Chelsea Nguyen remembers exactly where she was on March 16, 2020, when San José State announced that in-person classes would be canceled because of COVID-19.
“We all read the email together at the same time, and we had a production that night, we had a paper to get out,” Nguyen said. “Certainly we had to get the news out in response to the school's email as fast as possible.”
Nguyen was the executive editor of the Spartan Daily for spring 2020, and she was sitting in the newsroom when SJSU sent out the campus-wide email informing staff and students of the imminent lockdown.
News editor Christian Trujano was in the newsroom as well, and he was in shock.
“I remember Mike getting up on the middle table and giving a speech about we can all go home or whatever, or we could stay and do our job,” he said, speaking about Spartan Daily Production Chief Mike Corpos.
The Spartan Daily staff had to make the choice to either give up for the night, and break a 90-year-long streak of never missing a scheduled publication date, or prevail and get the night’s paper in.
The team made the tough decision to continue on and publish that night’s paper but only through PDF, and suspended the Spartan Daily’s contract to print physical copies.
“And we're like, fuck it, let's just do it,” Trujano said. “Let's put out a nice paper just for the effort. And we'll go from there.”
Even though they weren’t supposed to, Trujano and Assistant News Editor Mauricio La Plante went to the library.
That’s when Santa Clara County sent a press release announcing a shelter-in-place order to all residents.
“We were both in shock,” Trujano said. “Obviously we had to get a story out, so I started writing a story on the press release.”
Trujano and La Plante then spent the evening walking around Downtown San José getting quotes to get the story out.
The two of them worked together on the story that would be the front page of the first COVID-era issue of the Spartan Daily.
“We weren't supposed to do that on campus, but we still came into the newsroom,” Trujano said. “We worked on the paper, did what we needed to do.”
Erica Lizarrago was copy editor for the Spartan Daily in 2020, and she said the hardest part of the lockdown was the frequent breakdowns of communication brought on by a fully online production.
She said there were many days the editors had to make the decision to cancel entire sections some nights because of a lack of content and sources to write stories.
“It was for sure a sucker punch to the gut every time we had to cancel a section,” she said. “We held a ‘the show must go on’ mentality and didn’t want to falter on the idea that we produce no matter the circumstances.”
Lizarrago said that special issue was especially hard to put together because there were so many moving parts with no central way of communication, which made it difficult to get anything done.
She said she struggled to keep up with online work and keeping her morale high in light of the situation.
“College is already difficult to begin with,” Lizarrago said. “And throw in the lack of communication and less access to classmates for help, you really had to become disciplined to see your semesters through and power through the end.”
She said staying up to 2 or 3 a.m. on production nights was a common occurrence during lockdown.
Both editors and staff initially struggled with the fully online format, but communication became stronger as the semesters went on.
“There was a lot of trial and error,” Nguyen said. “And I certainly felt like I was grasping at the same straw that everybody else was.”
Nguyen said she would often dream about telling information to her editors, and wouldn’t realize it was a dream until they didn’t know what she was talking about the next morning.
Despite the challenges, the team worked hard to break down the barriers of communication presented over Zoom.
“I think that what we kind of established in fall 2020 really set the precedent on how things are going to be moving forward,” Trujano said. “We honestly didn't know when we were going to get back into the newsroom.”
Nguyen said despite the difficulties of running a newspaper during lockdown, the creativity and drive shown by the writers made it worth the trouble.
“I think we also learned to be more connected in different ways,” she said. “I kind of saw the whole staff adapt to all of that and it was an admirable thing on their part.”
