Amid bomb threat, UNC's DTH reports from the street

Generally, the news-gathering process goes like this: News breaks, reporters chase after it. Simple enough.

Sunday night, it worked in reverse. News landed on the doorstep of the Daily Tar Heel, UNC Chapel Hill's student newspaper. It came in the form of a bomb threat, now proven to be a hoax, that led campus police to evacuate several campus buildings. One was the student union. That's where the Daily Tar Heel is located.

Big news. Bad timing.

Here's what Allison Nichols, the DTH's editor in chief, told me today about the experience.

So it's late Sunday night and you're hard at work. And then what?

At about 9:20 I got a call from the opinion editor who had gone home from the night. He was in the front of the student union and our office is in the back and he said they were evacuating.

They had not made it back to our office yet but they were intending to. So I found out there was a bomb threat so I went back and got the staff out.

Were you afraid?

I wasn't particularly scared. I didn't think we'd be out all night long. I figured they'd figure it out. We assembled across the street from our office on Raleigh Road.

Literally?

Yes. Literally under a street light. (Editor's note: it's true. See the photo below)  We had a few computers and we were posting breaking news to our website. We were having folks call any spokesmen or all the various police units and so forth to figure out what was going on. We had people walking around in pairs trying to figure out where, exactly, the barriers were where you could and couldn't go.

Over time they pushed further and further out on campus. By 10 I could tell we wouldn't be able to wander around campus. There were a lot of police with big guns and they were getting increasingly irritated with us.They were trying to do their jobs and we were a bunch of kids trying to figure out what we could do.

How many staff members did you have involved in this?

There were probably about 50 in the newsroom at the time.

Fifty?

We have a large staff. We don't pay them. (laugh). We dwindled throughout the night. Around midnight, I would say, there were still 15 to 20 hanging out.

Was it fun?


No. It wasn't fun. It was really cold, and we didn't know if we were going to be able to get back in. It didn't really appear urgent. It just appeared that it was going to last forever.

 _{(Members of the Daily Tar Heel staff gather on a campus sidewalk, still
producing content on deadline after being evacuated from the DTH
offices due to a bomb threat late Sunday, Feb. 15, 2009. News &
Observer photo by Ted Richardson)}

Did it feel like a real threat, or just a go-through-the-motions sort of thing?

It's hard to say. I have two managing editors. One of them, and I, were remarking about how we weren't really taking it seriously. I think we're jaded about stuff like this happening on our campus. I never thought we were in any danger.

Kinda odd that the news comes to you, isn't it?

The only thing this person disrupted with this bomb threat on a Sunday night was me getting the paper out and maybe a handful of people studying. It was different from any other situation we've handled before, because of Twitter.

Tell me about that. (Twitter is a social networking site that allows raid-fire information updates to subscribers)

We were all posting updates, particularly me and a managing editor. We all have twitter accounts. We were tweeting constantly, every time we were finding something. It's faster than updating a breaking news story on the web.

So when you're out, literally, on the street, you've got basically laptops and you could do almost everything you wanted to be able to do?

We were able to do everything on the web. We could update stories, even photos. We have something like 50 comments on our breaking news story that night. We were the only ones who knew what was going on. I gave 5 or 6 or seven interviews to other media last night.

Was there anything you left in the newsroom that you wished you hadn't, since once you were evacuated you couldn't get back in?

I had my keys and my phones, which is really what I needed. And a notebook. Some people left their phones. Some left their house keys. Some people, like me, were ill-dressed for the occasion. I was wearing flip-flops.

So you didn't get the print newspaper out?

We did. We got back in at 3:30 a.m. and got it to the printer by 5 a.m. Our print deadline is 12:30. But because of our extenuating circumstances...we were able to get it all out.

Are you happy with it?

Yeah, it looks great.

Any lessons to be learned from this?

I can't go on enough about the professionalism of the staff. They can handle anythng. They came in here and put a paper out at 4 in the morning. Noone at all questioned or complained or worried about the fact that we were going to wait until I told them to get up and come back in. So that's what they did. The circumstances don't really get worse than this in terms of trying to produce a newspaper. We have been tested before. Every time, I never have a doubt they'll be able to rise to the occasion.

Technology helped a lot here.

If we didn't have laptops, if we didn't have wireless internet, then, you know, we might have been learning things all through the night but noone would have known.

Did this demonstrate to you the value of your newspaper for your community?

Yes, absolutely. There has already been criticism of the university handling of this. There wasn't an alert (quickly enough). We were the only source of information and quickly, students realized that. Like I said, there was a great many comments on our stories.

Check out the Daily Tar Heel coverage of the bomb hoax here.