Leading Amid Chaos
A staff meeting at the offices of the Columbia Daily Spectator. Photo courtesy of New York Magazine/The Columbia Daily Spectator
A student journalist on how her team coped with the stress of covering a campus under siege
Editor’s note: This conversation with Isabella Ramírez, editor-in-chief of the Columbia Daily Spectator was originally published by MindSite News, a nonprofit dedicated to coverage of mental health issues. palabra is republishing the story in line with our mission to uplift the work of independent journalists and students, with a particular focus on how coverage of traumatic events impacts their mental health.
The protests that have erupted on college campuses across the country have generated almost as much controversy and outrage as the Israel-Hamas war that is the focus of those demonstrations. The story of these protests has mostly been told by outsiders and non-students. Until now.
For its May 6 issue, New York Magazine gave over its cover and 20 pages inside to an in-depth report on the protests at Columbia University. The stories were written by student staff of the Columbia Daily Spectator, the almost 150-year-old undergraduate student newspaper.
The issue was published less than a week after reporters and photographers from the Spectator documented the action when police forcibly removed students who had occupied the university’s Hamilton Hall.
The magazine’s cover story was written and edited by 11 students on the Spectator’s staff, led by Spectator editor-in-chief, Isabella Ramírez.
The 20-year-old junior, a sociology major, spoke with MindSite News via Zoom, describing the stress and trauma experienced by the student journalists and the campus community over the past eight months, since the Israel-Hamas war began.
‘The police sweeps have been a really traumatic time for a lot of our journalists who bore witness to a lot of incidents both of hate, but also of police brutality.’
Ramírez grew up in Palm Beach County, Florida and graduated from Dreyfoos School of the Arts, a performing arts magnet school, where she studied communications and worked on the school yearbook and magazine.
Although it does not have an undergraduate journalism program, she applied to Columbia because of its legacy of writers and journalists. Ramírez knew she wanted to work at the Spectator even before she was accepted to the school. She started at the publication in her freshman year and over three years worked her way up from trainee to staff writer, to senior staff writer, to deputy editor and, in her junior year, to editor-in-chief, leading a staff of 300. Some 50 staffers were ultimately involved in covering the protests.
This version of our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Isabella Ramírez, editor-in-chief for the Columbia Daily Spectator. Photo courtesy of New York Magazine/The Columbia Daily Spectator
Waters: How did The Spectator begin covering the protests and the encampment?
Ramírez: We’ve been covering since October 7, and we’ve had to make a lot of difficult decisions on how our reporters could take part in this and reaffirm our conflict-of-interest guidelines that say you cannot be someone who participates in protest and also cover them. It’s not that you can’t be on Spectator as a whole, but if you are reporting on this issue, you must disengage in that realm to engage in the reporting realm. That was challenging because it narrowed our pool in terms of who could participate to those who felt reporting was the most meaningful way for them to participate.
One thing that was challenging was how to describe the conflict and the war. We were watching critiques arise about how national media was approaching it. We didn’t want to repeat those mistakes but we had no other standard to follow. If you follow the timeline of our coverage, you can see the growing sophistication. In the beginning I felt like I, as university news editor, was stumbling. I didn’t know how to accurately depict why people were protesting or how they were protesting without contributing to what I believe were inflammatory or dangerous stereotypes about different types of people.
‘We were reporting in situations that were often more dangerous than we were used to, like being in the middle of protests, being in the middle of clashes between police and protesters.’
Waters: I’m curious about the emotional and psychological stress you all were under, both as members of the Columbia community and as journalists trying to write about it.
Ramírez: These past two weeks with the encampment and the police sweeps have been a really traumatic time for a lot of our journalists who bore witness to a lot of incidents both of hate, but also of police brutality. We’ve witnessed a lot of violence — not just direct eyewitness, but also in the editing process, even when we’re fact checking. Our copy editors are watching the videos of the evidence that we’re reporting on.
It can be really emotional to write about the pain and suffering of your peers. No matter the type of source we’ve spoken to, that’s a lot of what people have echoed to us. People are in different states of emotional distress — sources who cry in front of you, who share stories that are so intimate to their lives. As a student journalist, you’re in a position to empathize with your peer and to really feel for that person. But being in a journalist’s role, you occupy something different than a friend to someone seeking solace. It’s a weird thing to navigate.
April 30: “I didn’t mean to take this photo. The cops began to kettle us, threatening to arrest us. It was terrifying. Moments ago, Wyatt, who was taking video, and I were standing and then the next moment, they were moving toward us so quickly.” —Gabriella Gregor Splaver, Spectator Senior Photographer. Photo courtesy of New York Magazine/The Columbia Daily Spectator
Waters: What kinds of systems did you develop to support each other, take care of each other? And could you turn to the university for help?
Ramírez: Most of our support has come peer-to-peer. We spent a lot of time together, especially during the encampment days. We were in our library for hours and hours, working together. Something as basic as food and sleep were really challenging. We had a lot of alumni reach out and I ended up facilitating a lot of donations that came to us to be able to feed my newsroom and order food or purchase anything that our staff needed.
We also created shift systems. At the beginning people were often up for more than 24 hours at a time, which was absurd. I was guilty of this because I had gone to DC on the day of my president’s (Minouche Shafik) Congressional hearing and then came back to the encampment (just as police entered campus to evict protesters) and was up for almost 40 hours. We quickly acknowledged that was not sustainable — that our editors and our writers could not possibly continue this coverage and do it right if we were exhausted. So we came up with shift systems to have people switch in and out.
We were reporting in situations that were often more dangerous than we were used to, like being in the middle of protests, being in the middle of clashes between police and protesters. We never sent people out by themselves. That was a very strict rule for us. People were never reporting on their own. We came up with a lot of mechanisms for safety and who to call and who were the point people. That was particularly my role: If anything were to go wrong, I’m the emergency contact for my reporters.
We had to come up with a lot of safety situations, and emphasized that if a situation were to get severe, you need to get out. The story is never more important than your safety. If you need to leave, leave. No one’s gonna be mad that you didn’t turn a story in on time. That’s not more important than your physical well-being. We had a lot of dialogue and tough conversations about how to keep each other safe and how to carve out time for sleep, carve out time to order food, make sure that we were taking breaks and that people weren’t trying to overexert and stretch themselves too thin.
Waters: In terms of emotional stress, you all were in situations where there was violence. Were there specific ways that you all tried to support each other afterward?
Ramírez: There were a few instances that were particularly jarring. There was a march led by these famous conservative figures outside of our gates and it led to a lot of hate speech and clashes between counter-protesters and protesters. It was really jarring for our reporters. They came back and began writing but first we all came together, and they were like “Guys, we need to tell you about what we just experienced.” When our reporters went through something like that, they didn’t go straight into the writing. They would come to our office which is an off-campus kind of safe space, and we would have conversations about what just happened. Sometimes they were like, “I don’t know how to even approach writing about this.”
As editors who might not have been physically present for these events, I think we were really crucial for our reporters to kind of support them to talk through their experiences, what they saw as they were reporting and help them feel that they were not alone in coming up with “OK, how do I proceed from here? And how do I turn this into a piece that I’m ready to submit?”
April 18: “Right after the first arrests, the police began guarding the lawn while hundreds of protesters and onlookers stood in shock.” —Asha Ahn, Spectator Photographer. Photo courtesy of New York Magazine/The Columbia Daily Spectator
Waters: Before the protests, were there divisions or tensions within the editorial staff over the Israeli-Hamas war?
Ramírez: There were tensions both inside and outside the newsroom. There was tension towards Spectator, frustrations that I believe people had about media in general that were projected onto us — that Spectator was perpetuating some sort of harm in our coverage or that we weren’t covering it in the right way, or we weren’t portraying people in the right way.
Waters: Were you criticized as being pro-Zionist or antisemitic or anti-Muslim — or all of the above?
Ramírez: We were accused of being all things at the same time which was affirming to us in a weird way. If you’re getting criticism from all angles, it must mean that people are reading our pieces and projecting what they already believe onto them. It’s not necessarily the pieces themselves are inherently biased, but it was something that we were critically thinking about. That’s not to say we were perfect – I don’t think we’re perfect now, but some people were deeply criticizing some of the work we were doing. That was external to us and we were kind of confronted with that. Internal to the newsroom there were definitely disagreements about language.
As soon as it rolled out, we adopted AP style guidelines for the Israel Hamas War — they came out with a topical guide. That was really helpful to us. But even that phrasing — “Israel Hamas War” — became controversial to some individuals who felt like the war in Gaza was more accurate. There were so many complicated conversations that we’re still having. And as the war progresses, we’ve also progressed in how we think about these issues and how we describe it. But early on, as I became editor-in-chief this spring, we wanted to be pretty rigid to a set of guidelines so that our coverage was consistent, that there wasn’t an area where different writers could insert their bias by changing the rhetoric.
Waters: I bet.
Ramírez: You feel like you need to comfort your peer, but also do your role. I think we navigate with a certain empathy that I am very proud of but it’s taxing and hard on our journalists. We’re also people who are directly impacted by the things that happen on our campus. When the administration makes a decision people are unhappy about, we have direct stakes in that, but as journalists we occupy this weird role where we have — to some degree — to remove ourselves from what’s happening to be able to report on it. That level of attachment and detachment that we have to go between can feel really isolating. We’re not in a place where we can process what has happened to our peers or even something that might impact us directly because we have to report for our community. We have to fulfill this job.
‘I’m incredibly proud and impressed by the strength of the people I’ve worked with. I feel a lot closer to my reporters and fellow editors than ever.’
Waters: How do you view the unique stresses faced by Palestinian, Jewish or Muslim students and how have you tried to cover those editorially and talk about internally.
Ramírez: There are many people on our staff who were directly impacted by what we were covering on the basis of their identity — whether they were Jewish, Muslim, Arab. We had to navigate a particular sensitivity with reporters who wanted to do the coverage but were also impacted by the events. Our general rule of thumb was there is no level of proximity on the basis of identity that would bar you from participating. That’s not the same as a conflict-of-interest guideline. It was incredibly important to us, in fact, to have a diversity of people who were covering the issue from many angles.
There were a lot of instances where people came after our reporters directly right for their perceived or real identities in terms of how that impacted their reporting.
Waters: Can you be a bit more specific?
Ramírez: We have several Jewish journalists, and we’ve had a few instances where there were anti-semitic remarks made about one of our Jewish journalists who has been reporting on this issue for several months. This was early on — October, November December — and not coming, necessarily, from students. Our coverage was having so much reach that we were reaching audiences we weren’t familiar with. Our stories were on Twitter reaching the hands of who knows who, and really hateful things were being said about some of our reporters. There was a time when Spectator received multiple death threats that we had to report to Public Safety. One was to a Jewish reporter and another was about an article about a Jewish student. We did not know where those death threats were coming from; they were just in our emails. There was a really scary period of time in which we were deeply frightened for the safety of some of our reporters.
There were other instances where some of our Arab journalists have been on the ground reporting — not partaking in the protests, but there as reporters. And they were assumed to be of a particular position and had hateful things said to them. It can be really hard to navigate this. I think it would be deeply unfair for someone who is impacted to not be able to do reporting because others are singling them out.
Our job was to figure out the best ways to protect those people and make sure that we were also standing by our journalists. If something were to happen, it was our job to elevate it to a more public-facing front, to stand by our reporting, stand by our journalists and support them in any way we could.
April 26: “The Passover setup felt really good because everyone was happily enjoying the holiday together.” —Gabriella Gregor Splaver, Spectator Senior Photographer. Photo courtesy of New York Magazine/The Columbia Daily Spectator
Waters: What form did that support take, from you as editor, and in other ways?
Ramírez: A lot of it looked like check-ins that went beyond just where’s your story? Going to coffee, regular check-ins, particularly with reporters who were most impacted and giving them a chance to share their experiences — not just us an editor checking in, but as a friend, a peer and a classmate who really cares about their well-being.
Waters: From a mental health perspective, you’ve dealt with stress and developed resilience and coping mechanisms. How does it all feel at this moment?
Ramírez: Overall, I’m incredibly proud and impressed by the strength of the people I’ve worked with. I feel a lot closer to my reporters and fellow editors than ever. We’re bonded by this moment and the time we’ve spent together under a lot of stress. I think that this will likely be one of the defining moments of my time at Columbia. When I reflect on my time at Spectator, I think I’m gonna remember this most in terms of the magnitude of the reporting we were doing, how historical this moment has been, as well as how Spectator was able to mobilize and come together in a really powerful way to cover and deliver a very important service for our community. I don’t think I’m in the process of reflection quite yet, even though things have changed a lot from what it looked like a week ago.
Waters: There is much more openness to talking about mental health in your generation than there was a decade or two ago. How do you think that has helped?
Ramírez: I think it’s helped tremendously in the sense that my reporters and editors and I have been very open about the stresses we’re under and when we need a break. There have been points in which the reporters have hit their limit and were in a state of emotional distress that was obviously impeding their work and their ability to function as a student and a person. Those were moments where we came together and intervened to say; “You need to take a break. I know this has been so hard. Please take a day off, or several days off.” We have a student head of diversity, equity and inclusion whose role drastically expanded during this time to encompass facilitating dialogue about mental health, about identity and how that might intersect with reporting.
She did a lot to bring us snacks and to encourage us to take breaks. So while I and other editors were in the thick of the reporting, she played a crucial role in checking in with people all the time and having conversations that were largely confidential and private. She would report back to us and tell us how people were feeling, and we would make corrections in terms of what we could do. The demands of the coverage have been so great and we’ve had to push ourselves very hard. So we’ve course-corrected or tried to find tweaks to make sure we’re not over exerting our reporters.
April 26: “At this point, everything was orderly. I looked at it and realized how much everyone had gone through in the past couple of days that we still hadn’t had time to process.” —Gabriella Gregor Splaver, Spectator Senior Photographer. Photo courtesy of New York Magazine/The Columbia Daily Spectator
Waters: Do you think students ultimately feel empowered by the fact that they took action and protested or do you think they feel disempowered by the actions of the administration?
Ramírez: There’s a wide range, but when it comes to the students who have been involved in the protests, I think it’s clear that very little was going to disempower the movement. Columbia became an inspiration for encampments across the nation and across the world. Community formed around these protests. Within the Columbia encampment itself, on that lawn, there were songs, performance, art. A lot of students felt subdued by the actions of administration — the disciplinary action, the lockdowns, the police sweeps. But one of the remarkable things was after the first first police sweep, they got stronger. The encampment came back double, triple, quadruple the size. More people got involved, more people were in support, and now we’re at a place that’s really weird because the campus lockdown has cut off a lot of opportunity for protests.
I think even with students who disagree with each other, there’s sort of a weird agreement at some level about the fact that Administration has not adequately or maybe at all supported students during this time or made decisions that prioritize the needs and desires of those students. I think even for students who disagree with one another, who are on different ends of the spectrum of belief, there’s an agreement that the handling of the entire situation — from the protests to the arrests to the cancellation of commencement — has been a mess that has very profound implications for so many people And so I think our community is in a place where we’re going to be healing probably for a very long time.
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Rob Waters, the founding editor of MindSite News, is an award-winning health and mental health journalist. He was a contributing writer to Health Affairs and has worked as a staff reporter or editor at Bloomberg News, Time Inc. Health and Psychotherapy Networker. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Kaiser Health News, STAT, the Atlantic.com, Mother Jones and many other outlets. He was a 2005 fellow with the Carter Center for Mental Health Journalism. His most recent awards, in 2021, come from the Association of Health Care Journalists, the National Institute for Health Care Management, and the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California branch, for his mental health coverage. He is based in Oakland and Berkeley, California. He can be reached at info@mindsitenews.org. @robwaters001