There is a serious and perhaps defining debate going on in newsrooms this week. "How do we responsibly cover the aftereffects of the Littleton, Colorado school shootings?"

Across America, school systems are dismissing classes and sending kids home early while bomb squads and bomb-sniffing dogs search lockers and school classrooms.

In Conway, Ark., police found a bomb in a school locker. The boy who made the bomb said it was a school project. School systems in Hopkinsville and Bowling Green, Ky., and Toledo, Ohio, closed Thursday. In Cadillac and Flint, Mich., and in, Spearfish, S.D., schools closed early while search teams scoured schools and found nothing.

From California to Texas to Norfolk, Va., police and school officials are being forced to take seriously the threats of adolescent terrorists. Officials in San Francisco and Springfield, Mo., locked children in schools after someone spray painted threats on school walls.

Newsrooms are confronted with their own long-standing policies against covering bomb threats. Often these well-intentioned policies were laid down because of concerns that reporting such threats would breed others. The question we face this week is do we stick by the "don't report" rule even as suspects are arrested and in some cases schools are closed?

After talking with a number of news directors and my colleagues in The Poynter Institute ethics department I offer the following guidelines for covering these bomb threat stories:

1. Ask yourself these qustions: What is my journalistic duty in reporting this story? What do our viewers need to know? What is the threat to life or property? What are the consequences of the event itself? How significant is the evacuation and the interruption to normal life in your community? What is the impact this event has on the ability of law enforcement or emergency crews to respond to other calls? What else is this story about? What is the story behind the story? (In some cases, racial slurs and threats have been sprayed on school walls.)

2. What are the possible consequences of my actions and decisions? Reporting a false threat could lead to copycat threats, or reporting arrests might discourage such threats by showing the consequences for threatening others.

Other consequences might include raising the public's level of insecurity even when it is not warranted. Repeated broadcasting of bomb hoaxes can have the effect of "crying wolf," and the public becomes less responsive when actual danger arises. But the reporting on the volume and range of threats could inform viewers and listeners about the pressures police and schools officials are under. It could be important for the public to understand why officials react as they do.

3. How could you justify your decisions about where and how you play stories about bomb threats in your newscasts? How do you explain your decisions to your staff and to your viewers? How much discussion have you had in your newsroom about your coverage? What experts or persons outside your newsroom could you contact to get their perspectives about how you should treat this story?

4. Be careful about the tone of your coverage. Avoid words like "chaos," "terror," and "mayhem." They are subjective words. Play it straight. Tone down your teases and leads and graphics. The tone of what you report should not contradict the careful reporting of facts you include in your stories. Think carefully before "going live" in covering these stories. You have less editorial control in live situations. The emphasis on live coverage may warp the attention these stories deserve. A lead story carries different weight than a story that is deeper in the newscast. How can you justify the positioning of your coverage?

5. Cover the process more than the events. What thought are you giving to the bigger issues involved in this story? How easy is it for schools, the phone company, or cops to track down a threatening caller? How seriously are violators treated? Have you ever followed one of these cases through the legal system to find out what happens? How many bomb threats did police handle last year? How many resulted in prosecution? How many of those prosecuted went to jail or were actually punished? What was the extent of the punishment? Do your schools have caller ID systems in place? Do they or should they record incoming phone calls?

6. Minimize harm. We sometimes cause harm in the process of performing our journalistic duty, but it should be only the harm we can justify. Special care should be taken when covering juveniles. You should carefully consider whether placing a prank phone call warrants naming a juvenile. In one instance in upstate New York this week, a TV station could not talk with the juvenile suspected of placing the prank phone call, so the station interviewed the suspect's teen-age brother. What harm do we cause by sending a news photographer to a school that has been threatened by a caller?

Thoughtful stations hold these conversations about coverage before they are faced with a crisis. Front-end decision-making that includes many voices in the conversation result in fuller and more thoughtful coverage.