Shortly after 10 p.m., as the newspaper’s first-edition deadline neared, Councilwoman Karr’s ex-husband, a Post-Dispatch sports reporter, contacted the newspaper. He confirmed that hospital officials had notified him of Karr’s death. The paper had received no word from family members of other victims on their conditions.

Now editors faced the urgent question of how to handle their print product for the next day. Should they view it simply as one version of the online edition, subject to change? How could they serve equally those who had watched broadcast and online accounts of the shooting, as well as those who relied exclusively on the paper Post-Dispatch for their news? How could they write their print stories in language that, in an ever-changing situation, would not leave them behind the news—or worse, wrong—in the morning? Jonsson summarizes the problem:

We make an effort to try to give [readers] something a little bit different in [both the website and the newspaper]… [We] try to freshen it up and have it be different because the whole time, you’re thinking, well, some people only read the Web. Some people only read the paper. Some people read both. Some people are seeing the TV version of the story and then want to come to the paper and not see the exact same thing they just heard. They want to get different information… It’s always a struggle, though… [deciding] how much we give online so the people that read the next day aren’t getting the exact same thing, but that we’re not holding back from either reader.

Given how late the shooting had occurred, how reasonable was it to look for second-day angles on a story still unfolding? “It’s such a huge story and it’s happening at an hour when… people the next morning are going to absorb everything again,” Maples reflects. “If it happens at 9 in the morning, you have to think about the next day… You can’t just report that it happened.” What should the editors put in the next day’s paper?