Silence in newsrooms as 5 slain at Maryland paper remembered
ANNAPOLIS, MD. » Newsrooms across the country paused Thursday to observe a moment of silence for five employees of a Maryland newspaper who were killed a week ago in one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in U.S. history.
The Capital Gazette staff paused somberly at 2:33 p.m. as editor Rick Hutzell rang a bell for each person who died at the Annapolis paper exactly seven days earlier, The Baltimore Sun reported .
The staff traditionally convenes meetings by clanging a bell, and Hutzell said the act has taken on a new meaning.
“Every time we ring that bell, we’re going to think about our friends,” he said.
About a dozen people held hands and prayed next to a memorial near the building where the shootings happened. Cheryl Starr and her son, Sam, came to pay their respects.
“We live right next door, so it just hit us hard, because it’s so close to home — way too close to home — and it’s tragic. Everyone in the community knew these people, and it just shouldn’t happen like that,” she said.
The American Society of News Editors and The Associated Press Media Editors asked newsrooms around the globe to join in a remembrance of the dead, and many did.
In Louisville, Kentucky, the newsroom at the Courier Journal fell silent in memory of the victims after executive editor Joel Christopher read the names of the dead.
“They paid a high price for doing what we do,” he said.
In the newsroom of The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia, the vigil was accompanied by the names of the five victims being read aloud, according to reporter Jane Harper.
“It was incredibly quiet,” said Harper, 55, who worked at Annapolis paper from 1987 to 1991. “Not a cellphone rang. Not a desk phone. Not a single sound.”
About 100 people gathered in the headquarters of The Associated Press in New York to observe a moment of silence, circling around a desk where coverage of national and international stories is planned.
The attack on the Capital Gazette newsroom was “frightening and distressing in so many ways,” AP executive editor Sally Buzbee said.
Jimmie Gates, a reporter who participated in a moment of silence at the Clarion Ledger newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi, said being a journalist is like being in a small fraternity or sorority, and an injury to any one member hurts all.
“It was just like a family member being taken away,” Gates said.
The remembrance also touched journalism schools. No classes were in session at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, but more than a dozen faculty members and students bowed their heads in memory of the slain newspaper workers.