I can tell you this: We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow.
We have never met Chase Cook, the reporter at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, who hours after a gunman killed five of his colleagues at the paper, tweeted the above, bold assurance to the world.
But we feel like we know him.
His is the passion and commitment of the people we have worked with every day throughout our careers in journalism, mostly at small, community newspapers like the Leader.
We have never faced the horror that Cook and his co-workers did last Thursday. We hope we never will.
But the deaths of five of our peers at the Capital Gazette are a stark, and frightening, reminder that sometimes ours can be a dangerous job. Sometimes, simply by doing our jobs — the right way — people get angry with us. In the newspaper business, we’ve all repeated the adage, “Don’t shoot the messenger,” often with a resigned sigh as we discuss with fellow journalists the frustrations of reporting the news factually and fairly and still facing angry — and sometimes threatening — responses from the subjects of our reporting or readers in general.
That too-easily-repeated saying has a new, terrifying meaning. The Capital Gazette reported the results of a criminal case, and the subject of that story held a grudge. For six years, he harassed and threatened the news staff in various ways. And then, last week, he showed up at the newspaper’s office with a shotgun and killed five people.
Journalists are not perfect. We make mistakes, like almost everyone else. Sometimes they are small mistakes, like a typographical error. Sometimes the mistakes are big, like incorrectly reporting a fact in a news story. Sometimes the errors we make are in the way we report the news.
In all of these mistakes, we hear it from our readers. And that’s a good thing. When it is respectful, reasoned criticism, we appreciate it and learn from it.
Sadly, there’s not enough of that these days. Our nation has become so divided that anyone with a differing opinion becomes “the enemy.” Civil discourse is a lost art. Shouting the loudest or being the most physically imposing are the paths to victory in any disagreement. And only victory is acceptable, not understanding or a just resolution.
Journalists and journalism have become favorite targets of name-calling and over-the-top criticism. No less than our country’s president has placed a bull’s-eye on the media — labeling news reports with which he disagrees as “fake news” and even calling us “the enemy of the American people.”
Today, Independence Day, it seems more appropriate than ever to remind the president and those who repeat his pet phrases: Journalists are not an “enemy of the American people.” Rather, we are the American people. We are you.
We shop in the same stores you do. We eat with our families at the same restaurants. We attend theaters and watch our kids participate in sporting events just as you do. We are community journalists, not just because we “cover” the community, but because we live here, work here and care about this community.
We also care about the First Amendment and a free press that holds the powerful accountable while also telling the stories that otherwise might not be told — a child’s appearance on the honor roll at school, a neighbor’s unusual hobby, a new business coming to town.
Technological and economic changes have forced community newspapers to change the way we do business, but the reporters who gather in our newsroom every day continue to figure out the best way possible to tell those stories to our community. They work long hours, sometimes in uncomfortable situations, and they certainly won’t get rich doing these things.
But they do it. Because “putting out a damn paper” matters.
