On June 28, 2018, a gunman stormed the newsroom of the Capital Gazette, in Annapolis, Maryland, and murdered five staffers: Rob Hiaasen, Wendi Winters, Rebecca Smith, Gerald Fischman, and John McNamara. Later the same day, Selene San Felice, a twenty-two-year-old reporter who survived the attack, was interviewed on CNN, and shared a grim observation about the nature of the news cycles that typically follow mass shootings in America. “I honestly didn’t even expect to be talking with Anderson Cooper today. I thought people would get, like, an Apple News notification, and they would just blow it off,” San Felice said. “This is going to be a story for how many days? Less than a week. People will forget about us after a week.” The Capital Gazette shooting, and San Felice’s interview, stayed with Chris Benderev, a reporter and producer at NPR, much longer than that. He and his colleagues at Embedded—a documentary-style show, hosted by Kelly McEvers, that produces deep dives off the news—had already been looking to focus on the aftermath of a shooting; there was, sickeningly, no shortage of possible subjects, but Benderev ended up staying with the story of the Capital Gazette. (It helped that Annapolis is close to his base, in DC.) Over the course of the next two and a half years, he reported a four-part series; the first installment dropped a month ago, and the fourth came out last week. The series starts with the CNN interview and expands from there, focusing first on the day... Continue reading at 'Columbia Journalism Review'
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2021-03-16 12:10:09 UTC ]