I must say, I was incredibly impressed by the efforts of the staff of Virginia Tech’s student newspaper, the Collegiate Times. The day of the shooting, instead of repeating everything we got from wire services for thebatt.com, I chose to write brief updates and then link to CT’s website. These journalists, these students, did a simply amazing job of reporting from the field. They pulled out their laptops, audio recorders, digital cameras, etc. and showed what it means to be a mojo (mobile journalist). Corporate media could learn something from the CT staff.
It must be tempting, during of a situation like that, to pull back from the action, to sit back and let the tragedy and the drama sink in. Instead, the CT staff chose to act. Through all the commotion, their website’s server crashed, but luckily College Publisher bailed them out, and they kept going. In watching the news that day, I found that the CT staff often had the news faster and more accurately than the major news services, and they probably had the best advantage of putting student reaction into the stories.
Bryan Murley over at Innovation in College Media just posted his experience with the Collegiate Times. If you don’t have time to read it, basically, he was at Va.Tech a week before the shootings doing training seminars about new media and mobile, online journalism. Bryan, and I certainly agree, believes the CT deserves a Pulitzer.
I wasn’t here in 1999, but I have to imagine that The Battalion’s staff of that year would have done the same with the Bonfire collapse had it happened this year. From what I remember, most Batt staffers were either at the site or in the newsroom that entire week, with several of the editors bringing sleeping bags to the newsroom so they could work in shifts. I don’t want anything tragic like that happen at A&M again, but I would hope this Batt staff would be able to pull of something like the Collegiate Times did.
