Virginia Tech shootings: Student paper covers it from the inside

I hope my student journos never have to face something like this, but I sent this link on to the editor, just to keep her informed. Many a journalist’s career has been made by being professional, while happening to be in the right place at the right time — Dan Rather was a little-known local reporter in 1961 when he filed the first live TV broadcast during a hurricane; two years later, he was head of the Dallas bureau when John F. Kennedy was shot. (Though Rather  wasn’t the first to break the story, his coverage is now part of history, as he and other reporters invented, on the spot, modern TV journalism.)

As the story of the Virginia Tech shootings continue to unfold, the reporters of the Collegiate Times have been front and center.

The newspaper’s website crashed throughout the day due to intense interest, but through its Twitter feed @CollegiateTimes, the newspaper’s Facebook page and reporters’ own Twitter feeds, Collegiate Times staffers have kept its rapidly expanding audience up to date on all the twists and turns of the breaking news story — sometimes tweeting as often as once a minute.

And the Twittersphere is listening. The Collegiate Times twitter feed grew from having fewer than 2,000 followers to more than 20,500 (and counting) in just a few hours.

via Virginia Tech shootings: Student paper covers it from the inside – latimes.com.