Skip to main content

New top story from Time: The Capital Gazette Found Justice. But Can the Newspaper Survive?

https://ift.tt/3l5r0iS

I sat 10 feet behind the man who plotted to murder me.

It was the final day of his sanity trial, giving a jury power to decide if he understood what he was doing three years ago when he the illusion of safety created by the glass doors of our Annapolis newsroom.

Among the evidence were two years spent stockpiling weapons, identifying targets while sitting in the office parking lot with a camera, statements that he hoped to appear insane, letters taking responsibility for his attack and a revelation that after murdering four people, he put down his shotgun to surrender. Then he spotted a survivor under a desk, picked up the weapon and obliterated one more life.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

That was Gerald Fischman, a brilliant opinion page editor and my friend for 25 years. He died during minutes of carnage on June 28, 2018 along with Rob Hiaasen, Wendi Winters, John McNamara and Rebecca Smith.

I listened to the man’s public defender offer a rambling closing argument, telling 12 men and women there was sufficient proof his client didn’t understand the wrongness of shooting at fathers and brothers, mothers and daughters, then reloading and shooting again. I studied the man.

Dressed in blue prison scrubs and a black COVID-19 mask, he sat still except when asked to move so his restraints could be removed or restored. Long hair, long beard. Eyes focused straight ahead behind thick glasses. Small, compressed and silent.

I did the math. Could a 63-year-old man leap over two empty courtroom benches and beat the light out of those eyes before sheriff’s deputies pulled him off? Would jail be worth it?

So, I turned away. I looked at Alex Mann.

I hired Alex to cover this trial. He was a 2017 summer intern at Capital Gazette. He knew those who died and worked in the same space where their lives ended.

He moved into the Annapolis newsroom from his first job at another paper, and we started a three-year conversation with others about the coverage and meaning of this story.

If that man sitting quietly in a wood-paneled courtroom was the past, Alex and journalists like him are the future. He and Lilly Price, a second Capital Gazette reporter assigned to the trial, are proof that the plot to kill a newspaper for writing the truth failed.

That was the objective. A murderer five times over, the man told police, lawyers and psychiatrists that he only regretted not killing more. I was on a list of high priority targets. He hoped the families of those he murdered would sue the paper because it failed to protect them, finishing the job he started.

Yet for all of his plans and violence, he failed.

After two hours of deliberation, the Anne Arundel County jury said he failed to convince them that he was insane enough to skip responsibility for his crimes. He failed to win a quiet life in a state psychiatric hospital. He failed to block the almost guaranteed multiple life sentences coming down in September.

We were always going to reach this point. It just wasn’t supposed to take this long.

The gunman pleaded not guilty and not criminally responsible by reason of insanity to five murder charges and more. Then, he admitted his guilt on the spring 2019 day his trial was set to start. That set up a second trial to determine his mental state.

That state was hate unchained. He vowed to silence the newspaper for writing about his harassment conviction for a campaign of spite against a former high school classmate, who barely remembered him after he contacted her on Facebook. In an insightful 2011 column, Eric Hartley explored it as an example of the power for harm posed by social media.

The lawsuit he filed was trash, yet he used the courts for five years of appeals. It was such an obsession that the appellate judge who wrote the stinging final opinion singled him out for failing to grasp the newspaper had done nothing wrong.

That’s when he decided to kill.

The jury should have decided in October 2019 whether he knew this was wrong and whether he could have stopped. Then the delays started.

The lead public defender withdrew, fatal cancer. More time was granted to find expert witnesses for him.

COVID-19 shut down trials in Maryland for a year.

There were changes.

The University of Maryland turned its tiny student newsroom in Annapolis over to the Capital Gazette staff for 11 months and loaned respected editor Karen Denny as an endless source of help. Reporters from other papers came back to fill in while the survivors took time to heal.

The community that mourned with survivors during an Independence Day parade in Annapolis supported us with subscriptions and a realization of what The Capital meant to the community.

Maryland passed a red flag law, making it easier to remove guns from someone deemed by the courts as a threat. Annapolis and Anne Arundel County became a center for discussions of preventing gun violence.

Tribune Publishing, owner of The Capital and The Baltimore Sun, committed to keeping the Annapolis paper alive, promises embodied by people like Trif Alatzas and Tim Knight and Terry Jimenez. The company spent a small fortune on bulletproof walls for a new place to work.

The journalism profession rallied around us, awarding a Pulitzer Prize and other accolades, and made the paper a symbol of a free press in an era of attacks. The staff appeared on the cover of TIME.

Mass shootings continued; local murders needed to be covered. The police chief quit during Black Lives Matters protests. Elections came and went. COVID shut down the newsroom and classrooms and threatened to overwhelm the world.

My job was to keep it all spinning, focused on the work. I didn’t do it alone, though some days I was the symbol of the symbol. We did it together.

Yet, amid the endless news cycle and constant backbeat of grief, I quietly warned colleagues by ones and twos that it would not last.

Economic winds tearing through local journalism in 2018 were just outside the protective bubble created around our newsroom by goodwill. That bubble, I warned when I wasn’t being cheerleader-in-chief, would get smaller and smaller until one day it popped.

Staff members left for better jobs or in company buyouts. Hiring got tied up with strategy for the wider organization. The tide of culture change started in 2014 when The Sun bought its small-town competitor quickened as the tragedy receded, frequently drowning the needs of Annapolis in those of Baltimore.

Through it all, Alex remained focused on the case. We tried not to discuss it in the newsroom, where survivors worked every day. He wrote about motions, and families and anniversaries. Alex discovered a flaw that allowed lawyers to seal court documents without explanation or review.

Then Alex was called to Baltimore for a better-paying job. He could continue to cover the case with editors in Annapolis, we all agreed. That phone call from the publisher was the sound of a bubble bursting.

Donald Trump made it hard for some readers, drunk on hateful rhetoric, to support any news outlet that didn’t support his view of the world. COVID-19 came and subscriptions rose as people wanted news to stay safe, but some of those same readers saw the paper’s coverage as proof of its bias.

The bulletproof office closed with the arrival of COVID-19 restrictions in March 2020, It never reopened, as Tribune decided to save jobs over real estate during the recession. COVID-19 waned and online readership fell.

Tribune changed hands. Alden Global Financial succeeded in its long campaign to buy another major newspaper company, beating back a quixotic challenge by a Maryland billionaire. One of its first actions was offering a buyout to cut costs.

I wanted to stay. I believe in the work. Then I admitted to myself that a future of decreasing resources, fighting for every hire, cutting things deemed nonessential and working harder and longer to cover the ever-widening gaps was more than I could do after three draining years.

So, I left. I kick myself for abandoning reporters like Alex and Lilly and editors like Brandi Bottalico and Jay Judge to carry on with what I could not: Finish the story.

Today, as the families and other victims describe the July 15 verdict as a victory, I know the last three years have been just a reprieve. There are good people at The Capital and Baltimore Sun Media, its parent newspaper group, who are committed to keeping it going. I hope they can do it. But their success depends on factors beyond Annapolis.

I have faith that the value of a free press will survive the loss of a small-town newspaper editor, and even the presses themselves. It might not include print titles like The Capital and its weekly paper the Maryland Gazette, which have no physical presence in Annapolis for the first time since before the Revolution

Instead, it may be in small digital publications for local news. My friend Bess Langbein, whose Due East Partners works with nonprofit newsrooms, believes it will require nimble fundraising and robust community engagement to overcome the noise of an era when everyone is their own publisher and no one has an editor. It will come through years of experiment and failure in search of a successful model.

I don’t know if there’s a place for me on that journey. I left my position without any real job prospects.

Looking back, I take solace in relegating the man who killed my friends to a single line in the story of how a small newspaper, rescued in a moment of crisis by those who cared about its purpose, survived to report the news again.

Watching Alex in that courtroom, alone among the families and the lawyers and the killer, I realized that together with others, we saved The Capital so it could reach this point.

Bubble popped, winds blowing harder than ever, future unclear.

Alex and Lilly and Brandi are passionate about what they do and believe in the need for strong journalism in a community like Annapolis, the nation and the wider world.

Can Tribune keep the Alexes of its new asset? Or do they lose him and Lilly and Brandi and thousands like them to visionaries brave enough to make bold choices, patient enough to invest time and money, and smart enough to take the risks required to reach the future of journalism?

That is what ultimately will decide the fate of The Capital and much, much more.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

L Taraval Improvement Project Update

L Taraval Improvement Project Update By Sevilla Mann Roundtable at the Community Parklet Shares Project Updates  This past week, the SFMTA hosted a media roundtable discussing updates about the L Taraval Improvement Project at the community parklet located in front of the The Rolling Out Café  on Taraval St.   Segment B construction began in February 2022 and is scheduled to be completed Fall 2024. Sewer and water infrastructure work is currently taking place. Future work includes track work, overhead line work, the construction of new boarding islands and streetscape improvements.    On hand to answer questions and provide updates was District Four Supervisor Gordon Mar, SFMTA Board Director Sharon Lai and Director of Transportation Jefferey Tumlin.   The Roundtable  Supervisor Mar opened the discussion by highlighting the many benefits that the local community will receive with the planned infrastructure upgrades along the corridor. These benefits include:   Replacing sew

FOX NEWS: Cincinnati zoo renames sloth habitat after late 1-year-old who loved sloths The sloth habitat at Ohio's Cincinnati Zoo will be named after a toddler who recently passed away.

Cincinnati zoo renames sloth habitat after late 1-year-old who loved sloths The sloth habitat at Ohio's Cincinnati Zoo will be named after a toddler who recently passed away. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3DLAshi

IPL 2020 | KKR, SRH search for first win to get off the mark https://ift.tt/333a9nc

Having suffered defeats in their opening games, the Kolkata Knight Riders and Sunrisers Hyderabad will lock horns on Saturday at the Sheikh Zayed Stadium in Abu Dhabi. While Kolkata faced a tough 49-run loss to defending champions Mumbai Indians, the Sunrisers suffered a monumental batting collapse against Royal Challengers Bangalore, losing the game by 10 runs.

FOX NEWS: Decadent double chocolate mint cookies for National Chocolate Day National Chocolate Day on Oct. 28th calls for a serious dose of chocolate.

Decadent double chocolate mint cookies for National Chocolate Day National Chocolate Day on Oct. 28th calls for a serious dose of chocolate. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3nEJxSB

Muni’s Equity Toolkit Helps Essential Employees Get to Work

Muni’s Equity Toolkit Helps Essential Employees Get to Work By Mariana Maguire The latest data from SFMTA’s new  Equity Toolkit  shows that Muni service changes are helping people in neighborhoods identified by our  Muni Service Equity Strategy  access more jobs and support the city’s recovery.   In winter 2020, we launched the  SFMTA Equity Toolkit  to understand how service decisions are affecting neighborhoods where there is likely a high prevalence of essential workers who rely predominantly on Muni to get to their essential jobs. Our goal is to make better service decisions based on the trends and impacts we see in the Equity Toolkit.   Recently, the greatest increases in access to jobs via Muni have been in Hunters Point and Western Addition. The Hunters Point neighborhood saw the largest gains from the addition of the  15 Bayview-Hunters Point Express , as demonstrated in the table below. Thanks to the return of key Muni lines and increased frequencies on connector routes, I

Powered Scooters Charge City’s Transportation Recovery

Powered Scooters Charge City’s Transportation Recovery By Jason Hyde The SFMTA is releasing its next round of Powered Scooter Share permits on July 1. Scooters remain a sustainable mode of travel and a complement to Muni and public transit service as the city recovers from the pandemic and San Franciscans begin to travel more. The SFMTA’s Powered Scooter Share Program is essential in ensuring that shared scooter operations support the city’s economic recovery in a safe, sustainable, and equitable way.  The SFMTA received four submittals for the permit program and will issue permits to two operators : Spin and Lime. Permits will be in effect for a one-year term, with the option to extend for another year at the discretion of the SFMTA based on compliance with various program metrics. While the new permit program does not set a limit on the number of scooters each operator may deploy, it does limit the overall citywide fleet size at 10,000. Starting at a base of 2,000 scooters per

New top story from Time: 3 Killed in Northern California as Wildfires Force Thousands to Evacuate

https://ift.tt/34at2Uy (SAN FRANCISCO) — Northern California’s wine country was on fire again Monday as strong winds fanned flames in the already scorched region, destroying homes and prompting orders for nearly 70,000 people to evacuated. Meanwhile, three people died in a separate fire further north in the state. In Sonoma County, residents of the Oakmont Gardens senior living facility in Santa Rosa boarded brightly lit city buses in the darkness overnight, some wearing bathrobes and using walkers. They wore masks to protect against the coronavirus as orange flames marked the dark sky. The fire threat forced Adventist Health St. Helena hospital to suspend care and transfer all patients elsewhere. The fires that began Sunday in the famed Napa-Sonoma wine country about 45 miles (72 kilometers) north of San Francisco came as the region nears the third anniversary of deadly wildfires that erupted in 2017, including one that killed 22 people. Just a month ago, many of those

Traffic Collisions have Decreased on San Francisco’s Slow Streets

Traffic Collisions have Decreased on San Francisco’s Slow Streets By Julia Malmo   As a whole, Slow Streets are safer than they were before being designated Slow Streets  Streets that are part of the SFMTA’s  Slow Streets Program have become measurably safer since the program began in 2020, with the number of traffic crashes falling by almost half. On average, these corridors have seen a 48% drop in collisions following their designation as Slow Streets, compared with a 14% drop in collisions citywide over the same period. Slow Streets also are more welcoming for people who walk, bike and roll. Fewer than 1,000 vehicles per day use all but four of the current Slow Streets (20th Street, Minnesota Street, Noe Street, and Page Street).  The goal of the program is to create safe, shared streets that are comfortable and enjoyable for people of all ages and abilities, using any mode of transportation. We now can see how it’s doing in a new evaluation report . When the SFMTA Board appr

New top story from Time: How History Is Repeating Itself for Haitian Migrants Trying to Enter the U.S.

https://ift.tt/3upRk9U In the past 11 years alone, Haitians have suffered natural disasters, rising gang violence, outbreaks of cholera and COVID-19, and political instability, including the recent assassination of President Jovenel Moïse . The crises left many in the hemisphere’s poorest nation feeling they had no option but to leave—despite the difficulties they face in fleeing to other countries. In late September, Americans were confronted with the reality of those difficulties too. An estimated 15,000 people arrived in Del Rio, Texas, during the month, below a bridge connecting the city to Mexico’s Ciudad Acuña. A majority were Haitian nationals, migrants and asylum seekers who ended up living in tents or under tarps, in conditions similar to those in other camps that have formed along the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Read more: Caught Between U.S. Policies and Instability at Home, Haitian Migrants in Tijuana Are in a State of L

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J कोरोना सकंट में TV सीरियल की शूटिंग शूरू, मास्क लगाकर पहुंचे स्टार्स- निया, पार्थ से लेकर रश्मि-PICS

कोरोना वायरस के चलते जारी लॉकडाउन में टीवी व फिल्मों की शूटिंग बंद थी। कोरोना के खतरे को देखते हुए तमाम सीरियल की शूटिंग रोक दी गई तो वहीं फिल्मों को रिलीज अटक गई। एंटरटेंमेंट इंडस्ट्री को कोरोना के चलते करोड़ों from टेलीविजन की खबरें | Television News in Hindi | TV Serials Update in Hindi – FilmiBeat Hindi http:/hindi.filmibeat.com/television/tv-shooting-starts-kasauti-zindagi-kay-naagin-nia-sharma-parth-samthaan-rashmi-desai-pics-090604.html?utm_source=/rss/filmibeat-hindi-television-fb.xml&utm_medium=23.11.231.156&utm_campaign=client-rss