CHARTING OUR COMMUNITY'S PAIN
Charting our community's pain
Reporting an atrocity on the scale of the Omagh bomb is a difficult and often deeply disturbing job. Even seasoned journalists who had charted the ebbs and flows of conflict over three decades were stunned by the carnage visited on a quiet market town on a summer day.
For those whose job was to record the Omagh bomb story for the community itself in the pages of that week's Ulster Herald, the normal tasks were particularly difficult, as they were for other local people who had to get on with the job. The numbing impact of the atrocity had spread across the entire community as people tried to get their minds around the scale and consequences of what had happened in their midst.
Yet emergency services, medical personnel, clergy and others had to do their job. Local journalists knew their readers would look to the familiar pages of the Ulster Herald to fully comprehend what had taken place and help them back to normality.
Even as they struggled to comprehend for themselves the sheer scale of the outrage, the editorial team had a duty to inform and comfort readers with a local perspective on a story that was still reverberating around the world.
With family and social links to many of those most traumatically affected, the Ulster Herald staff members had to muster all their reserves of professionalism to tell the story. Some even set aside their own personal trauma and concerns to do so.
Here they recall what it was like.
Reporting an atrocity on the scale of the Omagh bomb is a difficult and often deeply disturbing job. Even seasoned journalists who had charted the ebbs and flows of conflict over three decades were stunned by the carnage visited on a quiet market town on a summer day.
For those whose job was to record the Omagh bomb story for the community itself in the pages of that week's Ulster Herald, the normal tasks were particularly difficult, as they were for other local people who had to get on with the job. The numbing impact of the atrocity had spread across the entire community as people tried to get their minds around the scale and consequences of what had happened in their midst.
Yet emergency services, medical personnel, clergy and others had to do their job. Local journalists knew their readers would look to the familiar pages of the Ulster Herald to fully comprehend what had taken place and help them back to normality.
Even as they struggled to comprehend for themselves the sheer scale of the outrage, the editorial team had a duty to inform and comfort readers with a local perspective on a story that was still reverberating around the world.
With family and social links to many of those most traumatically affected, the Ulster Herald staff members had to muster all their reserves of professionalism to tell the story. Some even set aside their own personal trauma and concerns to do so.
Here they recall what it was like.
Further Information
Publisher: ULSTER HERALD
Ref: UH10An/36
Published Date: 14-Aug-08
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