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As New York City police assembled around Columbia University on Tuesday evening, student journalist Tanvi Krishnamurthy typed out an all-caps tweet from the college radio station’s account: “PLEASE TUNE IN NOW.”

Police were in riot gear. Demonstrators were chanting outside. Pro-Palestinian protesters had barricaded themselves in a university building. With the country wondering what would happen inside Columbia’s gates — and onlookers and other reporters blocked from the campus — WKCR’s student journalists began delivering a live picture of the tumult that couldn’t be found anywhere else.

Despite heavy police presence, university orders to go inside and a lack of sleep and supplies, the team of 18 undergraduates broadcast the news to the nation as an extraordinary series of events <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/04/30/college-protests-gaza-arrest-expulsions/" target=_blank>unfolded on Columbia’s campus</a>. More than 21,000 people streamed the broadcast online and countless others listened via FM radio, as social media users spread the students’ reporting.

“Everyone understood that what was possibly going to happen was going to be big,” Georgia Dillane, a Barnard College junior and the station’s program director, told The Washington Post.

But the student journalists had no idea how big — or how strongly people would react.

“You are keeping democracy alive,” one person wrote on the station’s final Instagram post of the night. “The world appreciates your brave and professional service,” another said. “Gives me hope for journalism,” commented a third.

It even drew the attention of the Pulitzer Prize Board, which commended Columbia students — who also included the Columbia Daily Spectator reporters and journalism graduate students — <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/news/statement-pulitzer-prize-board-3" target=_blank>saying</a> they “worked to document a major national news event under difficult and dangerous circumstances and at risk of arrest.” (The Pulitzer Prizes are housed at Columbia.)

Relying on the immediacy and intimacy of radio, the students’ on-the-ground reporting in multiple places allowed them to keep eyes on the fast-moving action.

The coverage was “not just about what the politics are of bringing NYPD onto campus,” Dillane said, “it’s about what it feels like to be a student witnessing that at a place where you go to class.”

By the time the world began tuning in between 8 and 9 p.m. Tuesday, some of the WKCR students had been up for nearly 36 hours, covering the protesters’ occupation of Hamilton Hall the prior night. With entry to campus barred, the 10 reporters there had to stay if they wanted to have anyone to cover the story. Their colleagues had been running food and battery packs to the gates all day, passing the supplies through the bars.

They were also risking discipline for ignoring a university order to shelter in place. Later, some would be blocked by police from entering the station studio. Others would be kept inside the journalism school under threat of arrest. Meanwhile, the news would unfold.

All that time, WKCR 89.9 would stay on the air.

Julia Wu

The WKCR reporters were assembled Tuesday evening, sleep-deprived but ready, as dusk fell and a feeling of tension mounted. They had been reporting on the story since the early hours of April 17, when the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/04/18/columbia-student-gaza-protests-nypd/" target=_blank>first protest encampment</a> went up.

That encampment had <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/04/26/columbia-protest-students-israel-gaza/?itid=lk_inline_manual_20" target=_blank>sparked the wave</a> of pro-Palestinian demonstrations at colleges across the country. In the following weeks, as more than 2,000 people have been arrested, according to a Post count, student journalists have doggedly covered the scenes on their campuses, in many cases watching police come onto campus or arrest their peers.

WKCR station manager Ted Schmiedeler, a sophomore, along with colleagues Ian Pumphrey and Macy Hanzlik-Barend, was among the first reporters on the scene April 17 — “before there was national media attention, before people on campus even knew what was going to happen.”

Now, he and nine other reporters were stationed around Hamilton Hall, waiting for something to happen. They listened to their colleagues off-campus report that NYPD was shutting down streets and putting up barricades as tensions rose outside the campus gates. Inside, there was an eerie anticipation.

One earbud in and battery packs plugged into phones, the WKCR students passed the report back and forth, giving protest and police updates. As they had done on other days, students in the field stayed on a Zoom call with those in the studio, who broadcast it live, recounted Dillane, 21, and Schmiedeler, 20, who together spoke to The Post this week on behalf of WKCR.

Listeners became familiar with the reporters’ first names and where they were stationed as the students spoke. “It really seems like things are heating up here,” Schmiedeler said on air sometime after 8 p.m.

Jake Borden

Then a university alert announced a shelter-in-place — anyone who stayed outside could face discipline. Schmiedeler didn’t move from his spot outside the hall. He looked around at the other student journalists. Nobody was going inside.

Schmiedeler gave Dillane a big hug, then walked over to senior David Gonzalez and sophomore Ella Presiado, the two other reporters outside Hamilton. They embraced, then waited.

“Everyone recognized what could happen would be possibly dangerous,” Dillane said, “but we wanted to prioritize our coverage.”

Soon, reporters on the street saw NYPD officers cross through the campus gate. Those at Hamilton Hall prepared. The journalists’ many vantage points in and around campus were paying off. The tone of the broadcast became more urgent as students interrupted each other with updates.

“Things very quickly escalated. If people were listening, you could hear the jumping back and forth between people’s perspectives,” Dillane told The Post. “ … It was very important to convey to listeners that these things were happening all at the same time.”

Marco Postigo Storel

Dillane and Gonzalez were paired up outside Hamilton Hall. Their broadcast riveted listeners as police pushed spectators and press away from the area.

“We are now being escorted off the premises, both press, spectators, anyone else. Frankly no one here is left to document whatever might go down at Hamilton Hall as we are now being told to leave the premises,” Gonzalez said. “We are now being escorted off the premises by NYPD.”

They didn’t want to leave: Who would remain to document whatever was about to happen?

“If ourselves and every other student press weren’t going to be able to be on campus to bear witness to this, we weren’t sure who was,” Dillane later recalled.

Also outside, Schmiedeler and Presiado documented the commotion as NYPD told students to go inside, but campus public safety officers refused to let anyone but residents into the dorms.

In the studio, the team had begun realizing that a lot of people were listening to WKCR. They started adjusting the audio quality to accommodate more listeners, thanking people for tuning in.

“We have a wildly unprecedented number of streamers right now,” Hanzlik-Barend had said around 8:40 p.m., about 20 minutes before the police approached Hamilton.

Now, sheltering in the basement stairwell of a dorm, Schmiedeler got an automated text alert: The station’s live stream had crashed. He’d seen that alert before because of technical issues. Never had he imagined it would happen because too many people were tuning in. More than 13,000 people were trying to access the website.

“It was a real emotional moment,” he said. “To see that not only members of our community, not only members of the New York City community, but people all across the world … were relying on our coverage was a surreal moment for me<i>.</i>”

Most of the reporters in the field found out the stream was crashing from their own broadcast — and didn’t have much time to dwell on it.

“I had no idea because I was so focused on what was happening,” Dillane said. “Then we were hearing over Zoom … to everyone, all the listeners, ‘Our stream is down right now, please if you can move to FM.’”

After NYPD removed onlookers from the scene, the radio station lost its direct view of Hamilton Hall. On a student’s Instagram live stream, they saw police entering the hall through a window. But two reporters still had a vantage point: Senior Sarah Barlyn and sophomore Sawyer Huckabee, stationed on a ramp near the side of the building, soon saw the police bringing occupiers out of the buildings.

Meanwhile, some of the station’s other field reporters had taken refuge in Pulitzer Hall, which houses the journalism graduate school. The NYPD would later enter the building and warn that anyone exiting would be arrested, preventing WKCR and graduate students from leaving to report.

NYPD officers eventually arrested 109 people. Outside, from 114th Street, reporters Ben Erdmann and Natalie Najar, both juniors, saw corrections buses arrive at the campus, get loaded with detained occupiers and pull away.

The night seemed to be ending. Dillane and Gonzalez persuaded NYPD officers to let them walk back to the radio station, while senior Maria Shaughnessy negotiated with campus officers for Presiado and Schmiedeler’s exit from a dorm.

That trio made it onto Amsterdam Avenue, where they met six colleagues who had been stuck in Pulitzer Hall. One of them, Casey Lamb, had turned 20 in the building when the clock had passed midnight.

The group embraced in the middle of the street. Schmiedeler began crying when he saw his friend Pumphrey; they’d begun this coverage together so many days earlier.

When the students got to the station, it was the first time the radio’s staff had been in the same room since their protest coverage had begun.

“I think we all hugged the tightest we had in the two weeks,” Schmiedeler said. “It became emotional to look at everyone in the same space and recognize we had just all done that and been a part of that.”

The students said Thursday they were gratified by the public’s response to their work and grateful that people had recognized both the value of radio and of student journalism. They didn’t want attention, Dillane said — they just wanted to get the news out.

The students are planning for the coverage to continue for as long as the story lasts. They’re also processing what they experienced.

“It’s probably something,” said Dillane, “that’s going to be on our minds for a very long time.”

They tried to get some rest on Wednesday, programming the station to play its usual jazz music.

Still, that morning, WKCR was alerted to another protest forming. The reporters didn’t need to have much discussion. They went outside and began to cover it.

Keystone State Press Awards, first place in personality profile, 2019

Society of Professional Journalists Keystone Spotlight, first place in environmental reporting, 2018

Associated Press Sports Editors Top 10 Breaking News Award, 2017

Keystone State Press Awards, first place in special projects, 2017

University of Puget Sound, BA in Foreign Language (French) and International Affairs

University of Maryland, Master of Journalism

Justine McDaniel is a general assignment reporter who joined The Washington Post in 2022. She spent eight years at the Philadelphia Inquirer, covering topics including the coronavirus, environmental issues and breaking news, and has reported in D.C., Seattle and Northern California.

Justine McDaniel

Stanford University, BA in History and MA in Communications

Daniel Wu is a reporter on The Washington Post's Morning Mix team. He joined The Post as an intern on the Metro desk in 2022 and previously worked for the Seattle Times and the San Jose Mercury News.

Daniel Wu

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Columbia student radio station broadcasted on protests as police swarmed

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