While the giants of news reporting saturated the media markets with coverage of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, college newspaper editors around Hudson County suddenly found themselves scrambling to cover the major events as local news only days after classes started.
"We had several people who died from our school, most of them teachers," said Maria Berrios, a senior at New Jersey City University and the advertising manager for the school’s paper, The Gothic-Times, last week. "It wasn’t an easy task to report on events of such tragic magnitude."
Berrios and the staff members, who number slightly less than a dozen, were preparing to come out with their first issue for the year at their office in the Gilligan Student Building on Kennedy Boulevard when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center the morning of Sept. 11.
Berrios immediately rushed to a phone to call her family in Jersey City, and when the phone lines were busy, she began her journalistic duties, gathering information for the editorial staff.
"We were running around like chickens with no heads," Berrios said.
The Gothic-Times has experienced some difficulties in recent years in getting advertising money and recruiting writers and editors, Berrios admits. But despite publishing the paper only once a month, Berrios said she feels confident that the staff this year will pull through the difficult times and represent the issues and concerns of NJCU’s more than 5,000 students located near the Bayonne border in Jersey City.
"Our job is to publish news for the students and faculty to read. We intend to do just that," she said.
The major headline for the Sept. 11 issue reads "NJCU mourns loss of three," referring to the adjunct professors who died in the tragedy. The issue included stunning images of the WTC before the attacks and many opinion pieces by students reflecting on the events at the World Trade Center, which is less than 15 minutes away from the campus.
The more than 1,500 undergraduate students at Hoboken’s Stevens Institute of Technology on Hudson Street had a bird’s eye view of the WTC attacks. The Stute, Stevens’ weekly student newspaper, devoted the entire issue to the global event when it became obvious that the attacks superseded any other matters relevant to the school.
Lillian Chu, Stute’s managing editor for more than two years and a junior computer science major, was shocked by the events and came up with the paper’s main headline, "A day that will never be forgotten."
The staff of almost 30 students reported the events. Nobody from the Stevens community died as a result of the attacks, according to Chu.
After Sept. 11, the staff has been writing minor editorials about the war in Afghanistan and America’s military might. The editors have put them in the inside pages of the usually 12-to-16-page tabloid.
The Stute has been at the technical higher-learning institution for more than two decades. During that time the students have had the opportunity to get their feet wet in journalism, even if the paper is small. Chu admits that not too many staffers want to pursue professional journalism careers.
"We do this because we like it," Chu said during a phone interview.
The Stute’s Sept. 11 issue included students’ essays and several pictorials.
Ryan Livingston is in charge of the weekly campus newspaper at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, a Jesuit school. He has been editor-in-chief for the Pauw Wow (named after a founder of Jersey City, Michael Pauw) since the beginning of the 2001 school year, and said that putting the relatively small four-page edition of the paper devoted to the WTC attacks was very difficult.
"It just really hit home," said Livingston, originally from Staten Island, N.Y. The catch headline of the Sept. 11 paper was "Outraged But Not Unhinged." Livingston came up with it after several discussions with the editorial staff.
Livingston was relaxing in his dormitory room on Glenwood Avenue when his roommate walked in nervously and told him, "We’re at war! Wake up, we’re at war!"
Livingston quickly got dressed, left his room, and began to run to the Pauw Wow’s office at Dinneen Hall on Kennedy Boulevard. He and the staff left the campus and went off to locations in Jersey City that had better views of the crumbling towers.
A few people died from St. Peter’s, among them criminal justice adjunct professor Hank Brightman.
"What we found out about him was that he had a good personality and was liked by his students," Livingston said.
Growing up only a half mile away from the World Trade Center, Livingston was deeply affected by the attacks. The Pauw Wow’s Sept. 11th edition is almost his personal tribute, a contribution to what he calls "the day America cried together."
Livingston started at the paper as a cartoonist and eventually handled the arts and entertainment beat before becoming chief editor in 2001.
He is unsure about pursuing a professional career in journalism, but says that so far he is enjoying working with his peers at the fun college newspaper environment he has been able to create with the help of the staff.
"We’re all like a big family," he said. "Being involved with the newspaper is very fun."
St. Peter’s is home to approximately 2,000 undergraduate students and it is well known for its business department. It is a very diverse community of students who are mainly from New Jersey.