UNC student newspaper goes viral for coverage of campus shooting

As Emmy Martin was locked down Monday afternoon on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, with police searching nearby for an “armed and dangerous person,” she was simultaneously terrified and clear-headed.

Her “pulse through the roof,” she already had identified her escape route. But as the editor-in-chief of The Daily Tar Heel, she also was reporting and directing coverage for the university’s independent student newspaper.

Sitting with fellow Daily Tar Heel journalists in the second-floor library of the Hussman School of Journalism and Media, Martin scrapped plans for a big preview section that was scheduled for the first weekend of college football. Instead, she knew that this particular front page of the weekly print edition had to do several things, namely represent the community it serves and act as a historical record of the lockdown that paralyzed the campus for three hours on Monday.

Two days after a professor was fatally shot in a science lab, a dramatic front page of UNC’s student newspaper on Wednesday drew national attention — including from President Joe Biden — for doing both of those things. —News Observer