Student journalists report first on shots
Friday night was the second time UC Berkeley junior Riley Cooke planned to hang out with friends and instead ended up covering a shooting.
Cooke, the university news editor for the Daily Californian student paper, was on her way to get frozen yogurt with former managing editor Anna Armstrong when their phones started buzzing with texts and Slack messages about students hearing gunshots on the south edge of campus.
Later, the university would announce that a 59-year-old man had fired several shots into the air above Lower Sproul Plaza, hitting no one, and was quickly arrested by University of California police. But the first news that a shooting had happened at all came from student journalists reporting on it, even as they themselves took shelter.
As soon as the shooting happened, information began to pour into the Daily Cal’s Slack from students across campus, according to Matt Brown, the newspaper’s managing editor and a former Chronicle intern.
Some reporters had walked past the shooting as it happened, another had a friend who recorded a video of the incident, and yet another heard informally that police officers had already arrested the suspect, Brown said. But students didn’t receive a notification about the incident or the arrest until about 40 minutes after the shots were fired.
University of California police use a system called WarnMe to communicate with students about emergencies. The first WarnMe notice about the 8:40 p.m. incident went out around 9:20 p.m. Asked about the timing of the alerts, Janet Gilmore, a spokesperson for UC Berkeley, said the university was “looking into the matter.” She said the man was not affiliated with the campus and was arrested within a minute of firing his weapon.
In the time between the shooting and the WarnMe, Brown said reporters felt like they were in the dark.
“We didn’t know what was going on in the same way students didn’t know what was going on. All we heard was ‘active shooter on campus,’ and from there, your imagination just goes, ‘How bad? ’ ” Brown said. “For that moment, it was really scary.”
Cooke, who had headed for the paper’s newsroom on the north side of campus, began writing, while Armstrong — there with her — started listening to the police scanner. Still waiting for official word on whether the shooter was still out there, the two turned off the lights in the front of the newsroom and huddled together in the back, Armstrong said.
They called a university spokesperson to see what the school knew, Armstrong said. Cooke’s roommate texted her videos and photos other students had taken. At 9:42 p.m., the spokesperson confirmed the shooting had happened and the suspect had been arrested, according to Cooke. In between writing updates and making calls, Cooke said she tried to take deep breaths.
“There’s an increased pressure to get things right on the first try,” Cooke said. “I feel that way for all breaking news, but especially when you know people are looking to you for live updates about something as serious as an active shooter situation.”
Armstrong and Cooke had reported on a shooting together before — in 2022, when a person shot four people just one block south of where Friday’s shooting unfolded, the two teamed up to cover the story. In that case, one person died. None of the victims was a student.
This time, they felt more prepared, according to Cooke. The two knew whom to call and where to look first. They also knew that students would be looking for information on social media, Cooke said.
Kyle Garcia Takata, a junior and the paper’s social media editor, was in a classroom building a short walk north of Lower Sproul Plaza when he first got the Slack message about a shooting on campus.
Garcia Takata stepped out into the hall and called Brown.
“While I was nervous and a little worried about safety, I was more worried about, ‘How can we tell people as quickly as possible what’s going on? ’ ” Garcia Takata said.
Around Garcia Takata, other students had begun to hear about the shooting through social media and texts from friends, he said. They closed the blinds and locked the classroom doors while waiting to hear from the university.
The Daily Cal first posted about the shooting on X, formerly known as Twitter, at 8:54 p.m. and posted on Instagram and Facebook shortly after.
In the comment section of the Daily Cal’s Instagram, questions poured in from across campus — what happened? Had the shooter been arrested? Where was the notice from WarnMe, UC Berkeley’s emergency notification system? Garcia Takata posted on Facebook while Armstrong answered such questions to the extent possible on Instagram, with the limited information available.
At 9:20 p.m., the UC Police Department sent out a WarnMe notice asking students to shelter in place due to an “aggravated assault” at Lower Sproul Plaza. About 20 minutes later, a second notice went out telling students the suspect had been detained and the shelter-inplace order was lifted.
According to the Daily Cal’s prior reporting, the majority of WarnMe notices don’t come out until more than 50 minutes after the initial incident. Factors such as the number of victims and whether a weapon was involved can impact the timing of an alert, UCPD Sgt. Kevin Vincent told the Daily Cal.
UCPD, which operates the WarnMe system, directed all media requests about Friday night’s shooting to the university.
“It kind of makes you wonder, what’s the point of this system? Is it to report that something happened, or is it supposed to be a safety net for students? I think from what we saw this weekend, it’s not that case. I think that’s just a huge failure on the university,” Brown said.
Armstrong’s confidence in her fellow student journalists kept her calm as she and Cooke worked to put out the first article on the shooting, she said. Brown said the newsroom’s quick and accurate reporting was a testament to the power of student journalism.
“We’re not just reporting on it, we’re living in it. We understand the dynamics of our community better than anybody else could,” Brown said. “We’re seeing more of a trend around that nationally, with the reporters at Northwestern and Stanford. I think people are taking student journalism a whole lot more seriously.”