When news of the shootings broke, Virginia Tech's student-run media leapt into action, writes Molly Hennessy-Fiskein Blacksburg
The news marathon began shortly after 7am on Monday, as unofficial reports of the first Virginia Tech shootings began trickling in through e-mails, text messages and mobile phone calls.
During that day and the next student reporters fanned out to cover the events overwhelming the campus - interviewing students, teachers, school administrators, police officers and hospital workers.
Collegiate Times editor-in-chief Amie Steele became a staple on CNN, explaining details of the shooting. Reporters for the student-run newspaper churned out stories even though phones failed, police evacuated them from their offices and their website crashed as it was discovered by readers the world over.
"We knew there was going to be some kind of reliance on us, and we couldn't let people down," said former sports editor Joe Kendall (21), a political science student from Ashburn, Virginia, who had taken over just that morning as the paper's managing editor.
By 6am on Tuesday when the paper went to bed, about a dozen bleary-eyed staffers had a string of online scoops and their most anticipated print edition ever - a 16-page edition with a press run of 1,000 more than its usual 14,000. The banner headline read: "Heartache."
While major news outlets scrambled to learn about the Virginia Tech gunman, the wounded and the dead, they found themselves scooped by Virginia Tech's student-run media: the Collegiate Times newspaper and website, www.collegemedia.com; the web-only news site, www.planetblacksburg.com; and radio station WUVT-FM.
The Collegiate Times was founded 104 years ago as a sports newspaper, and although its reach expanded during the 1950s, it is still heavily sports-oriented. Operated independently of the university as a non-profit paper, it is published from Tuesday to Friday and distributed free across the campus.
Student staff, who are paid, started the paper's website about eight years ago; it typically drew about 2,000 to 3,000 visitors a day. By Tuesday the site had about 168 visitors a minute, with about 15 staff members rushing to update the site every 15 minutes.
The paper's main campus rival is www.planetblacksburg.com, which was founded in a computer lab a few years ago by a former Collegiate Times reporter. On Monday staff hurried to the scenes of the shootings, gathered eyewitness accounts and then mined Facebook pages for additional contacts, eventually creating an online wall for mourners to post comments.
"We felt like that was a service where people could go online in their dorm rooms and look at it. They can get the stuff from the press conferences anywhere," said editor Courtney Thomas (22), of Midlothian, Virginia, whose friend was shot in the leg at Norris Hall. Thomas was interviewed by the BBC and Newsweek on Tuesday. - ( LA Times/Washington Post service)