuss the Virginia Tech tragedy which engulfed the early part of this week. According to a PR week article (http://www.prweek.com/us/sectors/crisiscommunications/article/651936/Virginia-Tech-creates-comms-team-wake-tragedy/)
Within hours of the news, media from all over the world were arriving on the campus and in less than 24 hours, the university's communications staff was forced to come up with a contingency plan that enabled them to manage the country's largest gathering of national and international media in recent memory. Now, from my viewpoint as a student, being able to relate to the situation, a contingency plan to support the media torrent should definitely fall second to the plan that should have initially been devised to warn students immediately following the first shooting. I understand that there are 30,000 people at V. Tech and informing all of them in such a short period of time is basically impossible. i also understand, however, that the majority of those students were not on campus at 7 in the morning when the first shooting occurred. had the school taken the initiate to cancel school for the day considering dorm room shootings many of those off campus students would have stayed off. originally nothing was said to the students because they thought they were involved with an isolated incident and it apparently didn't seem necessary. however, at that time they had no motive, no capture and no suspect, so what lead them to assume so strongly it was isolated? whats done is done but i think had an announcement immediately been made and the campus closed, many lives could have been saved and many more unruined.