Kate Murphy

kmurphy@enquirer.com

When Nick Roll got a text about an attack on campus from Ohio State University he ran to the scene, not away from it.

The 21-year-old OSU student from Finneytown was sitting in a Dunkin' Donuts near the scene of the attack when he got the alert to run, hide or fight. As the campus editor of the student newspaper, the Lantern, he ran towards the caution tape, knowing he had a responsibility to accurately report what was happening as quickly as possible.

“I picked up my stuff and got as close as I could," Roll said. "You don’t go into it thinking, oh this is national news... This is breaking news, we’ve done it before.”

So, he and at least eight other student reporters immediately turned to Twitter.

"Our audience is college students and that's the only way they view us," The Lantern's campus life reporter Summer Cartwright said. "We have a printed edition, but the majority of people are going to see my tweets, rather than picking up the paper outside their classroom."

The game plan was to tweet out any updates as soon as they got it confirmed with officials because students rely on social media to get the information that they need, she said. The Lantern also added live updates to an online story published on the website.

"It was basically OK, I’m safe, now how do I get to the area where this is happening, how do I cover what’s going on and get to everyone who was on the scene," said Cartwright, a junior at OSU studying journalism.

The advantage student reporters have over bigger news outlets is the social network of people on campus. Within minutes student reporters were talking to witnesses of the attack and getting an influx of student voices from people who were there.

“As students, we can report on that and get to people surprisingly fast,” Roll said. “Students are helpful, but like any eyewitness to something traumatic you have to take it with a grain of salt.”

Roll’s phone was blowing up with text messages and tweets of all kinds of theories and accounts of what happened. He said they didn’t publish any facts that weren’t backed up by a university or law enforcement official, other than the eyewitness accounts.

“We might not always be the fastest," Roll said, "but we’re going to be pretty fast and it’s accurate."

The Lantern was one of the first news outlets to report on the attack, which gained national attention. The initial report was that an active shooter was on campus, but the attacker's only weapons were his car and a butcher's knife. The chaos only lasted a few minutes before OSU Police Officer Alan Horujko, Fairfield native, shot and killed the suspect at the scene.

“The world we live in now college campuses are major targets to acts of violence,” Cartwright said. “It was only a matter of time before something horrible like this would happen to our college.”

Cartwright, of Dublin, said despite the national significance keeping the story relevant to the campus community was critical.

“Our friends are the ones who were locked in their classrooms terrified for their life,” Cartwright said. “Getting the student voice out there is so important to us because that’s who we represent.”

In this case, being part of the student body meant knowing the attacker, Abdul Razak Ali Artan.

Earlier this year, The Lantern published a piece about Artan, who was a student at OSU. The story featured a short interview with Artan about his experience as a Muslim student on campus.

Having that interaction with him made covering the incident especially hard for some reporters.

"He’s a student at OSU who we wanted to represent, but he's also a student who committed these violent acts against other students," Cartwright said. "It’s horrible, but we need to remain neutral and make sure everything is factual."

She said it was very important to The Lantern staff to make sure there aren’t any religious or racial implications through their reporting. "We don’t want to blame a race or religion for his acts."

The Lantern plans to write multiple articles online and in print, including victim profiles and witness accounts, as more information becomes available throughout the investigation.