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Capital Gazette: "A Damn Paper"
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The front page of The Capital Gazette newspaper the day after a mass shooting occured at the paper's office. Claire Harbage/NPR/Claire Harbage/NPR hide caption
The front page of The Capital Gazette newspaper the day after a mass shooting occured at the paper's office.
Claire Harbage/NPR/Claire Harbage/NPRJust hours after surviving a shooting at her workplace, Selene San Felice was on live television being interviewed by Anderson Cooper. It was June 28, 2018. Five of her coworkers at the Capital Gazette, a local newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, had just been killed.
Selene described her experience and expressed her shock, but as a journalist, she also took it a step further. "This is going to be a story for how many days? Less than a week. People are going to forget about us after a week," Selene said on air. "I'm going to need more than a couple days of news coverage and some thoughts and prayers."
For more than two years, producer Chris Benderev has been following Selene and the other staffers who survived the Capital Gazette shooting. He talked with the staff members who were in the building, and those who were not. This series is about what happens after the news trucks go away. How do you rebuild your life, and your newspaper, after such an attack?
In part one of this story, we look at the events that occurred on the day of the shooting — not to retell the crime itself at length or in graphic detail, but because in order to understand everything that would come next for The Capital you need to know how the staff responded to the tragedy on June 28, 2018.