By Aaricka Washington/LAist
Originally published May 24th, 2024
Tumultuous. Surreal. Demanding.
These are just some of the words student journalists use to describe covering campus protests in Southern California this spring. On campuses across the region, protesters have called for an end to Israeli attacks on Gaza and for their schools to divest from companies tied to Israel and weapons manufacturing.
At some schools, administrators have negotiated with students. At others, law enforcement has been called in to dismantle encampments. We talked to student journalists at a number of schools to hear directly from them what it’s been like to report on their own schools and classmates.
About the protests
Since mid-April, thousands of college students — from Columbia University to the University of Texas at Austin to UCLA — have been protesting Israel’s eight-month long war in Gaza.
Since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,200 Israelis and left more than 200 hostages, more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza health officials, and many more wounded.
Southern California has been a hot spot for student protests. There have been protests on at least nine campuses, with the most notable encampments at USC and UCLA. And On Thursday, police arrived on UCLA’s campus yet again after a new encampment was erected that morning.
It all kickstarted here on April 15 when USC leaders canceled school valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s commencement speech due to what they called “safety concerns”.
That decision sparked students at USC and several others across Southern California to call for an end to school endowments or investments tied to Israel or weapons manufacturing, among other demands. During the first two weeks of protests, police arrested more than 2,100 people on college campuses — and some professors, too.
About the student journalists
At college news outlets including the Daily Trojan, Daily Bruin, Daily Forty-Niner, The Highlander, New University and Annenberg Media student journalists have been covering events in realtime — many with unique access.
For Henry Kofman, a rising sophomore and member of the Daily Trojan staff at the University of Southern California, the atmosphere was unprecedented.
“I just joined the Daily Trojan this semester,” explains Kofman, who is also a deputy photo editor. “It was a calm semester. We were almost done. We were in finals season and things completely ramped up.”
When he and his peers heard that student protesters would be setting up an encampment, they stayed in the newsroom, sometimes even sleeping on the couches.
“We had to be out there at 4 (a.m) and make sure we were documenting everything, getting the full holistic view,” Kofman says, describing the early hours spent on this story. “We were trying to adjust to everything, but also not spend too much time thinking because you also have to be on the ground reporting, getting photos and everything else.”
(Ashley Balderrama/LAist)
Here’s what we heard from Kofman and his fellow student journalists:
USC: “All eyes on us”
Henry Kofman | University of Southern California, sophomore
Daily Trojan, deputy photo editor
“I was at the encampment on that first day. I did still have to go to my Writing 150 class because we are still students. Trying to balance, especially in finals season, six-page papers with LAPD on campus and helicopters…that was a bit chaotic. And at USC, it was a very unique thing that the campus was shut down. It was only students and faculty who could be there. So that meant that we were the only people able to really report on it.”
“It’s the fact that we were the only people on campus able to cover it that led to us being the people that people were paying attention to. You can even just look at the number of Instagram followers over the last few weeks…it has gone up. All eyes were on us, which definitely led to more pressure in many ways.”
- Henry Kofman’s Daily Trojan pictures during the protests were featured in Time Magazine.
Cal State Long Beach: “Big learning experience”
Linsey Towles | California State University, Long Beach, rising senior
Daily Forty-Niner, incoming managing editor
“We started out with a really strong news team. It really tested our abilities as journalists and also students. I think it’s been a really good and exciting time. It’s been a time for growth. You go out there and it might be your first time covering a protest. And it’s a fairly big one. It’s just a big learning experience for everybody on the news team.”
“Being student media, when we explain, we’re from the Daily Forty-Niner, we are Cal State, Long Beach students, I’m a student, you’re a student, they usually feel more comfortable and safe talking to us. So I think that gives us an edge on other media outlets that might come to our campus to talk and try to cover the story. I just think that protesters might feel more comfortable with us. I just think that they see us less as a threat than like big media organizations, because they know that their words aren’t going to be broadcasted on national television or anything like that…So I think our status as student journalists has really helped us cover this the best we can, and sometimes even better than the other major outlets.”
UC Riverside: “Representing the student body”
Brenda Jovel |University of California, Riverside, senior
The Highlander, outgoing editor-in-chief
“I didn’t expect to be leading the newspaper with such things going on campus… Especially since at my school, we are a relatively smaller paper, so trying to cover as much as we can with the amount of staff that we have has been kind of difficult, but I think we’ve made it work throughout this year. I hope that it’s able to reach audiences from multiple backgrounds.”
“There’s definitely a line of trust established between our newspapers on campus and the protesters on campus as well. I think, being open with them, and genuinely taking the time to follow any guidelines that they themselves have is also just a sign of respect. If you give respect, you’re going to gain respect in return.”
“And I think as student journalists, we kind of have that responsibility of representing the student body on campus, and taking the time to just sit with them and talk to them, having these natural conversations with them and developing that relationship with them can be helpful. It makes our coverage more fruitful in that sense.”
- Brenda Jovel wrote a recent article for The Highlander about collective action from Pro-Palestinian protesters during a Regents meeting.
UC Riverside: “Unique perspective”
Senna Omar | University of California, Riverside
The Highlander, incoming editor-in-chief
“I haven’t really covered protests in the past, but in regards to the Pro-Palestinian protest, I think I had a unique perspective to bring to this table because I myself am Palestinian and my family has been involved in activism in this particular field for as long as I can remember. So I felt like it was an important space for me to be a part of as well as an important topic for us to cover.”
“I have seen the negative ramifications of media coverage on Arab and Muslim identities. I feel like a lot of times we are misrepresented and I wanted to make sure that as a newspaper we were representing these protests properly and giving justice to the work that the people were doing.”
“There’s a different level of care when it comes to covering things on your own campus versus covering things from a general lens. We’re more incentivized to go out to these protests and actually talk to the people who are running these protests and get to know the reasons that they’re out there and understand their perspective and honestly get more information out of them from what I’ve seen from other news organizations coming onto UCR campus and covering these protests.”
- Senna Omar wrote about the terms of an agreement between student protesters and UCR officials for The Highlander.
USC: “First time on air”
Tamara Almoayed | University of Southern California, rising sophomore
Annenberg Media student journalist
“Day one of the USC encampment was actually my first time going live on air, which as you can imagine was pretty nerve-wracking to begin with. Our radio host called in three times throughout our show, which lasted about 30 minutes, and I would answer live from the encampment and give updates on what was happening.”
“The first call was fairly easy going, nothing was really happening. By the third call, there were LAPD officers surrounding us equipped with tear gas guns, rubber bullets, zip cuffs. It was the craziest experience being live on air throughout this sudden escalation and having to maintain your cool and observe what was actually going on accurately without panicking. But I guess it was a good way to jump into the deep end of breaking news reporting.”
“The LAPD weren’t the most respectful of our roles as press, which meant we weren’t kept in communication about what was happening, and were even physically shoved at certain points despite our clear press passes. This, at least for me, reshaped the way I perceive media. On most nights, we were the only ones on site with cameras and equipment. This meant that we were able to do live coverage on our Instagram stories and even live videos, which I think today is way more accessible to a younger generation or even just those who are interested in what was happening.”
- Tamara Almoayed worked with her colleagues to provide live updates and reports during graduation day for Annenberg Media.
UC Irvine: “Doing the same work”
Emilie Takahashi | University of California, Irvine, rising sophomore
New University, staff writer
“I knew we had to be the first on the scene to make sure people knew what was going on. And so when I got there I live streamed the entire time, only stopping when the phone died, or we had to relocate, but we made sure that people, even if they weren’t there, could see what was going on in real time.”
“There were these big media outlets there, with their big cameras there, neon vests and helmets and large press badges and these big black vests that said “media” on them. And here I was with this flimsy piece of plastic with a lanyard around my neck and an iPhone. And we were capturing the same footage. The quality might have been a little worse on my end, but we were doing the same work.”
- Read Emilie Takahashi’s latest reporting on New University, the official campus newspaper for University of California, Irvine.
Cal State Long Beach: “It’s really inspiring”
Anthony Orrico | California State University, Long Beach, graduating senior
Daily Forty-Niner incoming assistant news editor
“Any student journalists, don’t ever let anybody tell you that what you do doesn’t matter because it absolutely does matter. Because when people look back 20 or 30 years from now, and they want to know what was going on [on our campus], they’re going to go back into our archives, and they’re going to look at these stories that we wrote, and they’re going to understand what the time was like at our campus.”
“A lot of people try to play off student journalism as…’Oh, this is just, you know, an extracurricular kind of activity. It’s like a club.’ You know, just not really…taking it very seriously in my eyes. But this whole ordeal has really re-inspired me to be very hopeful about the future of journalism because the amount of coverage that I’ve seen from papers all across the country and our own paper is just so professional. It’s so just amazing to see it from people who probably are, they’re not being paid for this more than likely they’re doing classes along with all of this all of this reporting. And it’s really inspiring to see that there are still younger people who care about journalism and care about the truth being told and, and understand the important role that it plays in our society and how it’s just an indispensable thing.”
Listen
Check out the latest How To LA podcast episode to learn more about these students’ experiences as reporters on campus during a historic protest.
This report is reprinted with permission from Southern California Public Radio. © 2024 Southern California Public Radio. All rights reserved.
