We stand with and honor the Capital Gazette

In this job, we are used to writing the headlines, not making them.

That changed last week, when the sad saga of mass shootings in the United States barged into our world.

A gunman who had a long vendetta against the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md., blasted into the newspaper building, blocked the exits and then started shooting.

Before he was done, five people were dead, several others injured.

These are not good times in the newspaper industry. We find ourselves struggling to find a new business model to replace the one that has been shattered by the internet, technology and social media.

The industry has been rocked by all these developments, leading to painful consolidations, downsizing and a shift to what we all hope will be a digital future. There’s a lot of hoping going on in the newspaper industry these days.

And last week, a lot of mourning, too.

The newspaper industry — and in truth much of the media — finds itself under withering attack these days. And not just from a madman with a gun and a chip on his shoulder the size of those old Thanksgiving Day editions.

There are constant chants of “fake news,” an inherent liberal bias, and a searing brand that we somehow have become “the enemy of the people.” None of it is true. We are not the enemy of the people. We are your neighbors. We coach your kids. We sit beside you in church. We hold the door for you going into Wawa.

The truth of the daily community newspaper is a long way from the glamour of the journalism that plays out on your television screens every night.

No one goes into the newspaper business thinking they are going to get rich.

The pay is lousy, and the hours worse. We work nights, holidays and weekends.

We do it to shine a light on things that need to be known in the community.

Want to be bored to tears some day? Sit through a couple of hours of your local zoning hearing board.

Yeah, it’s not always scintillating stuff.

Right up until the point where you learn that what transpired during that meeting means a pipeline is suddenly going to be your new neighbor, a few hundreds yards from your kids’ elementary school. Or perhaps that a bus depot that nobody knew anything about is suddenly going to show up across the street from your house.

We are watchdogs. And we are fast becoming an endangered species.

Government is best when it takes place in the open, in a transparent manner, for all to see.

Consider the newspaper and the people who work there a disinfectant, scouring all those dark corners and back rooms to make sure that the public’s business is in fact being done in public.

But that is not all we do. We also revel in telling the everyday stories — good and bad — that make up our lives.

We offer space for your kids’ accomplishments; we laud the Boys and Girls Scouts’ achievements; we note your kids’ graduation from high school; we salute their military service; we note your business accomplishments.

And, of course, we print an obituary paying homage and serving as a lasting legacy of a person’s time on this good Earth.

Last week we penned obits for five of our own, five people who got up and went to work, where they met an increasingly routine menace, a troubled person with a gun.

We sometimes refer to what we do every day as something akin to a mirror. Every day we hold up that mirror to life in our towns and reflect back what has transpired in the last 24 hours. Very often, just as when we look in the mirror ourselves, we are not especially happy with the reflection.

We do not blanche from the warts; we report the bad as well as the good.

Today we mourn the five victims of the shooting at the Capital Gazette. Wendi Winters, Rebecca Smith, Robert Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman and John McNamara each had a story of their own in addition to the stories they told every day.

We salute what they did. We revile how they died. And we recoil at the attacks on the long tradition of what we do every day. We will continue to hold that mirror up every day.

Even when we look into it and see a tear running down our cheek.