The Columbine Blueprint

On that day two decades ago, news spread from Columbine quickly, and widely. By the time the killers concluded their shooting spree by turning their guns on themselves, less than an hour after firing their first shots, the attack had already become a media event unprecedented in the history of mass shootings. Local news stations and CNN began broadcasting the scene live to viewers around the country about 40 minutes into the attack. The coverage continued unbroken for hours. The story made the front page of The New York Times the next day and remained there for a week and a half; it was a constant presence in the local Denver Post well into summer. No other school shooting had reached a nationwide audience so fast, or taken such a hold on the news cycle.

American students started bringing guns to school and firing on their teachers and peers , and by the late 1990s, they had begun doing so multiple times a year in classrooms around the country—. But Columbine was both in the United States up to that point and the first one to become a national spectacle. It set the blueprint for a generation of attacks. “[Reporters] really wrote the script as they went,”. “There wasn’t a template at the time for how these events are covered … Columbine created the script of crisis coverage.”