Student journalists find Covid scoops
As local news hollows out, college journalists are sometimes the only reporters left in town. Now, as American colleges have become a major source of coronavirus outbreaks, with at least 214,000 cases linked to campuses, they are on the front lines of a vital national story.
Often, they have to report on their own campus communities, breaking news about poorly organized administrative responses and irresponsible revelers.
“It’s up to us to report on it,” said Eli Hoff, 19, the managing editor of The Maneater, a student newspaper at the University of Missouri.
Before the semester even started, Hoff and his colleagues broke news about outbreaks in fraternities, which drew prank calls and harassment by Greek members.
“It’s weird being a student reporting on other students,” he said. “Not only am I a student reporting on them, but their actions have such a personal impact on me.”
The Michigan Daily, the student paper for the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, exposed a virus cluster tied to campus fraternities and sororities before the county imposed a stay-at-home order on undergraduates.Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
After a public records request, student journalists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, exposed internal faculty dissent over reopening plans and advance warning from epidemiologists long before school closed for in-person learning early in the semester.
“You could see a direct line from the decisions they made in May,” said Elizabeth Moore, 20, a senior editor at The Daily Tar Heel, the student paper. “That ended up causing some harm. A lot of people got sick, and people got displaced from dorms.”
And, as local journalists, they’re also telling the story of their community as people try to adjust to life during the virus.
“You’re not parachuting in,” Oyin Adedoyin, 21, the editor in chief of The Spokesman, the student newspaper at Morgan State University, Maryland’s largest historically Black university. She partnered with the Poynter Institute to report on health disparities in Baltimore’s Black community. “You literally live it.”
The New York Times