The website of Virginia Tech’s independent student newspaper, The Collegiate Times, struggled with traffic as people sought information on a campus shooting Thursday. For a while, the home page redirected to a sparsely designed “breaking news” page with a Twitter widget at the top and photos below. Shortly after 2 p.m. ET, the Times tweeted and posted to its Facebook page, “We are working to get our website back up. Just check Twitter and Facebook for constant updates.” The New York Times’ Brian Stelter tweeted, “Paper’s feed gained 10,000+ followers in 30 min.”
Later, the home page redirected to a fast-loading, WordPress-powered gallery of photos from the incident.
Mashable is updating a Storify with news and photos, including The Collegiate Times’ first tweets on the shooting.
The New York Times’ Twitter list for the shooting mostly follows journalists, but it includes two students: Michael Morrison, who’s studying electrical engineering, and senior Tauhid Chappell, who is majoring in electronic/print journalism, according to his Twitter bio. The Collegiate Times’ editor-in-chief, associate news editor, and a sports editor are also tweeting.
The Collegiate Times was apparently the first news outlet to break news of the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007. That day, the news site changed to a similar publishing approach as it covered that school shooting:
Virginia Tech’s student newspaper, The Collegiate Times, took this approach — posting continuously updated, time-stamped reports — largely out of necessity.
Christopher Ritter, CT‘s online director, said the paper’s site crashed on the day of the shootings around 10:30 a.m.
So the site moved to what Ritter called an “emergency information page” — a blue background with text, hosted by its parent company, College Media. With that format to work with, the best thing to do was just to get out the basics, Ritter said.
“We thought getting the information out was more valuable than an analysis,” he said. “After we got the information out, then our reporters would do a story on it.”
That day, the CT updated about every 10 to 15 minutes. The paper fact-checked with university relations or Virginia Tech police, and then posted. Making sure the paper put up accurate information was a major concern, Ritter said.
Student journalists struggled to report on what happened in 2007:
Reporter Saira Haider, who lost a good friend in the massacre, says: “I don’t want to be biased — I just want to report. It is kind of hard to separate the two — the emotional side and the news side.”
In fact, one student journalist covered the massacre on his first day on the job.
The day that student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University was Bowman’s first day as a managing editor of the Collegiate Times. As a student affected by the tragedy, he was called by networks from FOX News to Al Jazeera. He later was approached on campus by Geraldo Rivera, who also asked him a few questions.
NPR reported then on how the newspaper responded to the shooting. ”Collegiate Times editor-in-chief Amie Steele has gotten little or no sleep in the past 24 hours, but she’s still on fire,” said Larry Abramson. “The stars of the journalism firmament have alighted here. But this petite, 21-year-old junior is the busiest and the most popular. Her pink cell phone seldom leaves her ear.” After graduating, Steele worked as a journalist for almost two years.
Thursday, news orgs used social media to find witnesses and images. The New York Post, The Star-Ledger and CNN posted messages on the Collegiate Times’ Flickr page asking for permission to use its photos.
Julie Moos, Adam Hochberg and Mallary Tenore contributed reporting to this post.
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