Steve Schuh, county executive of Anne Arundel County, holds a copy of The Capital Gazette near the scene of a shooting at the newspaper's office June 29 in Annapolis, Md. A man armed with smoke grenades and a shotgun attacked journalists in the building June 28 killing five people before police quickly stormed the building and arrested him, police and witnesses said. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
This week, I was privileged to attend a national news leadership conference for editors in Texas. There I found the usual interesting talk about online vs. print journalism, online tools for journalists and ways to build and retain audience. But what struck me was that in a two-day program, three different sessions were dedicated to keeping our staff members safe.
It’s a reflection of today’s spiteful world, where a president calls journalists the “enemy of the people” and a member of the state Republican Party leadership refers to us as “those dirty, godless, hateful people.” This is not true. Journalists work a lot of hours for a little pay; we do it because the work is fascinating and because we believe our jobs provide a check on power that keeps democracy alive.
But don’t take my word for it. Look at the actions of people like Chase Cook, a reporter for the Annapolis Capital Gazette in Maryland. After a gunman stormed the newsroom and killed five of his colleagues, Cook took to Twitter: “I can tell you we are putting out a damn paper tomorrow,” he wrote.
And they did. “I knew I had a job to do,” Cook told us at the conference. Cook, who was not in the newsroom during the gunman’s 90-second rampage, said the first thing he did was use his smartphone to help put together profiles of his dead co-workers from information he found on his newspaper’s website. His biggest concern? He didn’t want to editorialize and say overly nice things about the victims. Instead, he was careful to stick to the facts.
The Capital Gazette’s publisher, Trif Alatzas, was also part of Tuesday’s panel. He talked about how, not long after the shooting, the Capital Gazette’s surviving editors met to figure out how to put out the news while the office was a major crime scene and the staff were witnesses. They had to ask their staff to put aside the shock and grief, if able to do so, and lend a hand in putting out the paper. I got the feeling that everyone on the staff wanted to present the best coverage for their readers rather than take the rest of the day off.
“When news happens in Annapolis, The Capital covers it,” Alatzas explained.
Another session focused on how to deal with online trolls. These people have been around forever. I can remember a decade or more ago a female Columbian reporter received threatening comments via voicemail; we called the Vancouver police and the offender eventually was convicted of a crime.
Bullying and threats are even more common in today’s online world. One of this week’s panelists, a Latina journalist who writes a politics column, talked about how she was told she should put a bag over her head and hang herself.
A female sportswriter for a Texas newspaper talked about the harassment she has received. One particularly awful incident came the day after a college football coach was nasty to her at a press conference. The next day, she hosted an online video chat for that team’s fans, and it was quickly flooded with hateful and sexist comments, including a suggestion she should take off her shirt. “It was horrible,” she said. “It was an online lynch mob.”
She’s also been harassed about her coverage of cyclist Lance Armstrong’s doping case and her Heisman Trophy vote.
Her advice? Acknowledge but don’t engage.
“You’ve got stuff to write,” she said.
Indeed we do. But the stress and danger is real, and increasing.
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