How student journalists are tested while covering campus protests

Ordered by police to leave the scene of a UCLA campus protest after violence broke out, Catherine Hamilton and three colleagues from the Daily Bruin suddenly found themselves surrounded by demonstrators who beat, kicked and sprayed them with a noxious chemical.

On American campuses awash in anger this spring, student journalists are in the center of it all, sometimes uncomfortably so. They're immersed in the story in ways journalists for major media organizations often can't be. And they face dual challenges — as members of the media and students at the institutions they are covering.

Across the country from University of California, Los Angeles late Tuesday, a student-run radio station broadcast live as police cleared a building taken by protesters on the Columbia University campus, while other student journalists were confined to dorms and threatened with arrests.

Hamilton's attackers wore masks. But she recognized the voice of one as a counter-demonstrator sympathetic to Israel's cause because of prior reporting when some of them filmed her working and harassed her by name. She checked out of a hospital Wednesday after learning that injuries to her arms and chest were bruises.

“While it was terrifying and, honestly, will take a lot of mental processing, the experience confirmed for me the importance of student journalists because we know our campus better than any outside reporter would," said Hamilton, 21. "It has not deterred me from wanting to continue this coverage.”