US journalists put out paper hours after mass killing
Staff worked from pickup truck while police combed newsroom following shooting that left five dead
AFTER the horror and the bloodshed, they did what they do best – getting out the news.
A handful of The Capital Gazette’s photographers and reporters gathered in a parking lot opposite the office block where five of their colleagues had just been shot dead.
Police were still sweeping the building where a gunman had opened fire in the newsroom. The fate of their friends “gravely” injured in the attack was still unknown.
But from the back of a silver pickup truck, those journalists lucky enough to have been spared huddled over laptops to tell their readers the news.
“I can tell you this,” tweeted Chase Cook, a reporter at the paper. “We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow.”
The Capital, as it is known in its home town of Annapolis, Maryland, was the descendant of the seventh earliest newspaper ever established in the United States.
The paper had prided itself on local news. It was thrust into the national spotlight on Thursday afternoon when an attacker began firing a shotgun into the newsroom, determined – according to police – to kill as many people as possible.
Jarrod Ramos, 38, is suspected of carrying out the attack. He attempted to sue the paper when it reported his conviction for harassment, but lost the case in 2015. Ramos had spent years posting threats against the paper and its staff on social media. Yesterday, it emerged the woman he stalked warned police he could become the “next mass shooter”.
He was yesterday charged with five counts of first-degree murder.
Within moments of the attack, The Capital’s journalists were posting on Twitter. “Active shooter 888 Bestgate please help us”, wrote Anthony Messenger, an intern. Phil Davis, its crime reporter, wrote on Twitter: “Gunman shot through the glass door to the office and opened fire on multiple employees. Can’t say much more and don’t want to declare anyone dead, but it’s bad.”
Police arrived within 60 seconds, intercepting the attacker without an exchange of gunfire and with a speed that politicians said saved countless lives.
All five of those who died worked at the paper. They were Gerald Fischman, 61, a page editor; Rob Hiaasen, 59, an editor and features columnist; John Mcnamara, 56, a sports writer; Wendi Winters, 65, a local news reporter; and Rebecca Smith, 34, a sales assistant.
Yesterday, The Capital was published as usual. “5 shot dead at The Capital” read its front page alongside pictures of those who had been killed.
The paper’s opinion page was left blank, save for a short note commemorating the journalists who died. “Today, we are speechless,” it read.
David Simon, creator of the crime drama The Wire and a former journalist, criticised Donald Trump over his fierce rebukes of journalists in the past.
He wrote: “Two of my friends are dead engaged in a profession that the US president told the nation makes them ‘enemies of the people’. That is what our leader told citizens, some of whom had their own grievances and damage.”
Mr Trump defended the profession yesterday, saying: “Journalists, like all Americans, should be free from the fear of being violently attacked while doing their job.”