“ARE YOU SAFE? WHERE ARE YOU? ARE YOU ALONE?” reads the front page of The Daily Tar Heel, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s student newspaper. The shocking words are an amalgamation of texts and social media posts sent by students to each other and their families during the campus’ Aug. 28 shooting.
Muhsin Mahmud, a student journalist at UNC and exchange student from London, United Kingdom, went viral for capturing the moment the sirens went off. Mahmud was recording the nice weather on campus when the sirens rang out, and a voice over a loudspeaker said “Attention, armed and dangerous person. Go inside.”
Suddenly, the surrounding students ran and so did he. As the camera shakes and we hear the quick steps on the pavement, Mahmud mumbles: “America …”
And Mahmud is correct. This is America.
The front page of The Daily Tar Heel and Mahmud’s viral video had one thing in common — they were voices of a collective trauma felt by not only their campus in North Carolina but also by colleges, high schools, middle schools and elementary schools across this country.
As print publications like newspapers continue to decline, we are steadily adapting to a constant stream of information overload. So much so that it can make us numb, overwhelmed and detached from the reality we are facing.
The tangible and raw front page of The Daily Tar Heel captured audiences, drawing a repost from President Joe Biden.
When you can hold the news in your hand, it makes the weight of it on your mind that much heavier — an important quality in the digital age of information overload.
The constant stream of texts that trail the front page keeps your eyes still and requires you to ruminate on the content much longer than a headline or a one-sentence digital news alert.
You are forced to reckon with what these students felt and to read what many of them thought may be their last texts: “Hey — Come on sweetheart, I need to hear from you,” “Stay calm and safe — we love you,” “Please send literally anything.”
Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Tar Heel, Emmy Martin, told NPR, “Once we got out of lockdown, we immediately started rethinking what our Wednesday paper would look like.”
She said her staff toiled over how to present this news in their weekly paper until late into the night. After she had given up for the night, she reread texts sent to her and those posted on social media. The design came to her.
The staff of The Daily Tar Heel began collecting texts from the campus community.
Martin told NPR, “They were short … and as soon as we saw those words on a blank design document, it was incredibly powerful. They just told the story of what it was like.”
Kevin Anderson, a freshman journalism student at Virginia Tech during the 2007 mass shooting that killed 33 people, reflected on being a student journalist at that moment.
“I had to psychologically separate myself from the situation in order to focus on work. While I was obviously deeply affected emotionally by the event, in order to do my job fairly and well, I had to try and force myself to look at everything in two different ways: the mourning student and the professional journalist.”