“We’re there to cover what’s happening”: How student journalists are covering campus protests
In a normal year, the last Thursday of April might have been a quiet day for Northeastern, and for junior Eli Curwin. It was the penultimate day of undergraduate student exams for spring classes, and, like many students, Curwin was set to return home the next day. Just a week before, he had handed off the reins and responsibility of his role as editor-in-chief of the independent student newspaper, The Huntington News.
But this has not been a normal year for students on college campuses. Late Wednesday night, Huntington News staff heard that students were planning to set up an encampment like the ones being erected on campuses across the country calling for universities to, among other demands, divest from Israel amid the ongoing war in Gaza. The Northeastern encampment, like others, quickly captured national attention — especially early Saturday morning, when police arrested about 100 protestors (including 29 Northeastern students and six faculty and staff) and dismantled it. So the encampment’s setup Thursday morning kicked off a cycle of multi-day, round-the-clock reporting for Curwin and The Huntington News team.
“It was very intense, and you kind of just were full of adrenaline until you had to step away,” he said. Yet as a reporting experience, “it was really cool, because it was like, this is what we’ve been learning about; this is what we’ve been practicing for.”
For years, student journalism has gained increasing recognition as a critical source of local news, especially as local news outlets nationwide shutter at an alarming, and accelerating, pace. But in the past few weeks, Curwin is one of the thousands of student journalists across the country who have gone above and beyond — in many cases during finals and outside of their normal production schedules, at a time of the year usually reserved for celebration and leadership transitions — to cover the historic protests that have exploded on college campuses across the country, sparked by the first encampment at Columbia. These journalists have reported the story for national publications, and shot unforgettable photographs documenting the protests and violent arrests. The Pulitzer Prize Board recognized student journalists across the country, and specifically at Columbia (where the prizes are housed) for “covering protests and unrest in the face of great personal and academic risk.”
I talked with editors from four independent student newspapers — The Huntington News, The Daily Texan at UT Austin, the Daily Trojan at the University of Southern California, and The GW Hatchet at George Washington University — about how they’ve approached this highly sensitive, nonstop reporting for their campus communities under immense pressure and a national spotlight.
Doing the work: From live blogs, to social media, to print, to pulling out the archives
Reporting on protests dating back to October on George Washington University’s campus has “been a big learning curve,” recent Hatchet editor-in-chief Zach Blackburn told me. But protest reporting has also unexpectedly combined several core Hatchet beats, especially once Congress got involved, raising issues related to D.C. statehood and longstanding tensions between local police and the campus community.
The Hatchet’s work documenting the encampment is “really a culmination of what we’ve been trying to report on the last few years,” Blackburn said.
Blackburn had passed the editor-in-chief mantle to Grace Chinowsky on April 29, when the Hatchet published its final print edition of the semester. But he and managing editor Nick Pasion decided with Chinowsky that they’d stay on in a temporary “staff editor” role to “help edit and make editorial decisions as this continues to unfold.”
The final Sunday of print, and Blackburn’s last official night of production as EIC, took place on day 4 of GW’s encampment (the Hatchet prints weekly). As the final week of the semester, this should have been a “ghost week” for the Hatchet. Instead, Blackburn and his outgoing leadership team stayed up until 8 a.m. and essentially scrapped their planned print paper after protestors knocked down barricades surrounding the encampment and stood off with police.
That was “a make it or break it moment for us,” Blackburn said. “We got the papers out the next day with photos of things that had happened eight hours prior.”
The Daily Texan, at UT Austin, and USC’s Daily Trojan can both relate to a high-stakes final night of production. (Print aside, the Trojan and the Texan are two of seven campus publications nationwide that collaborated on a photo essay capturing and weaving together scenes of protests on their campuses.)
“Our last night of print is usually a party, because at the end of the day, we are students,” Daily Texan associate managing editor and sophomore Ireland Blouin told me. The team would typically have news prepublished so they could celebrate the semester’s work and give out awards. This year, the newsroom set that aside to produce coverage of the first day of protests.
USC’s encampment was established the same day, which was also the Daily Trojan’s final night of print production for the semester. Editor-in-chief Anjali Patel — a graduating senior — said the publication pulled together three day-of stories focused on different angles of the encampment, and sent the paper to print around 3 a.m.
The trial-by-fire experience of reporting on student encampments and protests has strengthened students journalists’ conviction that student media is an essential form of local news.
“It’s confirmed, to me, the value of being in the community that you report on,” Blackburn said. “I think our coverage has been as good or better [than that of] many of the professional newspapers” that have come to campus.
“In terms of professional opportunity, I think that these are some of the best clips I’ll ever have, in any newsroom,” Curwin said.
“We had several of the reporters who spent two days at the encampment say they learned more covering this than in two years of classes,” Cutler added.
“A bunch of news outlets have been on campus when there are things happening, and leave right after,” Curwin reflected. Student journalists stick around — and unlike national media, they are part of the same community as the people protesting, the people who disagree with the protests, and everyone in between, which makes reporting on everyone with sensitivity and empathy especially important. “A student could get arrested, we could report about it, and then I could see them in class like the next day,” Curwin said. “These are students, and these are people that are just like us.”
“I hope people recognize that we are here to stay on the campus,” Cutler said. “We don’t come in when there’s something crazy happening and then leave when it’s over. This is just what we do all the time. And I really hope that makes people trust us more as a newspaper.”
- The publication has published around a dozen encampment-related reported stories, which have a combined total of close to 33,000 views as of this week, Cutler added.