When word was received about shootings at the Connecticut Lottery headquarters in Newington, local television news staffs scurried to meet the immediate demand for information.

The body of one of the shooting victims is removed by personnel from the medical examiner's office Friday afternoon.

Early morning anchors were dispatched to the field, evening anchors were on the air by mid-morning and entire reporting and production staffs were quickly assembled to cover the breaking story.

Janet Peckinpaugh, the morning anchor at WVIT-TV, Channel 30, was the first to report from the scene, broadcasting less than a half hour after the shootings, which were reported to police at 8:46 a.m.

Other local stations were on the air with cut-ins and updates Friday morning, increasing the time allotted to the coverage as the severity of the matter became more apparent.

For breaking coverage during the day, TV owned the field, even providing some government officials with their first notification of the shootings. Local radio offered little by comparison.

Stations pride themselves on their breaking coverage, but there is little preparation for events such as the one that occurred Friday.

"It's live TV. You don't know what's going to happen," said Cindy Willett, assistant news director at WTNH-TV, Channel 8. "Everybody is scrambling to get information and deal with it in a sensitive way."

For example, Channel 8 in New Haven, which is farther from Newington than its Hartford-area competitors, had one of its satellite trucks in Boston Friday for a hearing related to au pair Louise Woodward, Willett said. Channel 8 didn't have a truck in the immediate vicinity, and reporters at the scene had to wait for one to arrive to deliver live satellite reports.

Shortly before 12:30 p.m., channels 30, 8, WFSB-TV, Channel 3, and radio station WTIC-AM (1080) provided live coverage of a press conference by Gov. John G. Rowland. WTIC-TV, Channel 61, showed "Big Busted Strippers," an episode of "The Jerry Springer Show," before cutting in for a 10-minute report shortly after 1 p.m.

As local stations provided live coverage, they also had to plan more comprehensive reports for evening newscasts. The shootings were featured prominently on all three network newscasts, with ABC sending a reporter to Newington to provide a field report.

News directors said they had difficult decisions to make regarding how and when to report deaths, including those of two high-profile victims, lottery President Otho Brown and former New Britain Mayor Linda A. Blogoslawski Mlynarczyk. Deborah Johnson, Channel 3's assistant news director, said it was more important to confirm the deaths and make sure families had been notified than to be first with that information.

Channel 30 reporter Bob Wilson got to Brown's house before state police did, but he remained away from the house, News Director Liz Grey said. Channel 30 showed footage of state police arriving to inform Brown's wife of his death, but the station decided not to broadcast a tape it took of his school-age children arriving at home, she said.

Grey said the station did not report Brown's death until it knew that his wife was being notified.

Channel 61 was the first to report Brown's death, while Channel 30 was first to report Mlynarczyk death.

Although stations provided much useful information, there also were some minor factual errors and a few other glitches. The danger of live television, especially in cases where reporters and anchors have a lot of time and little new information, is that correspondents make mistakes, offer uninformed speculation or discuss their own feelings about the sad event.