Through additional interviews, Gimbel found that Budd had been acting strangely for months before his disappearance, giving away all the posters in his room at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house and avoiding making decisions about what courses to take during the upcoming term. Gimbel also found that police suspected Budd had his father’s pistol with him when he was last seen, walking away from the boat.

The resulting article, “Seven months, 1,500 acres: still no trace of Bryant Budd,” was one of the clips that earned Gimbel the Associated Collegiate Press and the National Scholastic Press Association’s 2000 Reporter of the Year title. He received the award and a thousand dollars in November at the National Collegiate Media Convention in Washington, D.C.

“Barney is really enthralled with journalism–he loves to talk about the craft, he loves the quest, looking at things from different angles,” says Sheila Tefft, director of Emory’s journalism program, who taught Gimbel’s journalism ethics class. “He’s naturally skeptical, discarding what doesn’t stand up. Bizarre, unusual, quirky things fascinate him.”

In his office on the fifth floor of the Dobbs University Center, Gimbel puts in fifty to sixty hours a week at the independent student newspaper, which publishes 7,500 copies twice a week. He supervises twenty student writers, assigns and edits copy, and keeps up with a full course load. “Sometimes I’ll get home at 6 a.m., and have a 9 a.m. class,” he says. “But I’m here because I think we’re doing something important.”

Gimbel, who worked last summer as a full-time news reporter in the DeKalb County bureau of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has covered political contests and the police beat. He coordinated a recent Emory Wheel article about the Emory post office’s poor service that resulted in new hires and an apology from the company that runs it.

“You realize things can change, and we can take some small credit for that,” he says.

Gimbel also achieved campus acclaim for an investigative article he wrote about extravagant spending by Student Government Association Executive Board members, including several who indulged in a $220 Sunday brunch at the Ritz-Carlton on the students’ tab.

As for the oft-heard prediction that print journalism will be obsolete in a decade or two, the twenty-one-year-old Gimbel counters like a grizzled, green-eyeshade editor: “Even if we’re published only on-line, who’s writing the stuff? It’ll make journalists’ lives harder, updating stories all day–we’ll have to become as twenty-four-hours oriented as CNN. But I don’t think hard copies will die any time soon. People like to have something to hold in their hands.”–M.J.L.