Robert Bowman is summer editor-in-chief of Virginia Tech’s Collegiate Times.
ON THE MORNING OF APRIL 16, I struggled to get out of bed. I looked outside my window before my 8 a.m. class. It was snowing. “This is the worst day ever,” I said to my roommate.
How I wish the worst part of that day had been the weather.
After a less-than-thrilling 8 a.m. lecture on electric theory, I went to the Collegiate Times newsroom to pick up a few things. On my way out, I passed the office of our adviser, Kelly Furnas. He looked troubled.
“Yep,” he said as he put down the phone. “Gunshots were fired in A.J.”
West Ambler-Johnston Hall, or A.J., is a co-ed residence hall with more than 900 beds. Blacksburg is a very quiet area, so even reported gunfire is something that we would not expect.
Although nothing was confirmed at this point, I knew it was going to be a long day. I drove home to pick up my laptop, cell phone charger and computer charger. On my way back to the office, I called my mom.
“Mom, I’m OK,” I said, “but you’re going to hear some bad news from Blacksburg.”
“Stay safe,” she said after I finished explaining what I knew.
The newsroom was relatively empty as we had trouble locating reporters and editors. Cell phones were useless at this point, as traffic for phone calls grew.
Amie Steele, the editor-in-chief, was in the CT business office, which is about a mile away from campus. Amie was stuck there, afraid she would not be allowed into the campus building in which the newsroom resides.
Joe Kendall, my co-managing editor, was on the phone delegating. We needed to get stories going. At about 2 p.m. we all finally met in the newsroom to begin a day that wouldn’t end until 6:01 a.m. Tuesday, when the last page was sent to the printer.
The dedication on the part of our student journalists that week was what made it possible for the CT to continue publishing.
Saira Haider, our news editor, found out that her friend, 18-year-old freshman Reema Samaha, was among those killed. Saira didn’t stop, though, no matter how many times we asked her to. She continued to work for 50-plus hours over the next four days.
T. Rees Shapiro is a sports writer covering our softball and women’s lacrosse teams, among other things. On that week, he became a news writer, as did others.
“Erin Sheehan was one of four people able to walk out of her 9:05 German class in Room 207 Norris Hall,” was the lead on one of more than a dozen stories Shapiro wrote.
David Harries, our head copy editor, had never written a story before. He was one of the first in the newsroom on Monday morning, and one of the last to leave 20 hours later.
During the long day, at any moment he found himself idle he asked me for a story to write.
Kevin Anderson is another news editor. He is in his first year at Tech and has taken the newsroom by storm. Kevin worked more than 50 hours side-by-side with Saira, as the two wrote quickly and often. They didn’t miss a single press conference during that week, often leaving the newsroom — just after sending the last of the pages to the printer — to go straight to another press conference.
Michelle Rivera had written for the CT for a few months as a staff writer and was always willing to help out. During that week, she wrote dozens of stories for the CT, each one well written.
Our Web staff deserved endless praise for their tireless dedication that week. The staff continuously updated our Web site and quickly recovered after our server crashed at 10:36 a.m.
The CT had over 5 million hits the morning of April 16. After the server crashed, the Educational Media Company at Virginia Tech, which oversees the college newspaper, yearbook, fine arts magazine, photographers and radio and TV stations, donated a dedicated server. That gave the student newspaper and other contributing student media as much capacity as they needed for the rest of the week. The newspaper was offline for only a short period of time, and students were able to keep posting throughout the day.
As students at Virginia, everyone on the staff was deeply affected by the shootings. Everyone knew somebody who was killed or injured, and everyone hated it.
Sitting in the press conference at noon on Monday, I was under the impression that one person had died and one was injured. That was the most up-to-date news I had received.
After speaking to the press, Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum, took his first question.
“Do you have a number for how many were killed?” a reporter asked.
I never imagined his reply, and I certainly did not know that this would be the worst moment of my life.
“Twenty.”
Everyone in the room gasped.
My jaw fell.
The number climbed.
On my way back to the newsroom, I was torn. I wanted to be with my friends. I wanted to hop on a plane and be with my family. I wanted to report the story. I wanted to help out in the newsroom.
After an internal struggle, I decided that I would best help the university community by getting the information to the students. That’s the reason why anyone would join a newspaper, and that’s what kept the staff going.
Back in the newsroom, I began receiving calls. Amid calls from local and national media, I received calls from friends who wondered if I was OK.
Throughout the day it was clear that we were only going to make it by helping each other out.
On Tuesday evening, Hokies United, a student-run group prepared a candlelit vigil for the community. Hokies United began after Hurricane Katrina to coordinate community outreach efforts.
The vigil was important. Although we were deep inside the story as reporters, everyone needed to remember that we were members of the Hokie family as well. The newsroom emptied, as everyone filed to the drillfield, the heart of campus, to be students, not reporters.
For the remainder of the week, the number of staff in the newsroom shrank. We did not ask a single person to stay; the decision was theirs. Many felt bad about leaving the CT, but were quickly hushed and kicked out the door. No matter how important it was to relay the news, it was more important for us to be comfortable. For some, that meant to be reporting for the CT. For others, it meant being with family.
Personally, I needed to take off Wednesday afternoon. My younger brother goes to school at Radford University, just south of Blacksburg. I called him on my way out of the newsroom at 4 p.m. We hung out for the rest of the afternoon and attended church together.
Back on campus, I visited memorials and began collecting my thoughts. It was one of the first times I was alone since Monday, and it was a very emotional afternoon. Everything hit me at once.
I ignored a few calls from Amie, but later realized that she was just calling to tell me to stay home that evening. She certainly cared and did not want me working when I should be alone. After a few hours, I returned to the newsroom and helped finish the paper for the day.
Joe stayed throughout the week, seemingly with no interruption. I’m still not sure how he kept going, but he certainly was in the newsroom longer than anyone. With roughly 11 hours of sleep between Monday and Friday, he worked more than 65 hours. It was that kind of dedication that helped produce the paper, especially as our staff grew smaller as the week went on.
While on the phone with FOX News Monday morning, I was asked about a photograph of a man being detained on our drillfield. The photograph that FOX was airing was of an Asian man wearing a black jacket and glasses, matching the description of the gunman. The photo, however, was of our photographer, Shaozhuo Cui, who had been close to Norris taking photographs for the Collegiate Times.
Shao was photographing the scene outside of Norris when police yelled that he had run away from the scene. Then they “changed their mind,” Shao said.
Shao was detained for nearly two hours and his equipment was confiscated. The camera, with the pictures still on it, was returned Thursday, three days later than we would have liked.
The CT published many of Shao’s pictures in Friday’s issue
Of the many debates in the newsroom, the one that required the most attention was how much play to give the gunman. Throughout the week, his picture did not graze the front page of our newspaper. We printed a headshot of him in the Wednesday paper on Page 4, and discussed printing photos from the manifesto he sent to NBC.
After expressing distaste for the photographs, we published a single photo of the television screen with one of the controversial pictures. The story was about the manifesto and the details of Monday’s events.
Amie, Joe and I, along with the photo editor for each day, worked on the front page each night. Amie certainly gave the front page the most attention, and her background as production manager gave her plenty of experience with layout. Amie and her assistant, Claire Craft, spent hours each night designing the front page.
On Monday, we knew that the next day’s front page was going to be important, more important than any other day for the CT. We talked about pictures of gore and chaos. We decided that everyone was tired of those photographs, and by the time the paper was in the racks, it would have been 24 hours since the Norris shootings.
Instead, we printed a page with a very large photograph of students standing in a circle on the drillfield. The photo is of the backs of these students and is relatively dark. It encompassed many of the feelings we had. There is a little bit of light over the horizon, as if Hokies everywhere were searching for that light.
Above the photo is the word “Heartache.” Below is a paragraph that sums up the feelings for most students. It begins, “Surreal … There are still hundreds of questions left unanswered surrounding yesterday’s events. In the face of such devastating loss, lingering uncertainties about what caused it, who caused it and how it was handled will forever haunt our memories, but what is more important is to remember what we were before the tragedy. We were strong, secure, confident — Team United.”
The next day featured another very large photograph of a member of the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets playing “Taps” on the drillfield during the candlelit vigil. Below was a story on the vigil written by our sports editor.
Thursday’s issue contained four pictures on the front page, along with the names of all 32 victims.
After four days of photographs, the Friday issue of the CT did not include any on the front page. Instead, Amie and our technical adviser, Scott Chandler, worked on a memorial ribbon that took up most of the page. Inside the ribbon were all of the questions we had asked all week; many of them would not be answered for months. “Who is he talking about?” it begins. “What was he like? What will happen to Norris? Why Norris Hall?”
I have taken great pride in how the CT looked visually that week. People will save copies of the CT from that week, and the front pages were excruciatingly important.
As we waited Sunday at 11:15 p.m. for the last of the pages to convert to PDFs, we talked about the week we had just experienced. It was April 22, and we just finished the first Monday issue the CT has ever produced (the CT prints Tuesday through Friday).
Sixteen percent completed. The iMac from the late 1990s is not the fastest machine in the world, but it is what the CT uses to change PostScript files into PDFs. The printer won’t accept PostScript files, so this tedious process is the best option.
“I just can’t believe this,” Amie said. “I haven’t even had a chance to think about it.”
“The first time I got to think about it was while taking a shower on Tuesday morning,” Joe said.
I laughed. “You had time to take a shower?” I asked.
We thought about what it took to produce a paper on the most miserable of weeks, and how we wish it had never happened — and how we would give anything at all for it not to happen to anyone else.
Even months after April 16, the CT has not seen a publication without mention of the tragedy. Each issue has contained, in some way, the repercussions from that miserable day, and it is unclear how long this will last. It would be nice to publish a paper that has no mention of the day, but that is not our goal. Instead, the fact that we have not been able to avoid April 16-related news is a testament to how deeply the tragedy has affected this community. We will move on, but we will never forget. *