The Campus Newspaper a Year Later

By Joe Kendall

During the week of the April 16 shootings The Collegiate Times newsroom was a whirlwind of work and mourning as staff members juggled their responsibilities as both student and journalists. I remember one evening putting together a page dedicated to the victims and being struck by how surreal it all was. Here we were placing the faces of our fallen classmates and teachers on a page, and we were worried about getting the spacing and alignment just right.

As difficult as that first week was, many of the decisions we faced in the subsequent weeks and months were every bit as difficult.

After the shootings, one of the most challenging problems The Collegiate Times staff faced was determining how best to shift back to covering "normal" news. After spending five straight days filling the paper with margin-to-margin coverage of the shootings, normal news copy seemed trivial. The shootings were the single largest news event any of us had ever covered. How could we possibly go back to writing stories about guest speakers and parking problems? At the same time, however, it became clear that continuing to stuff the paper with April 16 stories was something akin to bludgeoning an aching community with facts, figures and grim stories that we knew too well already.

Coverage of April 16 certainly did not disappear when classes reconvened last fall, but it did not dominate the paper the way it had in the weeks following the shootings. The newsroom slowly slipped back into its pre-April 16 mold, and although things didn't exactly return to "normal," The Collegiate Times slowly settled back into being a standard college publication, with one exception.

On Valentine's Day at around 4:30 p.m., most of the section editors and many assorted staff had gathered in the office to discuss the daily budget and decide the day's editorial. Someone, I can't remember who, stepped into the office and asked if we knew what had happened in Illinois. The room sat in almost complete silence as we watched the breaking news coverage of the Northern Illinois University shootings. We had been there before, but to watch it unfold somewhere else was a heartrending experience. For about five minutes, I just starred at the television in utter disbelief. For the first time since the week of April 16, the line between being a journalist and a student was once again blurred, as we simultaneously wished to cover the shootings objectively and to sympathize with the mourning NIU nation.

Despite the traumatic events, 2007-08 should have been a banner year for the paper. Throughout the year, new plaques have been added to the office walls, awards bestowed upon The Collegiate Times for its coverage of the April 16 shootings. Still, it is hard to take a great deal of pride in these accolades, knowing full well that we all would have much rather never penned the stories we wrote that week. We would give back every grant, trophy and title for the chance to go back and have it all never happen.

By Amy L. Kovac |  April 16, 2008; 4:30 AM ET  | Category:  Joe Kendall
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