Student Media

“We had never covered something like this.” The Cav Daily, “Unite the Right” and some incredible journalism (Part II)

The crew from the Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia that covered the chaos in Charlottesville over the weekend: Alexis Gravely, Anna Higgins, Daniel Hoerauf and Tim Dodson. (Photos courtesy of the Cavalier Daily staff)

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a short series of posts about the Cavalier Daily’s coverage of the chaos over the weekend in Charlottesville. Part I can be found here, along with an explanation as to why I’m focusing on student media and how amazingly helpful managing editor Tim Dodson with all of this. Tim, Senior Associate News Editor Alexis Gravely, News Editor Anna Higgins and Senior Writer Daniel Hoerauf were on the ground as the “Unite the Right” event turned violent and deadly. Tim was repeatedly clear how much this was a team event and that is so clear in the coverage the Cav Daily published.

The staff of the Cav Daily is continuing to cover the outcomes of this event. Here are a few stories they published in the last 24 hours:

Here is part two from our hour-long interview. Any mistakes are mine, not Tim’s. Corrections and tweaks are likely necessary and gratefully received.

 

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Here are two images that give you an indication of what the Cavalier Daily staff was walking into when covering the weekend’s events. Photos by Alexis Gravely, courtesy of the Cavalier Daily.

As the Cavalier Daily staff began covering Saturday’s “Unite the Right” rally, one thing became immediately clear to Managing Editor Tim Dodson.

“We had never covered something like this,” he said in an interview this week.

Charlottesville had become a flashpoint for the alt-right, neo-Nazis and other white supremacist groups that weekend. A group of white supremacists had already gathered Friday on the University of Virginia campus, carrying tiki torches and chanting racist rhetoric. A federal court injunction Friday allowed the event to take place in Emancipation Park, but it felt like chaos might emerge in the city. Counter-protestors had gathered in droves. Police donned riot gear and braced for mayhem.

Into it all marched the four-person team of the Cavalier Daily, U.Va.’s student newspaper, unsure of what would happen but knowing covering the event was necessary.

“There are people who are ‘first responders’ who rush into situations like fires and accidents to help people,” Dodson said. “I’m not comparing us to them, but journalists are like ‘first informers’ and we run toward chaos too so we can tell people what’s going on… I am proud of the courageous members of the Cavalier Daily staff who put themselves in harms way to report what we were seeing”

The main event was to start at noon, but things were getting ugly far earlier. Dodson said brawls popped up in various spots around the area. Someone burned a Confederate battle flag. Marchers carried machine guns and wore tactical body armor. The air became unbreathable.

“We started walking over to the rally and immediately the chemical irritant hit us,” he said of the tear gas. “We were choking on it. I was trying to do a Facebook Live event but I had to give up on it. I couldn’t keep it going because I was coughing on whatever was in the air.”

Police were clearing the area when Dodson said the staff got word the white supremacists planned to gather shortly in McIntire Park to continue the rally.

“We drive over to the park and then we start walking around and it’s kind of empty, nobody really there,” he said. “There appear to be some alt-right people and some white supremacists, but not a crowd. It was really quiet. And then within a half hour, dozens or up to 100s showed up to gather and they’re clustered by this playground and we hear there are going to be speakers.”

Former KKK leader David Duke and white nationalist leader Richard Spencer arrived and addressed those who had gathered. The Cav Daily crew wove its way into the amped-up crowd to gather information.

“I think the people on the ground had great news instincts,” Dodson said. “There were seasoned members of the Cav Daily. In terms of the photography, Alexis is more of a trained photographer than I and she had a lot of photos. I had no experience with this so I kind of learned on the job when Spencer and Duke were speaking.”

Spencer and the Cav Daily had crossed paths before: The staff learned last year that Spencer graduated from U.Va. in 2001 and it began trying to piece together his past on the Charlottesville campus. He was not overly active in campus events, except for his participation in “Shakespeare on the Lawn” productions. Few people remembered him and those who did were almost universally unwilling to talk about him. When it came time to interview Spencer for the profile, the task fell to Dodson.

“I think I did two or three phone interviews with him to get a line on his time here,” Dodson said. “I had been prepared for the interview, I researched his timeline here and so forth. There’s not a whole lot written about his time at U.Va., so I was at a bit of a disadvantage… It was just a matter of asking some open ended questions.

“I don’t think I was necessarily intimidated but I did as much research as I could but I had to realize I was gathering information,” he added, noting that Spencer made it clear that nobody at U.Va “turned him into” the current iteration of himself. “You don’t always have all the answers.”

When Duke addressed the crowd, the situation began to devolve again.

“It was hard to keep track of all these things as the speakers were addressing the supporters…” Dodson said. “Some people saw a reporter being intimidated… During Duke’s speech, counter-protesters showed up and that altercation turned physical…  As all that was happening, our reporting team and I were watching this happening and covering all this on social media and we get this news that a car plowed through crowd in a downtown area.”

The staff members split up with two people heading downtown and two others staying at McIntire Park. All the content was flowing from the scene to EIC Mike Reingold, who was retweeting material and working with others to build content on the paper’s homepage. The social media flow from the scene was essentially a reflexive need to get the story out immediately, Dodson said.

“I think for the social media it was just our instincts,” he said. “As things happened, we just had our phones out and we were telling stories. One of our people was smart and brought a battery pack, so we were all plugging into that to pull juice off of for the day… I think as things happened in the moment we were very good at reacting to that.”

The car attack downtown killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injured 19 others. Other physical altercations, including an assault in a parking garage, were reported as well, with varying levels of injuries. The police began to take over the situation downtown and the rally in the park began to dissolve as the day wore on, Dodson said.

“Police began to take charge and there was definitely less chaos,” he said. “We could see the aftermath of what had happened…”

“It was a very long day in Charlottesville.”

 

The Cav Daily and its amazing “Unite the Right” coverage (Part I)

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Tim Dodson’s photo of the tiki-torch-wielding white supremacists on the U.Va. campus Friday night. (Courtesy of Tim Dodson, Cavalier Daily)

Editor’s Note: I wanted to take a look at the events of Charlottesville for the blog, but I wanted to look at it through the eyes of the student media. Far too often, student media gets the cruddy end of the stick or just gets ignored, so I went to the website for the student newspaper at the University of Virginia to see if anyone wrote a story on the topic. I was blown away by the overall coverage here in terms of quantity, quality and depth from the Cavalier Daily. The use of video, social media, text, links to previous work and photography was beyond what most local publications could handle. They “flooded the zone,” to borrow a phrase.

These are just a few of the stories the Cav Daily published:

I reached out to Tim Dodson, the managing editor of the Cavalier Daily on U.Va.’s campus, who was gracious enough to talk to me about all of this. He wanted to make sure I understood that he wasn’t the only one on staff working the story: Senior Associate News Editor Alexis Gravely, News Editor Anna Higgins and Senior Writer Daniel Hoerauf comprised the team that produced this incredible work. EIC Mike Reingold was chipping in as well, aggregating his staffers’ social media posts and flowing them through the Cav Daily’s formal social media channels. Opinion writers were building additional pieces and others were also adding what they could from wherever they were while still on summer break. As much as I knew I would end up telling this story through Tim’s eyes because he was my main source, he clarified at every turn that it was NOT “his reporting” or “his work” but that of the whole staff. So, if that doesn’t always come through in the writing, you should blame me, not him.

In going back through the notes of a more than hour-long interview, there is no way to do this well in one giant chunk, so I’m splitting it up across several posts on the next few days. In the mean time, here’s the first chunk of the story. Corrections and tweaks are likely necessary and gratefully received.

Corrections:  Date of Tim’s election to news editor has been fixed and clarification on who was covering which events on which days has been added. Keep ’em coming if I messed up.

—

Two days before his 21st birthday, Tim Dodson found himself working with a small group of journalists from the student newspaper at U.Va. to cover the chaotic events in Charlottesville.

“I think we all knew there was a potential for violence,” he said in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon. “I don’t think anyone was expecting to see everything that unfolded.”

The national media kept a wary eye on this city of nearly 47,000 as white supremacists, the alt-right and other hate groups gathered for the “Unite the Right” rally on Friday. Dodson, the managing editor of the Cavalier Daily, was part of a skeleton crew of staffers that planned to cover the event that was happening on U.Va.’s front doorstep. Aside from his position at the paper, Dodson had another reason to care about the weekend’s events: Charlottesville was his hometown.

“I’ve grown up here this is my hometown,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like this. I’m in no way making light of anything that happened Friday but in some ways, it felt like I was in one those “Purge” movies because of all the stuff that was going on.”

Dodson graduated in 2015 from Western Albemarle High School, where he worked on the student newspaper (“It wasn’t this hard core,” he said. “I didn’t do any breaking news.”) before he enrolled at U.Va. He found out about the Cav Daily while attending a student organization fair and became a reporter on staff. He was then elected as one of two news editors in December 2016. A year later, he was elected managing editor and his 20-30 hours per week at the paper surged to 30+ hours as he helped the editor in chief oversee the publication’s operation.

During this summer, he was on his second internship at Charlottesville Tomorrow, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization focused on covering quality of life issues in the area, and his weekend gig at News Talk 107.5 WCHV, a local radio station. Thanks to the flexibility of his various bosses, he was able to work with the Cav Daily staff on the “Unite the Right” events.

“I’m honored and blessed that my bosses have been really good about flexibility with me,” he said. “We are in a period where nobody is formally writing things (for the Cav Daily) so several of us were really trying to figure out who is in town and how we could get all hands on deck for this.”

Dodson said he went to the Cav Daily office on Friday night after working one of his other media gigs to await a court ruling regarding the event. The city tried to force the group of white supremacists to a different location, but the group sued the city and got an injunction. As Dodson awaited a court’s decision on how all this would shake out, he got several texts from people he knew saying the white supremacists would be holding a rally at the rotunda, which is right in the middle of campus.

“I have no photo skills, but I grabbed a camera and headed over there,” he said. “I found two other reporters and we were all walking around together. Then we start getting pictures of people lighting tiki torches and walking around on campus… I called the other members of the staff and said, ‘How quickly can you get over here?'”

Staffers Alexis Gravel and Daniel Hoerauf arrived and everyone threw themselves into the mix, even as people were twirling torches and chanting. (News Editor Anna Higgins joined the group on Saturday as the team covered the events downtown.) Dodson said the staff members were not only working on telling stories but also watching out for each other as mob’s frenzy grew.

“I was looking down on (the crowd) from a balcony area and if there’s one word for it, it would be chaotic…” he said. “We knew there was a high potential for violence and we knew it was going to be a mess the next day.”

 

 

 

GAME TIME: An AP quiz for the folks at the College Media Mega Workshop (and the rest of us, too…)

In honor of the student journalists who are slaving away at the College Media Mega Workshop, here’s a chance to prove moral and intellectual superiority over your peers: An AP style quiz that is based on the CMMW.

If you’re not there, don’t worry. You can still play this and dominate all.

Same rules as before: 10 questions, speed counts, rankings will be posted.

CLICK HERE TO START

It never hurts to ask (Or how a high school kid scored an interview with the Secretary of Defense)

One of my dad’s favorite sayings when I was a kid was, “Just ask. If you don’t ask, you’ll never get what you want. The worst anyone can do is say, ‘No.'” Some times an ask would get you a free refill at a restaurant or a couple bucks off of a price at a rummage sale.

For Teddy Fischer, a high school student at Seattle-area high school, the “ask” got him an interview with James Mattis, the United States secretary of defense:

In May, Fischer, who will be a junior at the Seattle-area high school in the fall, came across a Washington Post article about President’s Trump’s longtime bodyguard. The photo showed Trump’s bodyguard walking with a stack of papers, and on a yellow piece of paper was Mattis’s cell phone number.

Fischer called the number. No one responded, and Fischer didn’t leave a message.

So he texted Mattis instead, stating who he was, that he was from Mattis’s home state, Washington, and that he was writing an article on US foreign policy. (Fischer wasn’t — at the time.)

Fischer saved the number in his phone as “Jim M.” A week later, while in his journalism class, Fischer looked down at his phone to see “Jim M’ calling.

The 45-minute phone call led to a 6,000-word article with a man who generally shuns the media spotlight and avoids spending copious amounts of time with reporters. You can read the article here and a full transcript of the interview here.

Asking for an interview is one thing students repeatedly tell me they fear more than anything. I get it. As a reporter, I often would dial six digits of a phone number and then pause before hitting that final button. I tended to have to buck myself up before I approached a source in person or tried to nose into a conversation to pry away some one-on-one time with a potential interviewee. The thing students say to me most is what I have said in my own head as I gritted my teeth in advance of an interview: “That person is not going to want to talk to me.”

That might be true, but you shouldn’t take that opportunity off the table because you are afraid the person will reject you. Consider this:

Near the end of the interview, Fischer asked Mattis why he called him back, out of all the people who want to talk to him.

“You left a message there and I was going through listening to the messages and deleting them,” Mattis said. “But you’re from Washington state. I grew up in Washington state on the other side of the mountains there on the Columbia River. I just thought I’d give you a call.”

In other words, it never hurts to ask.

 

Ryan Wood: An award-winning pro

Congratulations to Green Bay Packers beat reporter Ryan Wood for his award-winning story about the retirement of B.J. Raji. He was honored this week at the Associated Press Sports Editors convention in New Orleans.

Ryan was nice enough to talk about his time as a journalist for one of our “A View From a Pro” segments that is included in the “Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing” textbook. You can find his thoughts on reporting and life as an award-winning journalism in the Basics of Reporting chapter, but here’s his “best bit of advice:”

ONE LAST THING: If you could tell the students reading this book anything you think is important, what would it be?

“The most important thing for anyone entering the field is to horde as much experience as you possibly can. Get involved in student journalism. When I was in college, I lived in the newsroom. Ate there. Slept there. Pulled all-nighters doing homework there. Made my friends there. Met my wife there. The newsroom was my home. I’ve gotten emails from folks with English degrees and zero student journalism experience who wanted to know how to enter the business, just because they wanted to write. I never have anything positive to tell them. They can’t, at least not in a full-time basis. If you want to give yourself the best chance to succeed, learn the tools of the trade. Nothing prepares you for life as a professional journalist like being a student journalist.”

You can follow him at ByRyanWood on Twitter.