It is just before 3 p.m., a perfect spring day, reminiscent of a perfect fall day in 2001.

In the newsroom of the South Jersey Times, reporters are routinely preparing stories for Tuesday's edition.

As news days go, there seems nothing unusual about this one.

Until all hell breaks loose in Boston.

Amid the computer keyboarding and occasionally irreverent chatter, a reporter calmly alerts fellow staffers, “Two explosions near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.”

Could it be terrorists? Good Lord, not again.

It gets the attention of the staff, but it will take minutes that seem like hours to begin sorting it out and even then it will not make any sense. It never does, of course.

I am an old codger now, out of the loop of covering breaking news, but intrigued by the old school smarts and hustle displayed by a staff of predominately 20-somethings.

An emergency responder and volunteers, including Carlos Arredondo in the cowboy hat, push Jeff Bauman in a wheelchair after he was injured in an explosion near the finish line of the Boston Marathon Monday, in Boston. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

When you see them react to a story of this magnitude it reminds you they didn’t study journalism because they thought riches would be their ultimate reward one day.

Three newsroom monitors are on and the staff collectively goes online while local connections to the race are explored. Hardly an online whiz, it did occur to me how much more difficult tracking down a local angle would be today without the resources of social media.

Jason Laday, a bulldog whose forte is general assignment reporting — he sits three feet behind me and consistently asks the right questions — is told by editor Matt Gray to drop what he's doing and begin exploring local Boston leads.

Within minutes, Laday has talked to former Gateway football coach John Ricketts, whose close friend, Steve Quick, heard the explosions less than 10 minutes after completing the marathon. Quick has not been physically scarred, and will convey that in a series of text messages to Jason throughout the early evening.

Laday will share a Page One byline with the sports department's Rob Edwards, who supplies another strong South Jersey angle.

Social media makes the tedious task of producing copy in a hurry a realistic avenue. We relied exclusively on telephones when I came up through the ranks; my “computer” was a vintage Smith-Corona.

Just another day in the newsroom? Of course not.

It enters the mind: 26,000 runners compete in running’s most prestigious marathon, and many thousands more, friends and family, are there to cheer them on. Most of Boston is in the streets, and Lord knows how many surround the finish line to await loved ones who made it the entire 26.2 miles. Training for any marathon, traditionalists will tell you, is a labor of love unlike any other. To pick on that venue to enact such a horrific act is senseless beyond reason.

Within a few minutes, through repeated visuals, the catastrophic scene unfolds. Through the night, we watch the same explosions dozens of times and strain to see something we didn’t see before.

It is five days later, but the sting hasn’t subsided. Whether 3,000 deaths or three, an attack on this country, on American soil, is the ultimate insult.

And as a journalist, it ranks as not just another day at the office.

Contact columnist Bob Shryock at 856-845-3300 or bshryock@southjerseymedia.com.