Carole Tarrant, managing editor

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"How do you prepare for this?" the journalism student asked me last week. How do you prepare your newsroom to cover something like the shootings at Virginia Tech?

"You don't," I quickly replied.

I don't know why my answer left me feeling unsettled. Then again, I don't understand a lot of things relating to April 16 -- from the lip-curling rage that fueled Seung-Hui Cho to the boundless empathy that caused someone to place a 33rd Hokie stone on the Drillfield.

I don't know why. We were not prepared.

Can you ever be?

To be prepared implies tucking away your emotions and moving with a steely efficiency.

Get interview, write story. Get another interview, write story.

From the outside, the work of journalists may seem it's all about steely efficiency.

Take photo, file to editor. Take more photos, keep moving.

But I'm writing today to tell you we, the journalists of The Roanoke Times and roanoke.com, were not prepared. Since that Monday morning, we have been moving, at a furious pace, but we also have been feeling.

What propels us is our mission as a community newspaper. We live here. We play alongside you on softball teams, sit beside you at Jefferson Center, wait behind you in the ticket line for Tech games.

Someone counted the satellite trucks outside the Inn at Virginia Tech -- at the peak, 140, they said.

All are gone now.

We live here.

That thought weighed heavily with us from the first day of our coverage, guiding our decisions on what to cover and how.

The earliest decision was deploying nearly our entire bureau in Christiansburg, 13 journalists in all, to the Tech campus and Blacksburg. Sixteen reporters and photographers from our main Roanoke newsroom soon joined in, working the phones from their desks or adding to the contingent in Blacksburg.

Their reporting filled a 12-page section Tuesday devoted solely to the coverage. We published a special section each day through Sunday, publishing up to 20 ad-less pages at a time -- an unprecedented effort by this company. Staffers from around the newsroom doubled up on work and volunteered on days off.

We published with later deadlines, we condensed the Virginia section and the Business pages into the national section. Readers didn't complain. They sent e-mails in support, such as this one from a Tech parent:

"For those grieving, and this includes us all, the need to know is a natural thing, and being informed is consoling and uniting. The Roanoke Valley owes your dedicated staff a tremendous debt of gratitude for their hard work, professionalism and heartfelt insight."

In short, we emptied ourselves into this story, physically and mentally. But our focus came back to: We live here. For that reason, we have concentrated our reporting efforts on the losses in our community, on those who died and were wounded.

By early Monday afternoon, when the magnitude became clear, we began shaping a coverage plan that ended with at least nine reporters assigned to the journalist's most difficult task -- calling families and friends, asking, "What was she like?"

In times like these, we are prepared enough to know that an organizational instinct must kick in. Each reporter was assigned three or four names. Each reporter would make that initial contact. Then that reporter would continue making calls through the weekend, providing a consistent local voice to family and friends as they planned memorials and funerals.

I hope you have had the chance to read the 32 profiles we've written. I hope you shared my thought after doing so: "I wish I had known her. I wish I had known him. They sound like such great people."

The reporter's call to a bereaved family can seem like journalism at its most callous.

We know that. And we are never prepared.

To comment on our coverage, e-mail Carole.Tarrant@roanoke.com or call (540) 981-3210