There has been a noticeable pullback in the amount of press attention being given to gunmen, most recently after Thursday's massacre at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. A roiling debate is happening in newsrooms about how often to say the names and show the faces of mass shooters — or whether to do so at all.
As she watched the Oregon shooting coverage in Denver on Friday morning, Sandy Phillips noticed that she hadn't seen any photos of the shooter.
She reached for her cell phone and texted Caren Teves in Phoenix: "#NoNotoriety is making a difference."
Teves had noticed the same thing. "I'm feeling slightly victorious this morning," she said in a phone call.
The two women are linked by loss. Phillips' daughter Jessica and Teves' son Alex were both killed in the attack at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater in 2012.
The Phillips and Teves families were confronted by the killer's face and photos many times in the days, weeks and months that ensued.
In January, Caren and her husband Tom Teves started
No Notoriety to challenge news media norms. Phillips and her husband Lonnie joined them.
The group praised journalists like CNN's Anderson Cooper and Denver anchorman Kyle Clark who had already taken a position against naming mass shooters. And they urged other journalists to do the same. "Limit the name and likeness of the individual,"
their web site recommends. "Refuse to broadcast/publish photos and/or self-serving statements made by the individual."
The No Notoriety challenge also pressed journalists to "recognize that the prospect of infamy could serve as a motivating factor for other individuals to kill others and could inspire copycat crimes. Keep this responsibility in mind when reporting."