Until the events of yesterday I didn’t think it could be possible to be both sickened and proud at the same instant. But that was how I felt as I watch the events unfold in the mortifying case of the Tori Stafford abduction and alleged murder.

On the one hand, as a parent of two young children, and an uncle of four beautiful nieces whom I adore, I was visibly shaken and bordering on nauseous as I learned of the apparent fate of young Tori. This is the most horrific crime I can imagine and having been so close to the story for the past 42 days was at times more than I could handle. Our journalists are consummate professionals but I wasn’t prepared for the emotion of such a case. (The fact that I’m writing this post at 4:00 am speaks to that issue).

On the other hand I felt a tremendous sense of pride as I watched a newsroom kick into overdrive to find and deliver the facts of the story, and to do it’s best to provide whatever analysis could be proffered in a case such as this. Early in the day the team recognized – with no input from me – that these developments would play out largely online, given that a print edition would not come for another 18 hours or so.

So what resulted was a reporter sked (a journalism term for the assignments for the day) that focused heavily on a multi-platform approach:

• Reporters were dispatched with instruction to be involved with readers via Twitter
• Reporters were asked to file stories and photos from their BlackBerries
• Photogs were given direction to get photos and video uploaded from the field
• A live video stream was established in the newsroom with updates provided by Dan Brown, PJ Harston and other editors every 30 minutes to an audience that eventually reached over 8,000 live viewers
• A laptop with Final Cut Pro and a 3G Rocket Stick was prepared so video could be edited and uploaded from the field
• Our crack in-house team got busy aggregating the incoming photos into an expanding gallery
• Despite some legal uncertainty we did our best to offer a forum for often heated exchanges in a live chat room that accompanied our video stream
• We worked with our infrastructure team in Montreal to deal with the overwhelming amount of traffic our site received, nearly double our previous daily record
• We made our best attempt at live streaming the press conference, but internet connectivity just wasn’t there

In isolation none of these initiatives seems overly innovative; however what I watched play out was a newsroom that appreciated how digital and social media tools could help them tell stories. Over the next few days we’ll discuss what we could have done differently; we’ve already realized that we could have used Google Latitude on our reporters’ BlackBerries to mash up a map on our site with real time updates displaying where they were in London, Woodstock and Guelph. But for now that was as ‘multi-platform’ as I’ve seen from our newsroom.

@SteveatLFPress