After Shooting, WIU Needs Student Journalists To Keep Reporting

CHICAGO — Shots rang out at my alma mater, Western Illinois University — a "roommate dispute" in Thompson Hall Tuesday had turned bloody. Somebody pulled a fire alarm that night sending students for the exits around the same time police said an "armed-and-dangerous" freshman was on the run.

About 1,000 students took shelter at Western Hall as officials locked down the Macomb campus and cancelled classes. The suspected shooter, an 18-year-old freshman, turned himself in Wednesday at a Chicago police station. On Thursday, classes resumed, the library doors were unlocked.

And as I write this, not a single one of those details has been published in the Western Courier, the independent student newspaper where I got my start questioning authority in print.

To me, that's almost as troubling as a gun shot in a dorm room. It's a warning sign journalism isn't just dying because evil vulture capitalists are slashing staff, or that labor unions, billionaires and political insiders have their grubby fingers all over the news. The situation far is worse than that.

"Kids don't want to write for newspapers anymore," Courier adviser Will Buss told me. "I always have editor positions open. I try to lure students to check out the paper. I've had open houses, offered free food ... had raffles. They're not into the news. It's a sign of the times."

Buss was a couple of years behind me at Western when we worked on the Courier together. Since then, he worked at newspapers around Illinois including a 16-year stint at Belleville News-Democrat before making his way back to Macomb. He shares my concern.

Everybody should care, especially WIU students headed back to class after this week's bloody roommate dispute. After a few days, maybe a week, there won't be reporters from local news outlets pressing university officials for answers to tough questions about the response to the shooting.

After the news cycle moves on to the crisis of the day, there won't be anyone pushing for details about how public safety officers responded? Did students at Thompson Hall know an armed, fellow student was making a get away around the same time evacuated in response to the fire alarm? No one will ask follow-up questions: Why? Why not? What changes will be made?

Without a vibrant Western Courier, students have a diminished voice that's more easily dismissed and ignored. Without a dogged student press, WIU's administration can more easily control narratives and even censor news. It happened in 2015, when former WIU President Jack Thomas suspended then Courier editor Nicholas Stewart for the crime of practicing journalism that was unflattering to the university.

Stewart, now an Emmy-winning TV meteorologist and storm chaser, reported on a melee outside the University Union that used pepper spray to disperse a crowd, and got punished for it.

Back then, Western's then-vice president of student affairs Gary Biller accused Stewart of posing a "threat to the normal operations of the University," and "committing acts of dishonesty" by representing the university without permission and "engaging in an act of theft or abuse of computer time." I called Thomas and read him the riot act for stupidly infringing on the First Amendment. Other journalists wrote op-eds as part of a righteous chorus. The Student Press Law Center took up Stewart's cause to get the suspension reversed.

It was a valuable lesson that we always need strong independent journalism to push back against when the powerful. At Western, the thing that's more dangerous than vindictive acts of university administrators willing to trample on the rights of student journalists, is no student journalism at all.

When Buss and I worked at the Courier the paper was stacked with scrappy reporters, ambitious editors and a team of talented photographers vying for the front page, producing award-winning stories and competing for top editorial jobs that came with tuition stipends.

These days, like professional newsrooms across the country, the Courier's reporting staff that has dwindled to a handful of staffers and too few freelancers face at an uncertain future. Already, coronavirus contributed to the untimely death of the Courier's print edition after a 115-year run.

"The staff we have does a pretty good job. There's just not enough of them," Buss said, offering a glimmer of hope. "I’ve got a few good ones ... who still go and get after it."

In times like these — in the wake of a bloody roommate dispute, during a strange school year tainted by a pandemic and roiling civil unrest on the eve of a historic presidential election at a financially struggling public university with declining enrollment — Leathernecks need Courier journalists to keep covering the news more than ever.

To them I say: Don't stop reporting.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots.

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