Terry Wimmer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a first-year professor of practice in the department of journalism at the University of Arizona.

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Virginia Tech was my backyard. My hometown newspaper, whose circulation straddles the border in southern West Virginia and southwestern Virginia, splits its loyalties between Tech and West Virginia University. The latter became my alma mater.

I started following the events that forever changed Blacksburg after the first assassinations on April 16. I did as most Americans do when the dark side comes visiting. I turned on the television. I must admit I am not a huge fan of what pretends to be news on television.

Simultaneously, I began scrolling through various online publications. First, MSNBC, then CNN, the Washington Post and the Roanoke Times. I am a breaking-news junkie, an addiction well served by more than two decades lived as a reporter and editor. As a journalism professor today, I still crave breaking news. It's exciting, unpredictable and challenging to do well.

When I entered graduate school about 10 years ago, I began studying the progression of online news. This new medium shines with breaking news, and the tragedy of Virginia Tech was no exception.

What was different with the coverage of Virginia Tech was the storytelling strategy of the online producers. They merged almost seamlessly the functions of radio and television into online packaging. In addition to journalistic narrative, stories from Blacksburg included interactive graphics, photographic slide shows, and audio and video clips.

How those clips were gathered is a different story, and some of the methods for that collection brought forth some concern. Overzealousness in a competitive newsgathering environment is nothing new. I was rather adept as a reporter and editor at persuading sources to deal with no one else but me. I never paid or made unethical promises. I never resorted to chicanery. I am not sure that happened here.

Complaints from some people in the Blacksburg region focused on unnamed news organizations offering students money to submit photos and information, particularly about the crazed gunman. However, what I saw primarily from the online world was a strategy of encouraging people to share information.

This is new. In pre-Internet days, editors never had such a large soapbox to stand upon and seek information from readers and viewers for readers and viewers.

Print media had blemished moments. The Chicago Sun-Times ran with an unconfirmed story stating that the shooter was of Chinese ancestry, when he was of Korean descent. The paper's editors defended their decision with the attitude that it was the best information they had under the pressure of deadline.

Hogwash. My first city editor harangued me with this axiom: "Get it first, but get it right first."

My major complaints about the shooting coverage are ones I have voiced frequently, and they fall squarely upon broadcast television. I find the medium to be largely merciless, guileless, unprincipled and inane.

Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow set some early standards for broadcast reporting. Integrity was an absolute. Today, I sense those standards have been set aside like a bad sitcom.

Television news today is a 24-hour hungry beast. It's the carnivorous plant from the film "Little Shop of Horrors" screeching "Feed me, Seymour!" The television response to food is a simple diet of conflict. This approach that television brings to information is far too simplistic to provide any nourishing sustenance.

Transcribe a typical news story on the nightly news and fewer than five paragraphs of printed copy will appear. That leaves little room for layers of context necessary to comprehend complex stories. The tragedy at Virginia Tech magnified that shallowness.

When the story began unfolding, television did what it does best: Here's what's happening at this moment now. In feeding the 24-7 beast, however, television coverage becomes repetitious quickly. How many times can the image of a bloody student be seen before it frays the viewers' sensibilities? Do we need a sad-looking Katie Couric imploring a young man to tell her how he felt because his friend was dead?

After the initial televised frenzy that accompanies its breaking-news coverage, broadcast news slips to an even lower level. Announcers begin speculating. Someone must have done something wrong. Television seeks blame, and not long into the tragedy at Virginia Tech the stories were rife with veiled accusation.

The reproaches were plentiful. The university failed to protect students after the first shooting. The university failed because it did not close the campus immediately after the first murders. The university police chief failed to sound the alarm. The university president failed to show strong leadership.

While this "passion play" continued on air, newspapers and online media — while not ignoring these questions — certainly did not make such fodder a dominant source of the coverage. Context of the pain came in the human stories about the victims and remembrances written by fellow students, colleagues, families and friends.

Then came the assassin's homemade video, hastily filmed and shipped to NBC in New York before the second deadly phase started. This exacted another feeding frenzy by television. How could the university not have known? How could the university not have taken action to get this student help? After gnawing those questions, television reporters (and print, too) turned their attention toward NBC. Why did the network air the video? The answer to that is simple. It put into context the ravings and motivations of a deeply disturbed 23-year-old man.

This constant play of the blame game makes for good conflict television but does little to delve into the complexities of the story. This is the broadcast media's greatest failing.

I have reached the conclusion that broadcast media just don't know better. No in-depth models — my apologies to National Public Radio, which is an extremely credible exception — educate broadcasters how to move beyond conflict-based reporting to that of context-based reporting.

Sadly, the issue is time and ratings. Television news is too closely aligned with entertainment, and for that reason I feel broadcast reporting will always remain shallow. Until broadcast executives develop the fortitude to break away from the conflict model, television reporting will be more about the marketability of a pretty face than the content of its product. Viewers must learn that for sustenance they must go elsewhere.

Educating broadcast journalists better will help. Teaching young people how to evaluate the claims that sources make, and how to rank the evidence that supports those claims might bring greater credibility to television news. It won't be as sexy as conflict, so how do you sell it to a television executive who needs high ratings to keep a job and keep investors fat and sassy?

I am not so naïve to believe that one can make that happen on the argument of responsibility alone. Until viewers demand better quality, television will continue to be the pit bull chewing on one leg until another walks past.

And the next time such a horrendous event occurs, I will turn first to print and online media. The television will be playing, I'm certain, giving me the immediate image, but failing miserably again to feed my soul with understanding.