When Yale University graduate student Annie Le was announced missing last Wednesday, the first reporters on the story weren’t from The Hartford Courant, the New Haven Register or another local news outlet.
They were student journalists from the Yale Daily News, which in the past week has published ongoing stories, photo galleries, time lines and videos about the murder, the arrest of murder suspect Raymond Clark III and the university’s reaction to the events.
In doing so, this daily student newspaper has established itself as the news outlet that some are turning to first for coverage of what has become a national story.
“The Yale Daily News has been the best source for information throughout this tragic series of events,” one reader commented on a story about Clark’s arrest. Another reader said, “I have been following this story from Austin, Texas, and time and again I find myself on the YDN site because this is where the truly excellent reporting has been.”
Several national news outlets, including CNN, have interviewed Thomas Kaplan, editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News, for updates on the developing story of Le’s murder. In an e-mail interview on Thursday, I asked Kaplan about the paper’s coverage. His edited responses are below.
Mallary Tenore: A lot of people in the comments section of the Yale Daily News stories have said they’ve turned to your news site before other news outlets for stories about Le. Why do you think that is?
Thomas Kaplan: It has been heartening to see all the kind comments that visitors have posted to our Web site recently, and we definitely have gotten more attention than we expected (including some 2 million page views since Le went missing, the largest spike in traffic in the 14 years we have been publishing online).
We see ourselves as the paper of record for the Yale community, so in a story of this magnitude, we hope to provide the most comprehensive coverage of any media outlet — and I think that has been the case over the past week and a half.
Tell us how you coordinated coverage after you found out about the murder and subsequently the arrest.
Kaplan: I received an e-mail from a Yale public affairs officer last Wednesday with news of Le’s disappearance, and we posted a story to our Web site minutes later and were the first to report that she was missing. Since then, we have been working around-the-clock, quite literally.
While Le was missing, we had reporters and photographers manning constant shifts outside the laboratory where Le had been last seen, for instance. … We have had as many as two dozen reporters working on the story at any one time, and virtually all our photographers have pitched in at some point over the past week and a half. …
Many of our editors and reporters on the story have been operating off of just a few hours of sleep per night; on Wednesday night, when sources told us that an arrest would happen first thing the next morning, we finished the paper at about 4:30 a.m. and then were back in the newsroom at 6:30 a.m. to ready a new story for our Web site about the arrest.
How is your coverage different from that of other local news outlets?
Kaplan: For one, we have focused much more on Le’s disappearance as it affects our community rather than just as it stands as a criminal investigation. We ran a story a few days ago about how researchers in the laboratory where Le was killed have struggled with the fact that their laboratory work has been interrupted — and, in some cases, perhaps thrown into jeopardy — as police shut down the building to investigate. No one else has written that story.
We also have had unusual access, and we have tried to take advantage of that: For instance, two of our reporters went into the basement of the laboratory building last week before the building was sealed off. After Le’s body was found there, they wrote a story giving an account of their visit to the basement-turned-murder-scene, including running into FBI agents who were investigating but had not yet sealed what would ultimately be determined to be the scene of a homicide.
Another thing is that we have definitely prioritized accuracy above all else. There have been some glaringly incorrect reports — including one suggesting that Le’s body had been found a day before it actually had, another about a nonexistent manhunt for a purported suspect and a third wrongly suggesting that a student was suspected as the killer — and we have not been involved in any of that.
What do you know about who’s following your coverage?
Kaplan: We have heard from folks across the nation (and, now that I think about it, across the world) regarding our stories about Le. That is in part a product of the fact that we were featured prominently at times on sites like the Drudge Report and Google News, as well as the fact that our television appearances likely have drawn readers to the Web site who otherwise would not have stumbled upon us.
We also know that a lot of reporters who have been assigned to this story have been reading our coverage — for the many journalists who have descended on New Haven, we have distributed an e-mail message each day with our latest stories [at their request], and many reporters have told us that those messages have been helpful as they try to ascertain the lay of the land here.
Do you consider the audience for the Yale Daily News to be the university community or broader?
Kaplan: We are unusual among college newspapers in that we devote significant resources to covering the city of New Haven. The paper is available throughout downtown New Haven, and in certain areas of reportage — say, city politics — we regularly have as much coverage as the local daily, I think it’s safe to say. But the Yale community (and alumni and parents reading from elsewhere) is our primary audience.
… Our print circulation is 7,500, although we upped our print run to 10,000 on the day after the authorities found Le’s body.
What sort of criticism have you gotten about the paper’s coverage, if any?
Kaplan: We haven’t heard much. I will offer one item of self-criticism, however. We have struggled to some extent this week in keeping pace with reports about various details regarding Le’s killing. We do not have strong sources in many law enforcement agencies — after all, we rarely deal with high-profile criminal cases such as this one — and as a result we have not been getting the kind of leaks that some other local publications have been getting. But we also have much more access to Yale administrators than outside publications have, so I suppose that makes up for it.
What’s been the hardest part of covering this story?
Kaplan: The sheer magnitude of it. The only instances in which we have coordinated so many reporters and so many stories at one time were for Election Day and President Obama’s Inauguration, and those stories were over in a day. This story has gone on for more than a week now, and our entire reporting staff has been pulling long hours for that entire time. And given the sensitivity of the story, the reporting is even more tiring than usual, and the ethical decisions we as editors have had to make have been more numerous. We are all exhausted, that’s for sure!
What advice do you have for other college journalists covering murders or other tragedies?
Kaplan: Above all else, make sure you nail every last thing down before going with it. This case has seen a really frightening number of false reports and rumors propagated by various news outlets, and I think it is a testament to the maturity of our staff that we have steered clear of that.
