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