Covering Student Death by Suicide: A Case Study on College Student Newspapers Navigating the News and Its Aftermath

Abstract

To understand how student journalists handle news coverage surrounding suicide, this study took a case study approach and analyzed how two student newspaper staffs at U.S.-based universities reported on the topic throughout the 2022–2023 academic year, in which multiple student deaths by suicide occurred on each campus. Guided by the literature on trauma in journalism and the Communication Theory of Coping, and through interviews with reporters, editors, and the newspapers’ advisors and a thematic analysis of the newspapers’ coverage during that academic year, we were able to glean insight into how coverage decisions were made, how students navigated such a sensitive topic, and how they enacted care for each other during and after the coverage period. Our findings underscore the pivotal role of the newspaper advisor in helping students navigate such sensitive reporting.

1. Introduction

Death by suicide is the third leading cause of death among traditional college-age students in the United States (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021). When death by suicide happens on a college campus, details about those deaths are often covered by student journalists who are still learning about newsworthiness and how to navigate sensitive topics with care. It is unclear if student journalists are familiar with guidelines for responsible coverage of suicide, and students often do not receive the training needed to properly process and cope with the trauma surrounding a fellow student’s death by suicide (Markovikj & Serafimovska, 2023; Newman et al., 2023). Slightly more than 25% of college-age adults (ages 18–24) report having seriously considered suicide (Czeisler et al., 2020), emphasizing the need for student journalists—especially those working within student media on campus—to understand the importance of and to implement guidelines that could influence their readers and viewers.

To understand how student journalists handle news coverage surrounding suicide, this study took a case study approach and analyzed how two student newspapers reported on the topic throughout an academic year in which multiple student deaths by suicide occurred on each campus. Guided by the literature on trauma in journalism and the Communication Theory of Coping, and through interviews with reporters and editors who led the coverage, interviews with the newspapers’ advisors, and a reading of the newspapers’ coverage during that academic year, we were able to glean insight into how coverage decisions were made, how students navigated such a sensitive topic, and how they enacted care for each other during and after the coverage period. Our findings underscore a need for proactive newsroom trainings on how to cover sensitive subjects, such as suicide, self-care and general well-being, as well as increased university support of student journalists more broadly, and we conclude with recommendations for newspaper advisors.

2. Covering Sensitive Subjects

Trauma reporting entails journalism about sensitive topics, in which reporters are telling stories surrounding trauma, distress, or grief, and requires reporters to be keenly aware of both how they approach and interview people and how they write about sensitive subjects in the news (Healey, 2020). Suicide coverage is one of many topics that fall under the umbrella of sensitive subjects. When reporting on suicide, journalists need to be mindful not only of the deceased person’s privacy and family, but also of the risk of suicide contagion. Dubbed the “Werther Effect,” (Phillips, 1974), copycat or contagion effects involves the spread of suicidal behavior to at-risk individuals through direct or mediated exposure to stories of others’ death by suicide (Gould, 1990). Romer et al. (2006) conducted, a months-long content analysis from six major U.S. cities showing strong evidence that there was a greater likelihood of suicide contagion after an individual consumed news stories about suicide from their local news outlet. The authors also found that audiences under the age of 25 were disproportionately more likely to be affected by this news coverage because people “in these developmental stages may find other persons’ suicides as confirming their own hopeless situations,” (Romer et al., 2006, p. 266). Although more recent research has explored if certain ways of covering suicide could decrease the contagion risk, including personal stories of hope and recovery has only been found to have a small protective effect (Niederkrotenthaler et al., 2010). Although research shows this contagion risk only applies to people pre-disposed to depression and suicidal thoughts (Gould & Davidson, 1988), since young people are often more susceptible to suicide contagion than adults (Romer et al., 2006), this is a concern on college campuses.

To limit the risk of contagion and general harm to audiences, guidelines evolved from several news and public health organizations that act as recommendations and reminders for journalists specifically when reporting on a death by suicide. The most commonly followed guidelines were developed by the World Health Organization (2017) and Reporting on Suicide (2020), a nonprofit organization; however, some news outlets also have internal policies on how to handle coverage of sensitive topics like suicide (Beam et al., 2018). Although there are some slight variations, the guidelines include these best practices for journalists: report the death as a suicide but exclude details about specific location and method of the suicide, avoid sensational language, and include warning signs for those who could be susceptible to suicide (see Table 1 for full list of best practices). Additional responsible reporting practices include reporting stories of hope and healing and sharing resources for people who might be thinking about suicide, such as hotline numbers (Reporting on Suicide, 2020).

Table 1. Recommendations for journalists reporting on suicide (Reporting on Suicide, 2020).

Avoid …	Instead …
Describing or depicting the method and location of the suicide	Report the death as a suicide; keep information about the location general
Sharing the content of a suicide note	Report that a note was found and exclude further details
Describing intimate details about the person who died	Keep information about the person general
Presenting suicide as a common or acceptable response to hardship	Report that coping skills, support, and treatment work for most people who have thought about suicide
Oversimplifying or speculating on the reason for the suicide	Describe warning signs and risk factors, including mental illness, that give the suicide context
Sensationalizing details in the headline or story	Report on the death using facts and languages that are sensitive to a grieving family
Glamorizing or romanticizing suicide	Provide context and facts to counter perceptions that the suicide was tied to heroism, honor, or loyalty to an individual or group
Overstating the problem of suicide by using descriptors like “epidemic” or “skyrocketing”	Research the best available data and use words like “increase” or “rise”
Putting the coverage in a prominent place	Place a print article inside the paper or magazine and later in a newscast

Different news outlets have formal and informal policies that dictate when and why they report on a person’s death by suicide (Beam et al., 2018). In their research interviewing professional journalists to gauge how decisions are made about when to cover a suicide, Beam et al. (2018) found some consistency around outlets covering deaths that met some of the traditional thresholds for what makes something newsworthy, such as timeliness, conflict, proximity, prominence and human interest. If a suicide occurred in a public place and drew a lot of public attention, reporting on it would be considered appropriate because it is bringing the public context for something they might have seen happen. Similarly, it is considered appropriate if the person who died was well known.

Despite formal and informal guidelines on responsible reporting about suicide, journalists do not always get it right. Yaqub et al. (2020) found that while most of the journalists they interviewed want to cover suicide responsibly, they often do not. The authors found that professional journalists are “socialized to value full disclosure of information as a virtue, and even obligation” (Yaqub et al., 2020, p. 1293). This means that they prioritize sharing what they know, valuing transparency in their reporting over the impact that the truth could have on their audience. This work explored the difference between how they report on suicide for feature style stories versus an episodic, breaking news style event.

In breaking news style events, the authors found “journalistic impulse simply outweighed or voided concerns about contagion or sensitivity to family” (Yaqub et al., 2020, p. 1293). This was especially true if the journalist’s work would verify public dialog about an event or end public speculations, such as an event of a missing person. The authors’ findings are in line literature surrounding the routinization of news coverage (Tuchman, 1973), which involves the way journalists assess newsworthiness and follow predictable routines when covering breaking a story that do not necessarily create space for how a story on a particularly sensitive subject might have different implications, especially in newsrooms that have expectations for content that is produced at a fast pace. To help alleviate this problem, Duncan and Luce (2022) developed the Responsible Suicide Reporting (RSR) model, a tool to help journalists put suicide reporting guidelines into practice through a discernment process. The RSR provides a roadmap for reporters assigned a story about suicide, prompting them to think about their story content, tone, and other ethical factors (Duncan & Luce, 2022). While tools such as this might be useful, it is unclear how many newsrooms are aware of them and then put them into action, and it is also unclear if such tools are being used by student journalists.

2.1. Covering Trauma on a College Campus

Student journalists are just that—students still learning to be journalists. They are learning their craft and their responsibility to uphold journalistic ethics to minimize harm (Society of Professional Journalists, 2014). However, it is well known that trauma-related instruction is often sparsely included, if at all, in journalism curriculum, underscored by a special issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Educator on trauma literacy. In their introduction to the special issue, Ogunyemi and Price (2023) asserted that “journalism students are ill-prepared to cope with the challenges of reporting in the 21st century” (p. 108). Collectively, the authors of the special issue found students largely feel unsupported when seeking advice on how to cover sensitive subjects, and journalism educators often lack strategies to prepare students to cover difficult topics appropriately. This has real consequences for those who go on to work in the journalism profession. Seely (2020) found that less than half of the more than 250 print journalists she surveyed recalled learning about how to handle trauma during journalism or communication courses during college. Those journalists expressed uncertainty and a lack of preparedness in difficult situations, such as when interviewing victims of a crime. While not specific to suicide, Seely’s work showed a need for journalism educators to prioritize trauma literacy for students so they are more prepared in the field.

In a content analysis of more than 500 articles mentioning suicide from student news outlets at flagship universities across the U.S., Kocan and Parrott (2023) found student journalists followed many of the guidelines for responsible reporting on suicide. The student reporters were particularly diligent, the authors found, with avoiding sensational coverage that might impact vulnerable news consumers, and they almost never included contents of a suicide note in their stories. However, Kocan and Parrott (2023) did identify areas for improvement, with stories consistently using the stigmatizing phrase “committed suicide,” referencing suicide in headlines, and not including suicide prevention resources, which was something only about 40% of the articles included. While previous research looked at the final product of student journalists’ reporting on a death by suicide, we want to understand the decision-making and process involved in that reporting, to assess if students were aware of responsible reporting guidelines and how they interpreted and attempted to implement them. Thus, we ask:

RQ1: How does student journalists’ decision-making around reporting on a student death by suicide align with or diverge from best practice guidelines on the subject?

Student journalists are also uniquely enmeshed in the coverage of a fellow student’s death by suicide, as they are grieving alongside their classmates. After such a death at a college or university, many students express a desire for open conversation about the loss of the student, its impact, and what social change can or should happen on campus in response (Pattani, 2021). Student journalists can be torn between those same feelings and a desire to uphold sometimes competing journalistic standards.

The idea of an open discussion around the loss has been thought to mitigate any stigma around suicide. College-age students who reported feeling more of a stigma around mental health challenges have reported greater odds of experiencing suicide ideation, planning, and attempt (Goodwill & Zhou, 2020). However, there are tensions between the campus community’s interest to know more information and the will of the deceased student’s parents (Pattani, 2021). Additionally, postvention plans, such as North Carolina’s, indicate that universities fear whether their role in that discussion could pose a contagion risk. There is not yet research on how universities communicate with the larger college campus following a student death by suicide, but tangential crisis response research on university communication following sexual assault on campus suggests university officials should acknowledge the crisis and their potential role in it (Works et al., 2021). How student journalists balance competing goals in their reporting and even work around university officials who may try to withhold information is a gap in the literature. To help unpack those tensions, we pose our second research question:

RQ2: What institutional challenges do student journalists experience while reporting on student death by suicide, and how do those impact their resulting news coverage?

2.2. Coping After Covering Suicide

In a Teen Vogue story from April 2023, the then-editor of Princeton’s student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, wrote about the impact their coverage of four deaths by suicide (three students and one staff member) had on her own wellbeing. In that article, Washington University psychiatrist Jessi Gold emphasized that it “is incredibly hard to disconnect yourself from a situation in your community and just put your head down and do your job. Even for the most traumatic stories, you might be able to separate yourself and just report—and probably have the skills to do so—but if you are also a member of the community, experiencing a lot of the same reactions and feelings, it’s different” (Retta, 2023). The article goes on to emphasize the significant role this type of coverage has played in the college journalist experience in recent years, especially at schools that have experienced multiple losses of this nature.

The consequences of not having a strong foundation of trauma literacy are not just tied to the journalists’ reporting processes but are physical and mental as well. After covering a traumatic event, “negative effects––such as flashbacks, trouble sleeping, anxiety, and depression––still lingered long after the story was filed” (Seely, 2020, p. 75). Journalists are often on the frontlines of trauma, sometimes arriving on the scene of an event alongside first responders, and are therefore known to struggle with anxiety, depression, and PTSD (Pearson & Seglins, 2022). Although journalism educators are getting better at trauma-informed reporting and its effects on the news consumer, content regarding how journalists can care for themselves and properly attend to their own well-being during and after reporting on trauma are often left out of the curriculum (Newman et al., 2023). Students seem to believe that there is a mental health risk associated with being a journalist, as exposure to trauma is part of a journalist’s job, but only about 20% of students actually feel prepared to deal with such exposure themselves (Markovikj & Serafimovska, 2023). However, Markovikj and Serafimovska (2023) argue that being trauma literate means not just being aware of the effects of trauma exposure but understanding how to respond and heal.

While there are many definitions of coping, it is most commonly defined as “constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the resources of the person” (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984, p. 147). In their transactional model of stress and coping, Lazarus and Folkman conceptualize the coping process as fluid. It adapts as individuals encounter the same stressors multiple times, learning to modify their coping strategies to better fit their needs and contextual factors within the environment and even helping them to anticipate coping needs when encountering the stressor in the future (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). This makes the construct especially applicable in the context of this study because of the reoccurring nature of student deaths by suicide within an academic year. The student journalists kept experiencing the same stressor (covering another death), and therefore needed to enact coping strategies multiple times throughout the year.

Communication scholars have focused on the relational aspects of coping. For example, Afifi et al. (2006) studied coping within the context of family communication and found the process is highly influenced by others, specifically other family members. LeBlanc et al. (2023) built on these ideas to develop The Communication Theory of Coping (CTC), which involves five stages: (a) a triggering event; (b) triage, or the immediate response and default to usual coping mechanisms, good or bad; (c) prioritization, or the assessing of ongoing needs and adjusting expectations and behaviors; (d) misdiagnosis, or inevitable negative self-talk amid the mental and physical strain of the crisis; and (e) survival, or the point at which one realizes they have surpassed the worst of the crisis and are able to move forward in a determined way. This is a deeply human experience, in which problematic behaviors or missteps often occur. CTC also recognizes the ways in which coping is both an individual and communal process, with individual coping strategies (positive or negative) affecting the quality of communal coping (LeBlanc et al., 2023).

Šimunjak (2023) studied the idea of coping being a relational, communal process in the context of newsrooms. Professional journalists were found to prefer communal coping in the form of talking with colleagues about their trauma and related struggles (Šimunjak, 2023). However, they have also been known to adopt unhealthy coping mechanisms that do not transcend to the level of survival, such as withdrawing from friends and loved ones, poor diet, and/or binge drinking (Kim & Shin, 2025; Seely, 2019). In other contexts, such as when coping after experiencing hostility or harassment, journalists have been found to utilize disengagement strategies to temporarily distance themselves from their work or even chosen to exit the journalism professional entirely (Mesmer, 2022).

College newsrooms are tightknit communities. It is unclear if those findings on professional journalists’ coping behaviors translate to the student journalist experience, or if they have other coping mechanisms unique to their position as both students and journalists. Thus, the final research question:

RQ3: How do student journalists cope with the trauma of covering a fellow student’s death by suicide?

3. Method

This case study focuses on two university student newspapers, both large public universities located in the United States where a series of student deaths by suicide occurred within the same time period. These newspapers were chosen because of this unfortunate similarity—six and seven deaths by suicide were reported at the universities during the 2022–2023 academic year—and because each of the newspapers chose to report on the student deaths1.

Neither of these universities have a journalism school, or even journalism programs, despite having thriving student newspapers. They each offer a Bachelor of Arts degree in communication, but many of the student journalists pursue other majors. Many are therefore not exposed to formal journalism curriculum, and everything they learn about the craft is passed on from other student journalists and/or their newsroom staff advisor.

What makes these student newspapers particularly appropriate for exploring this study’s research questions is the stark difference in their approach to reporting on the student deaths. These differences were noted when looking at the news content published by each other the newspapers2, and the goal of this project was to unpack those differences and understand what happened behind the scenes within each newsroom.

3.1. Participants

Participants for this study were identified by looking at the published online news coverage from each student newspaper, identifying the stories’ bylines and then searching for contact information for those reporters who wrote the news articles. Snowball sampling was also used to identify student editors who were involved with the news coverage but did not author news stories, as well as to identify student newspaper advisors. Only people directly involved in the coverage of the student deaths by suicide were invited to participate in this research study. In total, eight people were interviewed: six students, three from each student newspaper, and the advisor for each newspaper (see Table 2 for demographic information).

Table 2. Participant demographics.

University/Case	Pseudonym	Age	Role
Eastshore University	Laurie	21	Editor, reporter
Eastshore University	Lucy	22	Editor-in-chief, reporter
Eastshore University	Vicky	23	Reporter
Eastshore University	Mac	42	Staff advisor
Midlandia University	Sally	20	Editor, reporter
Midlandia University	John	21	Editor-in-chief, reporter
Midlandia University	Morgan	24	Editor, reporter
Midlandia University	Jennifer	63	Staff advisor

3.1.1. Case A: Eastshore University

Eastshore University is a major public land grant university that enrolls more than 40,500 undergraduate and graduate students. The Eastshore University student newspaper, the Eastshore Beacon, publishes weekly. It employs about 14 student editors and dozens of student reporters and photojournalists focused on news, sports, culture, and opinion sections. In January 2023, the newspaper acquired a new advisor, Mac, who is a university staff member and a former professional journalist. He is also an alum of Eastshore University. Mac has a background in solutions journalism. In Spring 2023, the staff got involved with a mental health collaborative grant sponsored by the Solution’s Journalism Network, a non-profit journalism organization that focuses on solutions-focused storytelling rather than problem-focused reporting. During the 2022–2023 academic year, 14 students died, and at least seven of those died by suicide.

3.1.2. Case B: Midlandia University

Midlandia University is also a major public land grant university, enrolling about 50,000 students at its main campus. The Midlandia Tribune is an independent newspaper that is owned by a non-profit organization. The newspaper publishes twice per week and employs a staff advisor, Jennifer, to support the more than 100 student journalists who work on the print and digital editions of the paper. Jennifer is also a professional journalist and an alum of Midlandia University. During the 2022–2023 academic year, six students died by suicide.

3.2. Procedures and Data Analysis

After receiving approval from our university’s institutional review board, data collection took place between October and November 2024. Interviews were conducted via Zoom and lasted between 38 and 64 min (m = 56 min), with the total amount of interview data amounting to 7 h and 26 min and, once transcribed, 115.5 single-spaced pages. The interviews were semi-structured, which allowed for the conversations to follow the lead of the participants and veer in different directions, dependent on the participants’ unique experiences with the research subject. Participants who were former newspaper staff (reporters and/or editors) were asked questions about how they covered the student deaths by suicide, if and how reporting on the subject was discussed within the newsroom, any challenges that arose when reporting on the suicides, if and how reporting of the deaths impacted them, and if and how support was provided within the student media newsroom or elsewhere. Participants who were newspaper advisors were asked slightly different questions, focusing on how they supported newsroom staff, and if they identified opportunities for providing more support, additional training or other interventions, as well as what that support looked like. As the recorded interviews were transcribed, identifying information was removed and pseudonyms are used when referring to university, newspaper, and participant names throughout this study.

Our data also consisted of 13 published news stories, four from Case A and nine from Case B, which were directly related to the student deaths by suicide on each campus. We read through these to contextualize the interview data. However, to further protect the anonymity of participants, direct quotes, personal details about the students who died by suicide, and headlines from published news stories will not be shared within this paper.

To analyze the data, we read and re-read interview transcripts, constantly comparing what participants told us to the published news content and our guiding literature (Memon et al., 2017). As we did this, we noted themes and, separately, places where the participants’ reporting practices seemed to align with or diverge from responsible reporting guides for suicide coverage. We then compared our initial themes and observations across the two cases, which led to our final themes discussed below.

4. Findings

Our first research question asked: (RQ1) How do student journalists’ decision-making around reporting on a student death by suicide align with or diverge from best practice guidelines on the subject? We found that the answer to this question was, in many ways, entangled with our second research question, which was: (RQ2) What institutional challenges do student journalists experience while reporting on student death by suicide, and how do those impact their resulting news coverage? Specifically, participants faced challenges regarding how they defined newsworthiness in relation to student deaths by suicide and how they received information from the university. Their responses to these challenges largely effected how well their reporting aligned with responsible reporting guidelines.

Interview data revealed that both newsrooms worked tirelessly to uphold journalistic principles of accuracy and public service, though their approaches were oftentimes quite different. The student journalists from Eastshore University developed policies for coverage and did training on how to reduce harm to the community and to themselves, though that all evolved over time and was not in place when the suicides began. The student journalists from Midlandia University focused on unsanitized truth telling, prioritizing investigative rigor regardless of push back and at the expense of their own wellbeing. These two cases highlight how student newsrooms translate professional journalism frameworks into practice with limited support and high emotional stakes. The themes below highlight the differences in approaches and the challenges they faced, helping us answer both RQ1 and RQ2 in interconnected ways.

4.1. Philosophy of Coverage

One of the challenges both newsrooms faced was that of defining newsworthiness in their suicide coverage, especially as their campuses (and they themselves) grappled with the growing number of deaths. For both newsrooms, their philosophies of coverage were rooted in wanting to contextualize what was happening instead of reporting on body counts.

At Eastshore University, student editors Lucy and Laurie said they ultimately framed their decision making through harm reduction, but it did not necessarily start out that way. Lucy explained:

“There was a lot of conversation for us about what makes this news and when it is appropriate to report on it? And, when is it actually providing a public service to report on it or when it’s providing harm to report on it?”

(Lucy, Case A)

She said that after each triggering event (the news of another student death), the staff was triaging, asking questions within the newsroom about what was important to share immediately versus what information was best to include later, in follow-up reporting. Lucy’s quote highlights cautiousness as a theme among the Eastshore Beacon team. Their coverage was evaluated on a case-by-case basis, considering whether the information would be helpful or hurtful, and they tried to avoid layering on the campus’ grief. Laurie shared that the Beacon staff’s goal was to be consistent with how they covered the student deaths, but important factors like what details the university shared and the wishes of the student’s family members were important factors they considered. For example, at the beginning of the spate of student suicides, university administrators sent out emails to the student’s classmates alerting them of the loss and sharing resources. Laurie said those emails were important resources early on and helped reporters confirm the identity of the deceased student. The university eventually stopped sharing the student’s names in those emails and the reporters stopped sharing the name in breaking news coverage, too, following the university’s lead, learning to prioritize certain details over others and alter their reporting strategies to work within university constraints. Their approach also evolved throughout the year as they learned more about covering suicide and with the onboarding of a new advisor. When Mac stepped into his role mid-year, he helped the newsroom adopt formal reporting guidelines consistent with the Reporting on Suicide recommendations and created a required training for staff on how to report on suicides to minimize harm to the community. “From a journalistic standpoint, they need to be empowered,” Mac said, talking about why he implemented the training, which had not existed before. “They need to be empowered to talk about this stuff openly. And that’s what the reporting on mental health training is supposed to do.”

In contrast, students in the Midlandia Tribune newsroom focused on the importance of verifying information and telling the truth. They had no hard and fast rules regarding suicide coverage, but the interview data revealed a disconnect between stated news values and actual news coverage. For example, Morgan, an editor and reporter, said they would “only cover suicides that happen in a public place.” However, in a longer feature story trying to bring context and understanding in the thick of the campus’ high number of suicides, the reporter included graphic details about how multiple students died, even when those deaths occurred when students were alone in their homes. Another editor and reporter, John, said his goal was to humanize his deceased peers and counter misinformation, regardless of the criticism from the community. In the balance of privacy and transparency, transparency mostly won at the Midlandia Tribune, and the students never seemed to evolve or alter their reporting strategies, despite the reoccurring triggering event.

Ultimately, the newsrooms held opposing philosophies, with the Eastshore Beacon focused on restraint and the Midlandia Tribune emphasizing transparency. Reporting on suicide guidelines encourage journalists to weigh public interest against potential harm. Members of both newsrooms did believe there were minimizing harm with their coverage decisions, demonstrating how differently that ideal can be interpreted.

4.2. Alignment with Responsible Reporting Guidelines

The newsrooms’ differing philosophies on coverage fed directly into whether their coverage adhered to responsible reporting guidelines for suicide coverage. At Eastshore University, while the students were not aware of these guidelines when the school year and the deaths by suicide started happening, the staff said their reporting largely aligned with the guidelines through those first few tragedies. In the beginning, the newsroom often discussed whether to publish anything at all following a student death. Lucy described their decision-making process:

“Unless we find a reason to release additional information, we will release what the university will release. And I think that that typically ended up working pretty well, and I think it was kind of a happy medium to be able to acknowledge, yes, I know that you saw somebody be taken out of a dorm room on a stretcher. This is what we’re able to verify right now, and we cannot confirm anything else.”

(Lucy, Case A)

Laurie, another editor, said their priority was making sure they covered the deaths responsibly, and they believed—even without knowing the best practices—that meant not talking about the suicide method. “Because for a vulnerable community, it can make it worse,” she explained. Then, as mentioned above, their new advisor, Mac, joined and implemented training that formally introduced the staff to the responsible reporting guidelines. Toward the end of the year, the staff even published an article explaining how they approached suicide coverage through this lens. As a result, many of the articles on the student suicides from the Eastshore Beacon balance the guidelines well. The headlines refer to death rather than suicide explicitly, and every article begins with a reminder about the school’s counseling center and provides the phone number for the national suicide lifeline. None of their reporting included details about method, or the contents of a suicide note.

Student journalists at Midlandia University were unaware of the reporting guidelines, and John explained that much of their decision-making regarding coverage was done on the fly while they were triaging the situation. The students said they relied heavily on advice from their advisor, Jennifer. While Jennifer said she recognized the risk of sensationalism, she worried that excessive caution could obscure the truth. And while Jennifer said she was aware of the reporting guidelines, she did not create resources based on them for the staff or communicate the guidelines to students in any other way. She even went as far as to outwardly question the reporting guidelines:

“The conventional wisdom is, right, we don’t report on suicide as a matter of fact, you know, because that just encourages suicide. I don’t know. Sure seems to happen a lot anyway. Right? Is that bullshit or is there really something to it? Is it one of those rules that we just blindly follow and hope it’s true? Or should we be talking about it more? Personally … I’m a journalist. I believe that we should be open about things.”

(Jennifer, Case B)

Jennifer went on to defend a particularly difficult moment in their newsroom when the students were debating whether to publish a photo that showed body bags in the background to accompany a story of the death by suicide of two students. They decided to run the photo, with the rationale being that “You don’t want to sanitize what happened,” Jennifer said. This created a scenario in which the “prioritization” phase was largely skipped over, as the staff triaged the situation and never moved into that higher order of processing in which the altering of behaviors and expectations should take place. Instead, they believed that how they were coping in the triage phase was sufficient.

At the Midlandia Tribune, at least eight headlines explicitly said a person died by suicide. Depending on what prominence these stories had in the print newspaper layout and/or on the website at the time, this could be acceptable under the guidelines. Best practice would be to avoid mentioning suicide in the headline in prominent, lead stories. However, a larger recurring issue with Midlandia’s coverage was the level of detail included in many of the stories depicting the method and location of the suicides. Within the first two paragraphs of an analysis article toward the end of the academic year, the reporter included graphic details about the method of suicide, location and the contents of a suicide note, while also going into detail about the life of the student they were featuring—all things the suicide reporting guidelines discourage. Additionally, the Midlandia Tribune consistently failed to include suicide and mental health resources in their stories, a critical item from the reporting guidelines.

4.3. Friction Between the Newsroom and the University

In both cases, the student journalists dealt with systemic barriers to getting timely, accurate information from their universities. However, the nature of the barriers and how they navigated them varied substantially. At Eastshore University, the student journalists described the response from university officials as slow and sometimes even silent. “We struggled so bad… the university wasn’t communicating at all,” Vicky explained. The reporters sometimes learned about the death of a peer through social media or word of mouth before official confirmation. In addition to the student deaths by suicide, the university also experienced almost just as many deaths of students by other means, be it car accidents, illness, or natural causes. The editors and reporters described a meeting with the communications department to share more information about their respective priorities and approach as a turning point. Mac characterized the administrators as cautious but not malicious, saying they were at times constrained by privacy concerns, but the student journalists were often frustrated by their standpoint:

“By October, [the staff] wrote an editorial saying, we’re frustrated because the university is not releasing names. They’re not releasing names. They’re not, they’re not being forthcoming on this, and that struck a nerve with the university. And so they ended up having a meeting with the counseling center director and some other folks from university communications, I think. And, you know, the students were like, we need to know names, and they’re like, we’re not gonna name names. … It’s a privacy issue, and I also understand that the university has legal, moral, ethical obligations. But he did say if we come up with a name, he could confirm it. So what that said, that put the onus on the students to, yeah, to do the reporting and to verify anything that they’ve been seeing on social media.”

(Mac, Case A)

The willingness of the Eastshore university officials to explain what information they were and were not willing to give them, along with why, underscored that despite competing goals, the lines of communication between the two parties was still open and cooperative.

At Midlandia, the tension was sharper, and it was indicative of a long history of controversy between the university and the Midlandia Tribune, which operates independent from the university. Jennifer described her university as “an anti-journalism school,” where administrators withhold records and discourage student reporting. Student reporters submitted open records requests that went unanswered, cost too much, or came back so redacted that they were not helpful. “[Midlandia] will only tell you the information that they wanna tell you,” John said, adding that the students often had to work around university officials to confirm details about the deaths. Everyone from the Midlandia Tribune staff said such obstruction strengthened their commitment to their watchdog role.

These dynamics show the influence institutional culture can have on the student newsroom. Eastshore University’s environment became gradually collaborative and allowed room for shared understanding. Midlandia University’s required defensive independence from its student newsroom. These contexts demonstrate the friction between the university’s risk management priorities and student journalists’ duty to inform their communities.

4.4. Coping with Shared Trauma

Our final research question focused not on how the student journalists reported the news, but instead on how they showed up for themselves and others during and after the story coverage. We asked: (RQ3) How do student journalists cope with the trauma of covering a fellow student’s death by suicide? Student journalists from both universities spoke candidly and extensively about the emotional toll of covering the death by suicide of peers. Common struggles included the pressure to deliver at the expense of their own wellbeing, a feeling of suffering in silence when they could not share details of their experiences with friends outside of the newsroom, and the important role of community among each other. Laurie described a particularly difficult moment where she woke up early and saw a social media post about a possible suicide. She recalled reporting on that case and how difficult it was talking to witnesses and then immediately needing to switch roles and go to class like a regular student:

“They told me a lot of details that you would never put in a breaking news story because it’s not good for a community member to read that. … I remember then having to go to class after that was really hard. I remember sitting in my class at 9 a.m. and just I couldn’t stop thinking about that story.”

(Laurie, Case A)

Just as Eastshore University student journalists developed the policies on how to minimize harm to the community through their suicide coverage, they also prioritized their well-being and implemented policies to minimize harm to themselves. Laurie recalled creating the rule that “no one was ever reporting by themselves,” and giving reporters space to decline assignments if they were “not in the right headspace.” Mac said he tried to model vulnerability for the students by sharing his own PTSD and addiction issues with them from his time as a reporter. Finally, for students at the Eastshore Beacon, the shift from breaking news coverage to a concerted effort on solutions journalism also helped to shift their thinking about the work, providing a productive outlet which in turn helped them cope with the trauma. They believed their solutions stories had more value for the community, making them feel good about the work they were doing and eased the emotional toll previous coverage had taken. Although there might have been brief moments of misdiagnosis, as in Laurie’s example above, the Eastshore Beacon staff were largely able to move from prioritization to survival with minimal setbacks.

Midlandia student reporters were not dissimilar in their struggles of navigating the complexity of their role and the trauma that can come with reporting on a death by suicide. Sally recalled reporting on the scene after two students died by suicide together. She has a particularly difficult memory of approaching the students’ parents on the scene:

“Trying to talk to them really bothered me because, you know, I have [a] journalistic duty. I have to try. But also, their children just killed themselves in an alley and I’m walking up to them with a notebook and a recorder. Like, how shitty of a person am I?”

(Sally, Case B)

When asked about how she coped with her experiences covering or editing multiple traumatic stories about suicides of a peer, Morgan said she kept her feelings “way, way down deep in the bottom of my brain where I couldn’t access it.” She also talked about finding herself acting as an informal counselor to the reporters whose work she oversaw, despite her also being a student. She explained:

“[A new reporter covered a student death] and it was really hard, and now it’s 4 in the morning, and they’re crying because they just saw a body for the first time, and it was really traumatic. And you’re tired too, but you’re the boss, so you have to sit there and make them feel better about it. … It was a lot of being mom and being a therapist, for a bunch of crying children after doing everything else. Lots of cups of tea, lots of ‘here’s a blanket.’ Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

(Morgan, Case B)

As we can see in this example, Morgan’s ability to care for others and help them to cope was diminished, causing her to become callous because she was struggling to cope herself. In these examples, Sally and Morgan were in the stage of misdiagnosis, engaging heavily in negative self-talk and negative perceptions of how others were coping through the shared trauma. However, Morgan said she believed the real failure in caring for the students—be it those who died by suicide or those struggling with their mental health as they reported on it—was by the university. Despite the difficulties, the Midlandia student journalists emphasized how frequently they leaned on each other for support. And while the faculty advisor was a pillar of support for students at Eastshore, Midlandia’s staff said they only got reporting advice from their advisor, no advice on how to support one another through their shared grief and trauma. The difference between these two cases underscores how institutionalizing care can transform the culture of a newsroom, even in a college-level environment. The Eastshore Beacon embedded trauma literacy into policy, creating a culture of communal coping, while students at the Midlandia Tribune had to rely more on individual-level coping.

5. Discussion

This case study focused on two student newsrooms that reported on multiple student deaths by suicide over the course of the same academic year. Through in-depth interviews with the student editors, reporters, and faculty advisors, we found the students took vastly different approaches in their coverage, despite articulating similar journalistic values surrounding community-centered reporting. In the first case, Eastshore University students reported cautiously, following the university’s lead and eventually adopting formal trainings and guidelines associated with suicide coverage, which also accounted for how they coped with the trauma of reporting on fellow students’ deaths. Students for this newspaper largely followed responsible reporting guidelines for suicide coverage (Reporting on Suicide, 2020). Some of this had been happening intuitively when the events first started unfolding, but the staff fully adopted the guidelines after their advisor created newsroom trainings on the subject. In the second case, students at Midlandia University championed transparency in their reporting, even when the content was unpleasant or hard for the community to digest. They lacked formal reporting guidelines and tried to lean on each other for support as best they could. This resulted in coverage that—unbeknownst to them because they did not receive any training or support on how to cover the subject of suicide—largely went against responsible reporting guidelines. Our findings identify deep uncertainty and inconsistency surrounding reporting on death by suicide, with the significant factor influencing both their coverage decisions and how they supported each other being the level of support they received from their faculty advisors.

It is important to remember that these universities did not offer formal journalism degree programs, and many students might have taken a few journalism courses offered within a broader communication program but were majoring in something else. Often, what they learned about the journalism craft was passed on from other student journalists and/or their newsroom staff advisor. This highlights the importance of newsroom education for students who might not otherwise have access to training on not just how to cover suicide, but how to cope with their feelings about what they saw and experienced. We saw a stark difference in how well students in these two newsrooms adhered to responsible reporting guidelines and how well they were able to cope with the trauma associated with this coverage, and the role of the advisor seemed to be the common denominator. On the one hand, the Eastshore Beacon’s advisor was well versed in trauma literacy and helped the students establish a baseline of knowledge through formal training, resources, and a general ethic of care. On the other hand, the Midlandia Tribune’s advisor reified traditional breaking news reporting routines (Tuchman, 1973) and seemed to even push back on the responsible reporting guidelines she was aware of. The student journalists were therefore never formally informed of such guidelines and reported in a way they truly believed was best, given their past experience and the mentorship they were receiving. We make this observation not to be punitive, or to say that the students in Case B got it wrong. Rather, we want to highlight an area in which student journalists felt unsupported and suffered from a knowledge gap at no fault of their own. We wish to underscore that this was a sensitive reporting scenario in which students needed more support not only from their newsroom advisor, but from other faculty and even university staff and administrators who should have realized that these student journalists were acting as first-responders on the scene of traumatic breaking news.

Likewise, the Eastshore advisor emphasized how important it was for the students to prioritize their own wellbeing, and the students described much more proactive and supportive methods of coping. This allowed students to move more quickly through the triaging and prioritizing phases of the Communication Theory of Coping model, with the students barely seeming to grapple with the misdiagnosis phase. They moved into the survival phase quicker and with more confidence than their counterparts at Midlandia. These efforts to normalize emotional care also align with the Dart Center’s trauma-informed journalism framework that encourages a newsroom culture of support and open conversation. The Midlandia advisor was not well attuned to the reporters’ mental health, discussing aspects of community feedback and story viewership when reflecting on the reporter’s work and not on how it may have affected their wellbeing. The student editors, such as Morgan, who described that part of her role as caring “for a bunch of crying children after doing everything else,” resented having to take on the burden of consoling subordinate members of the newsroom. The students in Case B seemed to get stuck in the misdiagnosis phase, questioning their reporting decisions and struggling to even feel empathy for each other at times. Again, this showcases how the role of the advisor was extremely important in not only helping the students understand how to report on this sensitive subject but also how to process the trauma they were reporting on.

Theoretically, the success of Case A suggests that, at least for a group of young adults, a more experienced support person is crucial for helping guide the community through the coping processes to achieve survival. The difficulties of Case B also speak to the longstanding journalistic norm requiring reporters to have a “thick skin” while wellbeing is ignored (see Chen et al., 2020), although that norm that is starting to change as journalism scholars and younger generations of journalists are starting to prioritize self-care (Bélair-Gagnon et al., 2024). Additionally, our findings highlight parallels between how professional and student journalists cope with trauma (Šimunjak, 2023). In both cases, the power of community within the newsroom is ever present, highlighting the relevance of verbal processing as an emotion management strategy within the student journalism context. Student journalists from both universities also described attentional deployment strategies, such as going for a walk, watching a comfort movie and spending time with friends to distract themselves from their experiences in the newsroom. Because of these parallels, it would be reasonable to assume that trauma literacy interventions focused on coping and wellbeing for professional journalists would also work in student newsrooms.

Pragmatically, our findings strongly suggest that student newspaper advisors need to create more institutionalized means of training and support for student journalists. This could be in the form of a resource hub or course-like content for the newspaper staff so they can receive training related to covering sensitive topics such as suicide. It would be most beneficial if this content was provided proactively, before it is needed, at an annual orientation workshop. At minimum, though, this type of content needs to be handy in case it becomes necessary throughout the academic year. Advisors who recognize this as a deficit can start by familiarizing themselves with Dart Center resources (https://thedartcenter.org/ (accessed on 9 February 2026)). Additional organizations that have trainings, toolkits and other online materials that could be offered as discrete resources, or serve as the foundation for a larger workshop or resource kit adapted to fit the needs of any advisor’s staff, include the Journalist Trauma Support Network (https://www.jtsn.org/training (9 February 2026)), Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice (https://www.ctipp.org/post/toolkit-trauma-informed-journalism (accessed on 9 February 2026)), Trauma Work (https://www.traumareporting.com/ (accessed on 9 February 2026)), and Poynter’s free, self-guided online course on mental health reporting (https://www.poynter.org/shop/ethics/the-mental-health-reporting-project/ (accessed on 9 February 2026)). Such materials should cover not only reporting guidelines and best practices, but also discuss productive coping techniques and emotion management within the newsroom, which would be in line with a turn in journalism studies to be more attuned to journalistic well-being (Bélair-Gagnon et al., 2024). This type of institutionalized content is essential because advisors cannot assume the student journalists, especially at universities that lack formal journalism programs, will gain the knowledge elsewhere, and it becomes their responsibility to mentor the students through these difficult reporting scenarios. We also call for university staff and administrators to avoid viewing student journalists as adversaries from whom they need to withhold information from or censor, and remember that they are students as well who would benefit from care, counseling, and other campus resources when covering traumatic news.

This study is not without limitations. Because we were contacting and interviewing students who have since graduated from their respective universities, it was not possible to get in touch with everyone who played a role in the reporting at each student newspaper. While we believe these results could apply to students reporting on other sensitive subjects, it is unclear if reporting on suicide has its own unique concerns. It is also unclear if the relationship of the student newspaper advisor to the larger campus community, such as their tenure status, or generally whether or not the newspaper operates independent of the larger university, plays a role in how supportive advisors, faculty, staff and administrators are of student journalists when reporting in these scenarios. Finally, these cases may not be generalizable to other student newsroom experiences. Future research might take a larger look at what training and resources student newsrooms receive on sensitive reporting subjects such as suicide or investigate the effects of suicide coverage on the larger campus community.