The Crisis and Its Crises: An Analysis of the Public Information to the Columbine High School Shootings

On April 20, 1999, America was witness to the worst school shooting in a suburban, middle class neighborhood of its time at Columbine High School. Everyone assumed it would never happen in Littleton, Colorado, but it did and the public information officers of three Jefferson County agencies assumed the task of getting the information out to the media and the community as quickly as possible. While there is no public relations textbook on how to control a crisis like the Columbine shootings, there are basic guidelines agreed upon by public relations professionals that will lead to the successful control of the crisis. The public information response to the Columbine shootings and the crises that followed are evaluated based on these criteria and responses from the media involved in covering the shootings. Based on rhe evaluation, some general and important conclusions are made about the mistakes and successes of the public information response to the Columbine shootings.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Oregon

Year dc:date.issued

2000

Author dc:creator

• Skoog, Kari Elizabeth

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Bivins, Tom

• Columbine shootings
• Columbine high school
• America
• Crisis communications

Statement dc:rights

• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-US
• UO theses and dissertations are provided for research and educational purposes and may be under copyright by the author or the author’s heirs. Please contact scholars@uoregon.edu with any questions or comments. In your email, be sure to include the URL and title of the specific items that you are inquiring about.

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1794/32136

OAI record oai:identifier

https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/server/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Ascholarsbank.uoregon.edu%3A1794%2F32136