The new edition of The Daily Tar Heel was expected to focus on the impending football season at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. On Monday afternoon, an armed person was reported to be on campus. The university went into an hours-long lockdown. The defendant was later apprehended for the deadly shooting of a faculty member.
Members of the independent student newspaper team gathered on Monday evening. They abandoned their original concept for the home page.
“We replied, ‘Well, we can’t do that. “We need something impactful,” stated Caitlyn Yaede, the Tar Heel’s print managing editor. “We need something that’s going to really communicate the gravity of the situation.”
Then the thought struck – very late Monday night. Emmy Martin, The Daily Tar Heel’s 2023-24 editor-in-chief, was in bed reviewing all of the text messages she’d received during the lockdown. She hadn’t had the time to respond to them. She also saw social media posts from some of her UNC classmates, who shared the text messages they had received.
“That’s when it hit me. Everyone was getting these texts, and we were all having a different experience, but one that we all shared,” said Martin, a junior double majoring in journalism and information science. “That’s when I kind of knew that that is our front page.”
She texted Yaede. What if they compiled text messages from UNC students who were locked down?
“I said ‘Genius.'” “Perfect,” said Yaede, who attended UNC as an undergraduate and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in public policy.
Yaede stated that the top page design was a collaborative effort between herself, Martin, and Tar Heel multimedia managing editor Carson Elm-Picard. They requested their newsroom leadership team of roughly 36 editors to contact colleagues to see if they would share the text messages they had sent to family and friends during the lockdown.
It was just so upsetting to watch people’s parents give them things that I know my mother would send to me,” Yaede explained. “I believe one was along the lines of, ‘I wish I could just come get you right now.'” And my mother says this to me while I’m sick in my dorm room, let alone when someone is armed on our campus. The emotion was so unanimous. Everybody’s parents felt helpless. All of the students were afraid. And no matter how they communicated it, whether through expletives or heartbreaking texts to their loved ones, everyone expressed the same rage and anxiety. It simply made me sad.
The end result was a powerful front page that garnered national notice.
The Daily Tar Heel’s Wednesday edition includes some of the text texts sent and received by UNC students. It’s in all caps, the typeface is Myriad Pro Semibold Condensed, and the type is predominantly black bold with some red.
And it starts with questions.
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