Throughout this tragedy, students have been side-by-side in trying to move forward.

With the entire world focused on our small town, NIU students have handled the influx of media with compassion and grace, despite some members of news organizations not being prepared or careful when talking with members of our community.

Television stations frantically tried to locate Cole Hall via news helicopters. One station asked viewers to call in to help them identify where the incident happened an hour after it occurred.

Most students have noticed the media on campus during this time, with many choosing to voice their opinions on the air or in the newspapers. Good journalism and bad journalism could both be found at NIU following the incident.

As a section editor for this paper, I received many calls and spoke with numerous media outlets about what had happened; about how we at the Star were handling the incident, and how I personally dealt with everything happening around me.

Nearly every news organization I spoke with expressed concern for my health and safety and treated me with respect, the way any student should be treated following something so horrific.

Unfortunately, though, there is a completely different argument to be made on how the media acted – and is still acting – during their stay on our campus.

Friends and co-workers of mine began to tell me a few days following the incident about how they just wanted the media out of DeKalb and that they were treated poorly during encounters with the individuals covering this story.

As a journalist, my first reaction was to ask why my friends felt the way they did. I felt it was one of my duties to make sure the job title is not tarnished after this incident.

One friend politely declined to comment for her hometown newspaper but the reporter continued to ask questions despite the fact she did not want to talk.

Here at the Star, we received calls from every media outlet you could imagine. One call on the 14th, from a radio station outside of the state, wanted to put one of our staff members on the air immediately.

We were extremely busy but we tried to field as many of these calls as possible, as we had the staff on hand to do so. The station then proceeded to put us on hold for a good seven to eight minutes.

Now, on any other day, I would be more than delighted to speak with a radio station about anything despite an eight minute delay. On this day, though, we didn’t have eight minutes to sit on hold while the radio show went on.

The purpose of this column is not to showcase the dark side of the media, but rather to showcase both good and bad examples of larger media corporations.

Working in media during this situation was something that I would give back in a second if it meant this never happened. Covering news stories is what many people in college publications dream of doing someday for a major newspaper.

Many of us, though, would gladly eliminate the entire incident and the subsequent media coverage from our minds in an instant.

What used to be a town best known for barbed wire and Garrett Wolfe is now going to be recognized as the school that had a shooting on Valentine’s Day.

Let’s hope that the national media does not have a reason to come to DeKalb for anything this devastating.