Why we're journalists: Thoughts after the Annapolis newspaper shooting
Our newsroom, as I’m sure newsrooms throughout the country, was a little on edge on Friday. We ran a story about another mass shooting in our paper. This one was different. It was one that happened inside a newsroom in Maryland.
A man who reportedly had a grudge against The Capital Gazette in Annapolis shot his way into the newsroom Thursday afternoon, “looked for his victims,” killed four journalists and a sales assistant and injured two others, according to The Associated Press.
My first beat at my first full-time job as a reporter in a newsroom was crime and courts. Fresh out of journalism school, I found it thrilling and interesting, mechanical in reporting on the law while creative in reporting on the people. I’ve covered breaking news at every newspaper I’ve worked at since, and I still enjoy it, though there have been some moments I will always remember as overcoming.
I remember crying the whole (hour-long) drive home after covering a memorial for a mother and her two sons, ages 8 and 9, who were shot to death by her boyfriend before he also critically injured her father and killed himself.
I remember the first time I saw a dead body in the road after a car crash.
I remember not knowing what to do when another reporter returned to the office shaken from covering a hostage situation that resulted in a father fatally shooting his 11-month-old daughter. I hugged her. She wrote the story.
We’ve called our contacts at police departments and sheriff’s offices with a “just letting you know” about an angry reader, a mother who chose to believe we published false information over her daughter getting arrested, a disgruntled former employee, a man who wanted to visit us to explain why the homemade bombs he left in his parents’ house were misinterpreted.
People are angry at us all the time. It’s kind of the nature of the job. Truth hurts.
We didn’t take these jobs to get rich. We didn’t come here to work 9-to-5 and make it home for dinner every night. We didn’t come here to get thanked every day.
We get criticized. We’re fake. We’re biased. We don’t know English or how to read or how to write. We missed a comma. We need to get our facts straight.
Now, I guess, we die at our desks and hide under them as someone reloads feet from us. Now, I guess, we write our colleagues’ remembrances and run their obituaries.
We’re reporters. We’re editors. We’re sales representatives and graphic designers and carriers and publishers and photographers and videographers.
We’re Democrats. We’re Republicans. We drink beer. We pray. We eat pizza on election nights and have a collection of red pens.
We’re journalists. We’ve been let go and fired and consolidated and murdered. We’re not going to quit.