18 CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // JUNE 2019
THE BUZZ
THE MAC SCREEN GLOWS on the lenses
of Nikolai Mather’s horn-rimmed glasses
as he checks his Twitter direct messages
and the Niner Times website. He pauses,
turns to the other students in the room,
and holds up a Ziploc bag of supplies. “I
have an unused toothbrush, toothpaste,
Advil ...,” he says, “in case anyone needs
anything.”
A half-dozen student journalists barely
look up from their monitors, lined up on
desks along the perimeter of the paper’s
oce, in the basement of Popp Martin
Student Union. Old newspaper cutouts
are taped just below the ceiling along the
walls, like yellowed crown moldings. A
collage of memes covers a bulletin board
just above Alexandria Sands, Niner Times’
community editor, and Mather, an assis-
tant editor.
“All I have is a granola bar and a
banana,” adds Madison Dobrzenski, the
paper’s incoming editor-in-chief, “but I’m
willing to share.”
It’s the aernoon of Wednesday, May- Twenty-two hours have passed since a
former student entered Kennedy Hall 236
on UNC Charlotte’s campus with a loaded
handgun and opened re, killing two stu-
dents, Riley Howell and Ellis Parlier, and
injuring four, including Drew Pescaro,
a Niner Times sportswriter. Chancellor
Philip Dubois has called it “the saddest
day in UNC Charlotte’s history.”
The student-run newspaper published
its planned last issue of the semester that
same day, the last day of classes. Jerey
Kopp, Niner Times’ outgoing editor-in-
chief, had begun to pass on his responsi-
bilities to Dobrzenski. Sands, who’s also
a Charlotte magazine editorial intern,
tweeted just three hours before the
shooting that she was “ocially a retired
college newspaper editor. Thank you for
letting me tell your stories, #UNCC.”
In the hours aer the news broke, the
student journalists, some still on lock-
down, worked mostly from their phones.
They posted their breaking news tweet
one minute aer the NinerAlert, the cam-
pus’ internal emergency alert system.
They worked on little or no sleep and no
pay, and they published seven stories in
the rst day, running on adrenaline and
the generosity of others.
“Who should I thank for the pizza?”
Mather asks, turning away from his com-LOGAN CYRUSNEWSTHE STRENGTH OF A
LOCKDOWN GENERATION
UNCC student journalists knew right away how to handle the worstBY EMMA WAYTHE BUZZ
Continued on page 20
On April 30, two
students were
shot and killed
at UNC Charlotte.
In the hours that
followed, the
student-run Niner
Times covered the
tragedy as they
lived it.