« 2013 »
On April 15, 2013, when bulletins flashed into the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newsroom that bombs had exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, acting city editor Sonny Albarado quickly assigned reporters to find and talk to Arkansans at the storied footrace in Massachusetts. There was no handy master list with racers’ names and cell numbers, but the staff figured out how to filter names from entry rosters by state on the marathon’s website. Then a newsroom-wide effort sprang up, with writers and editors using social media and community contacts to check the status of 37 runners.
Soon they were on the phone with stunned Arkansans in Boston, including Cortney Allison, who had heard and felt the concussion of the two bombs but had no idea what was happening until she texted friends back home in Little Rock.
The paper’s coverage began that morning, posted at Arkansas Online by online news editor Katie Doherty.
This April 16 Page 1 conveyed the printed fruits of newsgathering in the digital era, with information compiled from The Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald, Bloomberg News, The New York Times and The Washington Post by daytime wire editor Jeremy Doherty and nighttime wire editor Amanda Roberts, as well as the local report by Claudia Lauer and Cathy Frye. Coverage continued inside the paper, including the outcome of the race and Arkansans’ finish times, which the Democrat-Gazette traditionally reports.
Three spectators died when the pressure-cooker bombs set by two terrorists exploded. Some among the 260 injured people lost limbs. Two other people would die as the terrorists tried to escape during a three-day manhunt. But all the Arkansans returned home unscathed, physically.
At dawn two days later, Boston racer Jacob Wells sat in the dark in his office at JPMS Cox PLLC in west Little Rock, speaking by phone to the Democrat-Gazette about a charity 5K he was conducting as well as a new marathon he and friends would debut that December. Wells described hearing the explosions five blocks away and his mixed feelings about his instinct to flee. His trip home with Kim Howard of Mineral Springs and James Bresette of Clinton was a “weird ordeal,” he said, worsened by a systemwide shutdown of American Airlines. The strangest part, he said, was boarding the plane to leave Boston and being applauded by strangers as though they were heroes, which shocked and appalled him.
The bombing changed how race promoters conduct large events, including the Little Rock Marathon, which employs professional levels of security that in the past were reserved for presidential visits. It did not dissuade Arkansans from running marathons. Wells died in 2014 of an undetected heart condition that felled him at the Midsouth Marathon in Wynne. The race that he started in 2013 is now the Jacob Wells 3 Bridges Marathon, a memorial, and its seventh running in Little Rock is Dec. 28.
— Celia Storey
You can download a PDF by clicking the image, or by clicking here.
