S T A T E M E N T

8— Wednesday, March 15, 2023
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

The first time I ever had to carry 
grief that did not belong to me 
was the day I began to report on 
survivors of former University of 
Michigan Athletics doctor Robert 
Anderson. Over a span of 37 years, 
more than 950 victims reported 
thousands of incidents of sexual 
abuse and misconduct at the hands 
of Anderson, remaining as likely 
the most sexual abuse allegations 
against a single person in United 
States history. 
There is an untold grief in 
reporting this kind of trauma, in 
reporting the tragedies that affect 
our schools and communities — the 
people we love and know — and what 
they ultimately leave behind. In time, 
even grief that does not belong to us 
has a way of becoming our own. 
College journalists are especially 
vulnerable to the weight of reporting. 
The world sees them as too young 
to understand the heaviness of 
grief or to report on the shootings 
that 
fracture 
their 
campuses, 
the homicides that destroy their 
student bodies, the bomb threats 
and sexual abuse scandals that 
define the way they reckon with 

themselves. But oftentimes, long 
after national news outlets have left, 
when press conferences become 
a rarity and towns begin to quiet 
again, 
student 
journalists 
and 
student-run 
newspapers 
become 
the last to remain, to understand, to 
painstakingly cover all that happens 
in between. And at a cost few are 
ever willing to make. What becomes 
of college journalists in the face of 
collective grief? What does it mean to 
grieve, to process, to become angry, 
to be in pain, to know joy and love 
and healing as a journalist first, and 
as a student last? 
I’ve 
spent 
the 
past 
month 
researching 
college 
newspapers 
across the country, and more 
importantly, college newspapers that 
found themselves at the forefront of 
national tragedies — those that have 
had to contend with what it meant 
to no longer feel safe in your own 
libraries, classrooms, newsrooms 
and homes. Over the past few 
weeks, I spoke to Ava MacBlane, 
Editor in Chief of The Cavalier 
Daily at the University of Virginia; 
Haadiya Tariq, Editor in Chief of The 
Argonaut at The University of Idaho; 
and Jasper Smith, Editor in Chief of 
The Hilltop at Howard University. 
These are their stories. This is the 
weight they carry.

The Cavalier Daily, The University 
of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va. 
The Cavalier Daily — The CD or 
The Cav, for short — is the University 
of 
Virginia’s 
independently-run 
student newspaper. It employs 
approximately 400 staffers and 
is led by Editor in Chief Ava 
MacBlane. The Cavalier Daily’s 
offices are located in the basement 
of Newcomb Hall, a student center 
that also houses the campus’s main 
dining hall. Staff sometimes take 
long naps on a couch chock-full of 
Squishmallows. A life-size cut-out 
of Will Ferrell sits in an odd corner, 
and there are lopsided frames of old 
newspapers from decades ago hung 
on the walls. Meetings are held in an 
area fondly dubbed “The Office” and 
on Fridays, when the production 
schedule is pleasantly light, the 
Copy staffers spend hours at one 
of the few empty tables gossiping 
about the day’s latest happenings. 
The newsroom here is well-loved. 
It’s the kind of place people visit just 
because they can.
On Sunday, Nov. 13, 2022, 
University of Virginia students 
and football team members Devin 
Chandler, D’Sean Perry and Lavel 
Davis Jr. died after a gunman 
opened fire on a bus returning from 
a University of Virginia class trip 

to Washington, D.C. Two other 
students were wounded. A shelter-
in-place warning issued a campus-
wide “Run, Hide, Fight” alert that 
lasted well into the next morning. 
Students spent the whole night 
cramped into libraries and a variety 
of campus and academic buildings, 
trapped in an uncomfortable state 
of limbo and a terribly unsettling 
cloud of fear, in search of a reason 
why. 
MacBlane, 
who 
was 
the 
Managing Editor of The Cavalier 
Daily at the time, spent the entirety 
of the next 72 hours following the 
shooting, on the ground reporting. 
She missed meals and sleep, and 
much of her grief was experienced 
as a journalist first. Reporting on 
her community became one of the 
only ways she carried her grief, 
or rather, the only way her job as a 
student journalist allowed her to. 
“You want to feel connected to 
people and to your community, 
but you can’t because you’re still 
the media,” MacBlane told me. 
There is a heaviness that comes 
with reporting on fellow peers who 
left the world so violently, a half-
removed kind of grieving. 
While 
it 
became 
the 
sole 
responsibility of MacBlane and The 
Cavalier Daily to print the victims’ 

names, their hometowns, what they 
studied, the lovely, wonderful tiny 
things that made them who they 
were, there is also the realization 
that the journalists are students, 
too. They might have run into the 
victims of the shooting somewhere 
in line at a coffee shop or in the 
library, or the victims might have 
picked up a copy of The Cavalier 
Daily, because Devin Chandler, 
D’Sean Perry and Lavel Davis Jr. 
were here as fellow students, and 
now after a senseless act of violence, 
they no longer were. 
The 
Cavalier 
Daily’s 
news 
team fell apart after the shooting. 
MacBlane, former Editor in Chief 
Eva Surovell and members of the 
Senior team carried the brunt of 
reporting, spending hours in the 
newsroom, often until dark fell. 
“I don’t really know, there’s 
nothing 
you 
can 
really 
say,” 
MacBlane confided. “You don’t 
know how to report when three 
people at your school die.” Past 
alumni brought cookies and pizza 
to the newsroom, and staffers 
gathered together. They all had 
been consumed by a terrifying act of 
violence that fractured their school 
and changed the University of 
Virginia as they knew it, but at least 
they had each other. 

After the shooting, MacBlane 
took photos for hours on end. 
She captured pictures of people 
leaving flowers, of people painting 
the Beta Bridge — a campus staple 
— and mostly, of collective grief 
and healing in action. But still, 
MacBlane felt out of place, like she 
was intruding on something she 
couldn’t entirely be a part of. 
“The processing of my grief 
was done behind a camera. I still 
didn’t really feel like a student.” 
MacBlane said. “I called my mom 
a few days later, and it was the first 
time I really cried.” 
While The Cavalier Daily aimed 
to cover the shooting with great 
care, affording students the choice 
to reflect on the shooting if they 
so wished, national media did not. 
Journalists from outside outlets 
covered the shooting aggressively, 
zeroing in on any student they could 
find for a comment. And as the 
days passed, as quickly as they had 
arrived, they left, leaving a campus 
so deeply attempting to recover. 
“You just have to keep going,” 
Macblane said. “When the big 
media trucks leave, when The 
Washington Post leaves, it is us, 
the student-run and local small 
newspapers that pick up the pieces 
left behind.”

SARAH AKAABOUNE
Statement Deputy Editor 

The weight we carry: college journalism’s untold grief

Jeremy Weine/DAILY

Ava MacBlane/Cavalier Daily

Ava MacBlane/Cavalier Daily
The Cavalier Daily’s Jan. 26, 2023 paper.

Anna Fuder/DAILY
Alum Becca Mahon/Daily
Anna Fuder/Daily

