Nottingham Post
It’s the sort of news event that as a team and as an editor, you know you have to try and do the best you can to reflect the emotions your readers and residents might be feeling. The front page I have entered came two days after the horrific killings and was designed by Keith Williams. By this point we knew the names and had pictures of the trio who had died. We felt there was only one way of summarising what had happened and that was the headline we used - “Senseless”. We didn’t want to clutter the splash with lots of words, we wanted to have impact and to reflect how everyone had been feeling. Whatever had happened, this shouldn’t define the city and its people - it was down to one individual and they should be held to account. The days after the attack saw thousands of people coming together at vigils both at the university and in Old Market Square in the centre of Nottingham, and hundreds of flowers laid at the steps of the Council House (which you can see at the bottom of this front page). It was one of those times where you barely had to think how the splash should look, we had been living and breathing the story for 48 hours by that point and we knew what people were thinking and feeling by being out and about and speaking to them. We splashed on the Nottingham attacks three days in a row, which is unusual, but shows the scale of the story. Each one was a poster front and I like to think we set the tone and reflected what people were feeling in equal measure. Hopefully people picked up the paper and said “You’re right” when they saw the front page.