Complete Story
12/06/2016
Alan Miller commentary: Ohio State alert sent Dispatch staff into action
By Alan Davis, The Columbus Dispatch
Run Hide Fight.
Three little words sounded the alarm for everyone at Ohio State University's main campus on Monday morning to take immediate action to stay safe against an unknown but potentially deadly threat.
It also was the signal for Dispatch reporters and photographers to run toward the threat, knowing that you depend on us for almost immediate reporting from the scene in such cases.
To be clear: We are not officers with guns, but we often are right behind them — doing our best to stay out of their way and out of harm's way. I'm not equating our work with the life-or-death work of officers or medics. We respect and admire those who put their lives on the line daily to keep us all safe.
And we all are grateful to Officer Alan Horujko of the Ohio State Police Department for his quick action to shoot and kill the attacker before he could do more harm. While as many as 13 people were injured, no one died because Horujko did his job so well.
Like first responders, we sometimes run toward danger while most others are running away because we know that you and people around the globe depend on us as a trusted source of information.
Because we live here, we had people on the scene within minutes of the first alert of what we now know was a possible terrorist attack by an Ohio State student who rammed his car into a group of students, teachers and staff memebers and then began slashing them with a butcher knife.
Even as we try to hold our feelings in check so that we can do our jobs, we are at the same time affected like all of you by the horror of it. And, like many of you, some of us have children studying at Ohio State. Some here were texting or calling their children even as they were racing to nail down facts for our earliest reports on Dispatch.com.
In today's digital world, and especially in a college environment, where virtually everyone on campus has access via cell phones to social media that allows them to "report" from anywhere — even inside barricaded classrooms — it's sometimes difficult for everyone to find facts. Facts relayed by Twitter and other social media often are so fragmented that it's challenging for anyone to piece it all together quickly. Rumors run rampant and supposition takes over, sometimes leading to bad information being relayed to thousands of people.
