By Kyle Mittan, University Communications

Sam Burdette won't soon forget the day in early March that the 2020 Tucson Festival of Books was canceled.

Festival organizers announced the decision on March 9 amid concerns about the novel coronavirus, soon after Pima County reported its first case.

As the copy chief for the Daily Wildcat, the University of Arizona's 121-year-old student-run news outlet, Burdette, along with several other editors, had spent the preceding weeks polishing several stories for a 20-page special festival guide.

Wildcat staff halted printing the festival guide just hours before it was to be sent to press. The festival cancellation also nullified many of the stories planned for the Wildcat's upcoming regular arts and life section. Burdette learned about the book festival in a text from a fellow editor while on a volunteer trip in Whiteriver, Arizona, during spring break.

"Now, all of a sudden, all of that work was gone, and we had to figure out how to cover this new experience while we're all on spring break," said Burdette, now the Wildcat's editor-in-chief.

The COVID-19 pandemic upended the semester in some way for nearly every university student. But it also presented a once-in-a-career opportunity for student journalists, such as Burdette, who rose to the occasion to cover it with guidance from journalism faculty and staff.

Having so much content derailed by the festival's cancellation was a "galvanizing" experience for the Wildcat's editors, said Brett Fera, director of Arizona Student Media and a staff adviser to the newsroom.

After taking stock of their personal situations and figuring out how to forge ahead mostly from home, staffers began to cover the ways the pandemic would shape life for UArizona students. Since March, about 40 staffers have produced 80 to 90 stories on COVID-19. 

The Wildcat continues to publish online and is sending out weekly e-newsletters on Wednesdays to readers who sign up. 

In the School of Journalism, faculty had to get creative teaching students how to use remote working techniques to do a job rooted in witnessing stories as they unfold.

It was as if faculty had to "flip a switch" and adapt their teaching styles, said Prof. Michael McKisson, the school's associate director, who teaches new journalistic techniques involving drones, virtual reality and 360-degree video. Faculty encouraged students to do what they could over Skype and Zoom. The smartphones that most students had in their pockets took the place of DSLR cameras for multimedia projects, McKisson said.

This all made for a good lesson on adaptability as a journalist, he added, which has been a theme for the industry since the internet changed the media landscape over the last 20 years.

"This is just one more change," McKisson said. "You don't stop being a journalist because all of a sudden you can't be there – you just have to adapt."

The journalism school does not oversee the Wildcat but produces its own online publication, El Inde, as a capstone course taught by Prof. Ruxandra Guidi. El Inde's reporters, who cover issues and communities in Southern Arizona, contributed to a special edition of the Patagonia Regional Times this spring.

Guidi encouraged students to spend time in Patagonia and Sonoita, but the pandemic forced students to report remotely. Guidi also allowed students to write essays that personally reflected on the pandemic – a new form of storytelling for many who had spent years focused on newswriting.

"That alone was hard. It demanded a kind of shift in thinking and seeing things," Guidi said.

• Read the full story by Mittan, a 2014 J-school grad.