Amid Campus Protests and Trump’s Targeting of Elite Universities, Student Journalists Step Up To Tell the Stories Close to Home

As higher education contends with the fallout from protests over the war in Gaza and the pressures of the Trump administration, the future of many elite educational institutions hangs in balance. Yet amid the chaos, one group is seizing the moment: student journalists. College student reporters are living in the eye of the storms that have embroiled their campuses over the last couple of years. To meet the torrent of headlines erupting from their schools, their newsrooms have scaled up. Their readership has skyrocketed. And they’re breaking news in real time — often beating professional journalists to the punch.“Because Trump generates so much news and some of his moves have had a direct impact on universities, the students have been competing on national stories,” a former executive editor of The New York Times, Jill Abramson, tells The Sun.Ms. Abramson, who teaches journalism at Northeastern University in Boston, says she can’t recall another time when student journalists have been at the forefront of national news stories as they are today. “The number of major news outlets that have been writing ‘this was first reported in The Harvard Crimson’ is amazing,” a senior lecturer of narrative journalism at Harvard, Darcy Frey, tells The Sun.Here are a sample of the headlines that student publications have published recently:At Yale, funding cuts by the Trump administration threaten to shut down a center that seeks to bring home thousands of Ukrainian children abducted to Russia. At Harvard, the university is disputing with federal officials over a preliminary injunction to keep international students on campus while the university battles the issue in court.At Columbia, accreditation hangs in balance after the Department of Education found it in violation of Title VI for “deliberate indifference” toward the harassment of Jewish students.College newspapers publish a mix of objective news coverage and opinion pieces by writers who have taken sides in recent controversies. However, like a professional newsroom, there is typically a firewall in place to separate reporting and commentary so that student journalists cover the news objectively, giving voice to all sides of a story without injecting their own opinions. At The Harvard Crimson, “no one on the News side has any input or insight into what Opinion is doing, and vice versa,” a former editorial chair of The Crimson, Tommy Barone, tells The Sun. “We have totally separate editorial processes.”With geographic proximity and narrow editorial focus, student reporters have the upper-hand of following smaller stories that might bubble up into bigger ones — rather than retroactively piecing the puzzle together. If and when big news breaks, they often already have a slew of close contacts — their peers, their classmates, their professors — available for comment. “We can have these one-on-one trusting relationships with sources that might not be able to be fostered naturally by national news sources,” the editor-in-chief of The Cornell Daily Sun, Julia Senzon, tells The Sun. “Being a member of the community gives incredible power to us reporters.”In March, for example, The Cornell Daily Sun published a series of articles on a lawsuit by a Cornell professor and two graduates who claimed that the federal government’s national security-related executive orders violated their free speech rights. When The New York Times covered the case, Senzon says, “a lot of it was relying on the daily reporting of The Sun.”The advantages of student journalism came into sharp relief when elite university campuses were thrust into the national spotlight after October 7, 2023. Few saw this more clearly than Mr. Barone, who led the editorial team of The Crimson through a series of high-stakes controversies — from the pro-Palestine and anti-Israel encampment in Harvard Yard to the antisemitism and plagiarism allegations that ultimately brought down Harvard president Claudine Gay and ushered in Dr. Alan Garber as her successor.“Student publications can speak to certain nuances that are hard to tease out if you’re not a student,” Mr. Barone says. National outlets might run website-topping stories about developments at Harvard, he says, “but will there be 15 follow-up pieces on how it’s affecting the School of Public Health, as distinct from the Medical School, as distinct from student researchers or PhD students? No, they won’t. But The Crimson will.”Mr. Barone says that during his tenure between December 2023 and December 2024, The Crimson achieved record readership, with the opinion section alone surpassing 750,000 online visitors for its three weeks of coverage of Ms. Gay’s resignation beginning in January 2024. Harvard’s weekly paper, The Independent, has also enjoyed a boom in popularity. Digital viewership grew 50 percent in the spring of 2025 compared to the prior semester, according to internal reports shared with The Sun. Those figures build upon a 350 percent jump in total website visits, to 444,000 in the fall 2024 semester, up from 94,000 in the spring 2024 semester. “It was a time when people were particularly curious about the Harvard name,” Harvard graduate Eliza Kimball, who served as the president of The Independent during those months, tells The Sun. “That was something that I was leveraging, and I was happy to get eyes on us.”With all that attention comes responsibility.When 33 student groups at Harvard signed a letter blaming Israel for Hamas’s October 7 attack, a spreadsheet soon circulated with the names and addresses of the students identified as members of those groups, along with links to news and opinion articles they wrote in The Crimson and The Independent. Ms. Kimball says a dozen or so writers, as well as students who were quoted in the stories, called her in tears, terrified of being “doxxed.” Many of them no longer wanted to publish views on either side of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Ms. Kimball says her priority was to protect students’ freedom of speech, but that mission became fraught as students felt their bylines would place a target on their back.“We’re talking about the responsibilities of an international crisis on American colleges. That’s far beyond what I felt I was capable of as a 21-year-old,” says Ms. Kimball, who majored in statistics and physics and initially treated The Independent as a fun extracurricular. “I was spending maybe 60 or so hours a week on The Indy for all of October that semester. It just totally took over my life.”The stakes are high for student journalism today. In March, the Trump administration detained Tufts University PhD student Rümeysa Öztürk because of an op-ed she co-authored in the school’s student newspaper, the Tufts Daily, calling for the university to speak out against the war in Gaza and divest from companies with ties to Israel.That case sparked a slew of concerns from college and high school students about removing names and bylines from articles they fear could draw the attention of the Trump administration, according to the Student Press Law Center, a legal nonprofit dedicated to supporting student journalists’ rights. The content in question includes op-eds contributed by student activists, opinion pieces by staff reporters, and news articles featuring pro-Palestinian sources, particularly those whose immigration status may make them targets for their speech.“Under the old rules, it was the sort of speech that was a hundred percent protected and nobody would’ve ever thought otherwise,” senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, Mike Hiestand, tells The Sun. He says he has worked in the field of student journalism for over 30 years, yet “what happened to the Tufts student was unprecedented.”The SPLC subsequently revised its policies on takedown requests and anonymous sources, advising in an April announcement that students should “find the balance required to tell the most accurate story you can while minimizing harm.” Typically, the organization cautions against the deletion of bylines. “In student media, like all the news media, we greet the first draft of history,” Mr. Hiestand says. “You don’t want to go back in and just start changing history around.”Indeed, the spotlight thrown on higher education institutions has granted students power in writing that first draft of history. Those publishing opinion pieces, in particular, say they play a role in shaping a national narrative that directly affects their lives.“We see an opportunity to cut our teeth in journalism and develop an ability to really defend what we believe to a broader audience,” Princeton student Zach Gardner, who serves as the publisher of The Tory, the university’s journal of conservative thought, tells The Sun. The publication’s alumni include Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Senator Ted Cruz.Mr. Gardner says he and his colleagues have aimed to document campus protests related to Gaza and offer conservative commentary, even in instances they face hostility. “We’ve been trying to balance our obligations as students with what we view as our duty towards the campus community, our alumni, and especially the country, to try and fight some of these ideological battles on the ground and not just let national forces dictate it,” he says. The payoff is already apparent. Though trust in mainstream media has reached its lowest point in over five decades, and though college students increasingly flock toward careers in finance, consulting, and tech, young people who work for their campus newspapers could be fueling a revived interest in journalism. “It’s very energizing when you can write and know that you’re being read,” Mr. Barone reflects, “and that it’s adding to the national conversation.” The Cornell Daily Sun now boasts upwards of 200 staffers, including more than 40 editors and a news department of roughly 50 writers, Ms. Senzon says, which is five times greater than when she joined as a writer. Amid a rise in student interest, the publication has replaced open recruitment with an official application process.At Yale’s student paper, Yale Daily News, the university news beat drew a record high number of freshman recruits this past academic year, staff reporter Nora Moses tells The Sun. She credits this surge in interest to the intensity of university coverage this year. “It gave people maybe a sense of what it would actually be like to be a journalist in today’s media, trying to really get things out as fast as possible,” she says. Ms. Moses, who is a rising junior, adds that the experience has inspired her to pursue a career in journalism.Mr. Barone is also considering entering journalism alongside attending graduate school next year. While he notes that most of his colleagues are not launching careers as reporters, “everyone is exiting with a really deep appreciation for journalism — and as a consequence of that, the ability to be a better-informed, more engaged citizen.”For the students still on their paper’s masthead, a break in classes for the summer doesn’t mean a pause on reporting. According to Ms. Moses of Yale Daily News, many students will still be working over the summer to publish breaking news — “far more than in past years given the high-stakes national news affecting Yale students.” The headlines won’t be stopping anytime soon — and neither will they.

Amid Campus Protests and Trump’s Targeting of Elite Universities, Student Journalists Step Up To Tell the Stories Close to Home

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