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When Trump’s Envoy for Ukraine Resigned, a College Journalist Had the Scoop

An editor at Arizona State University’s student newspaper beat everyone else to the news that Kurt Volker had stepped down.

A student newspaper broke the news that Kurt D. Volker abruptly resigned from his job as the State Department’s special envoy for Ukraine.Credit...Sergei Supinsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Kurt D. Volker has traveled halfway around the world as a United States diplomat. He has met with world leaders, negotiated foreign policy and served under multiple American presidents.

But when he abruptly resigned from his job as the State Department’s special envoy for Ukraine, it wasn’t an international broadcaster or national newspaper that had the scoop.

It was a 20-year-old junior at Arizona State University who broke the news in the school’s student newspaper.

Mr. Volker serves as executive director of the McCain Institute, a think tank in Washington that is run by Arizona State University. When reporters at the student newspaper, The State Press, discovered the connection, they began looking into Mr. Volker and, on Friday evening, confirmed with an unnamed school official that the ambassador had resigned.

Andrew Howard, a managing editor of The State Press, said he hadn’t set out to write a story that would be followed by reporters from dozens of major media outlets, including The New York Times. He had just been doing his job: covering the university.

“I didn’t take a different approach to this story than any other,” Mr. Howard said shortly after waking up to a flood of congratulatory texts on Saturday morning. “Everyone’s looking for an ‘aha’ moment that I don’t think was there.”

Mr. Volker resigned after news reports surfaced that Mr. Trump had encouraged Ukraine’s president to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Democratic candidate for president, which touched off a House impeachment inquiry. According to a whistle-blower complaint about Mr. Trump’s efforts, Mr. Volker had advised Ukrainian officials on how to “navigate” the president’s demands.

“We decided to take an approach to the story that a national outlet might not, and reach out to the university,” Mr. Howard said. “I’m not sure we ever expected to get the scoop that we did.”

When his story went online just after 6:15 p.m., Mr. Howard happened to be sitting in another newsroom: that of The Arizona Republic, where he is an intern and was working on obituaries. He apologized to his editors there for working two jobs at once.

The story immediately took off. The A.S.U. newspaper has been online only since the fall of 2014, and a popular story can garner a few thousand views on the website. Mr. Howard’s cracked 100,000.

Mr. Howard grew up in Phoenix and was drawn to journalism in part because of his mother, who studied it in college. He was further inspired when he joined his high school newspaper, The Brophy Roundup, and met a teacher who advised the paper and encouraged its journalists to never shy away from serious stories, like coverage of the soccer team’s hazing.

Since he arrived at A.S.U., the student newspaper has been a central focus.

“What do I do outside of it? I feel like I spend a lot of time at The State Press,” Mr. Howard said.

International diplomacy is not a frequent subject of coverage for The State Press, which has a staff of about 100 editors and reporters who work from a basement office filled with “fairy lights, the occasional cockroach and lots of love,” according to Kimberly Rapanut, the current editor in chief.

The newspaper’s online pages are filled with a mix of everyday news — profiles of clubs, sports coverage and crime — and investigative pieces, including one story exposing a campus group’s use of a Nazi-inspired flag. (The university later began investigating the group, College Republicans United.)

Jason Manning, the director of student media and an adviser to the newspaper, said he was incredibly proud of the student journalists for their scoop.

“The original reporting is one thing, but managing the ongoing viral explosion of this story adds another level of complexity and pressure, and they have handled themselves with an extraordinary degree of professionalism,” Mr. Manning said.

He said he and other advisers and professors tell students that even on a college campus, they can break new developments in the day’s biggest stories.

“Anything they do can immediately become a national or international story,” Mr. Manning said. “That was the case this time, and they’ve handled it very well.”

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports on national news. He is from upstate New York and previously reported in Baltimore, Albany, and Isla Vista, Calif. More about Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: When Trump’s Envoy for Ukraine Resigned, a College Journalist Beat Outlets to the Scoop. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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