Skagit County was at the eye of a media storm last week in the wake of what has been described, in cliché shorthand, as a killing spree, deadly rampage, senseless tragedy and other compact catch-phrases.

None of the headline-ese captures the enormity or complexity of events that left six people dead, four wounded and an untold number of others in shock and grief.

Print and broadcast crews swept into the county on a legitimate quest to cover a story that is, by any definition, huge. For a few days, Alger became an international dateline, in a corner of the world that most people haven’t heard of and almost certainly would mispronounce (a hard “g” in Skagit seems to be the default mode).

Skagit County residents who have never been quoted anywhere found themselves facing cameras, microphones and notebooks while news helicopters rattled overhead.

The killings jolted the Skagit Valley Herald newsroom into full mobilization, beginning Tuesday afternoon, to provide the best continuous, up-to-date, complete and accurate coverage possible. Every other coverage priority was triaged to the back of the line. Everyone threw themselves into whatever needed to be done. That momentum hasn’t slowed and will continue as long as necessary.

We have made extensive use of our Web site, http://www.goskagit.com, to post stories, photos and videotapes, and to provide forums for community commentary. We updated stories frequently as we learned more information. The widespread interest in the story literally overwhelmed the Web site until we upgraded its capacity to handle the volume.

Many other media outlets called us for help or even to interview our staffers. Photo chief Scott Terrell’s remarkable pictures of the suspect being taken into custody showed up in publications around the world.

Our total concentration has been on providing the kind of comprehensive coverage the community deserves and expects from the home team.

At the same time, we inevitably found ourselves following all the other coverage as well, to see what other media outlets had and what they were airing, publishing or posting. Sometimes we saw information that we regarded skeptically. Other times we saw information posted that we were pretty sure was true, but had not confirmed to our satisfaction. We are fiercely competitive, especially when the competition is swarming all around us. But we’d rather be right than first, and we held to our standards for checking things out.

Covering something that is so personal to so many people is a bit of a high-wire act. The emotional pitch, the anxiety of incomplete information, the profound desolation in so many lives all require sensitivity in how we approach people and report things. Yet we must be persistent, especially in pursuing public information that should be universally available in a timely fashion.

Timely, in this case, meant as soon as possible — while dozens of law enforcement officials were concentrating on the crucial first few hours of investigation.

Stories like this are the most difficult and most rewarding for journalists. Our human reactions are like anyone else’s, especially when we take a break from intense concentration on coverage to consider the scope of such a tragedy. It’s a gut-punch, on a personal level and as a community trauma. It’s also an adrenaline-fueled challenge for any of us who believes in the fundamental mission of journalism to inform and enlighten.

Many of you have offered coverage suggestions. We appreciate and encourage those contacts, and we hope you will always feel comfortable passing them along to us.

• Don Nelson is editor of the Skagit Valley Herald. He can be reached at 360-416-2137 or by e-mail at .