--- title: The Capital Gazette Found Justice. But Can It Survive? description: The Capital Gazette finally found some justice after the terrible newsroom shooting, but can the newspaper thrive with new owners? canonical: https://time.com/6085485/capital-gazette-shooting-justice/ author: Rick Hutzell article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2021-07-29T19:53:47.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:03:12.049Z article:section: Ideas og:title: The Capital Gazette Found Justice. But Can the Newspaper Survive? og:description: The Capital Gazette finally found some justice after the terrible newsroom shooting, but can the newspaper thrive with new owners? og:url: https://time.com/6085485/capital-gazette-shooting-justice/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt581091ee71756107/698a1b75b3fce35f040c8241/Rick-Hutzell-Journalists-Matter-Time.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1600 og:image:height: 900 og:image:alt: Rick Hutzell og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Capital Gazette Found Justice. But Can the Newspaper Survive? twitter:description: The Capital Gazette finally found some justice after the terrible newsroom shooting, but can the newspaper thrive with new owners? twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt581091ee71756107/698a1b75b3fce35f040c8241/Rick-Hutzell-Journalists-Matter-Time.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Capital Gazette Found Justice. But Can the Newspaper Survive? > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Inside TIME: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Inside TIME is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. A closer look at TIME's latest cover and our most compelling stories. 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A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: One Year After Surviving a Mass Shooting, the Capital Gazette Journalists Refuse to Be Silenced [Watch (HLS stream): One Year After Surviving a Mass Shooting, the Capital Gazette Journalists Refuse to Be Silenced](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/X27KHEvG.m3u8) (21:24)  _Published 2019-11-07. TIME spent a year chronicling the aftermath of the Capital Gazette shooting. Here's how the journalists have soldiered on since the tragedy._  by [Rick Hutzell](https://time.com/author/rick-hutzell/)  ## Rick Hutzell Jul 29, 2021 7:53 PM UTC  Rick Hutzell, former editor of Capital Gazette. Rick Hutzell, former editor of Capital Gazette. Paul W. Gillespie  by [Rick Hutzell](https://time.com/author/rick-hutzell/)  ## Rick Hutzell Jul 29, 2021 7:53 PM UTC 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 shattered the illusion of safety created by the glass doors of our [Annapolis newsroom](https://time.com/5475517/capital-gazette-person-of-the-year-2018/). 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. 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](https://www.capitalgazette.com/news/crime/ac-cn-whats-next-shooting-case-20210717-pg4alj6upbdd7mtv5f5ac4rxaa-story.html). 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](https://www.capitalgazette.com/news/crime/ac-cn-capital-gazette-trial-verdict-20210715-c2kgnf64hjfoho6ekarjuxjuv4-story.html). 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](https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2019/08/05/maryland-red-flag-law-gun-control-mass-shootings-president-trump/#:~:text=linkedin-,Maryland%20Has%20Red%20Flag%20Law%20That%20Allows%20Police%20To%20Take,Who%20Pose%20Threats%2C%20Mentally%20Ill&text=Maryland%20is%20among%20the%20states,threat%20to%20themselves%20or%20others.), 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.](https://time.com/longform/capital-gazette/) 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](https://www.npr.org/2021/05/21/998730863/vulture-fund-alden-global-known-for-slashing-newsrooms-buys-tribune-papers) in its long campaign to buy another major newspaper company, beating back a quixotic challenge by a [Maryland billionaire](https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/bs-md-bainum-alden-bid-20210406-d6spz2xcsved5dzgrgqucrivuy-story.html). 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. ## Transcript Okay. I tried to make a stay in the city, I think just today. It's clear this is a perfect fit for us. And I would like to speak to the fact that I had a heart attack when I came back from running to the store and found out the building had been evacuated on our first day. So if you pulled the fire alarm, don't do that again. The next story. Title I was just calling to ask if she remembers anything. About that happening. After the shooting. I set three milestones to keep the paper going, get us into a new office and get through the trial. Two down. A job. I think I was a little freaked out at first coming in here because the hallways and the building and everything are a lot like the old office. But we made our first batch of coffee and I was just the first batch of coffee in the new office. Like. To some extent, it's been a fight for normalcy. We have a job to do here that has nothing to do with the shooting. I just honestly, like I was really concerned about. What is it like to walk into an environment where you have a lot of people who have been through this really traumatic experience together and I'm coming in. I don't know what that's like now. Yeah, I mean, it is hard. Like and that's something you find out that your mind wanders and you start thinking about these people that aren't with you anymore. Several shots have been fired, at least ten shots hurt. Just before 3 p.m., the gunman entered Building 88, carrying smoke bombs, flash grenades, a shotgun, and headed straight for the Gazette newsroom. I wasn't there. I was on vacation. But there is a violence to finding out and that doesn't like it doesn't quite get fixed all the way. Now, even though five of the Capital Gazette staff were killed in this morning, several of the roughly 30 strong editorial staff were seen working in a nearby garage after the attack. They were covering the story while the fate of their friends and colleagues were still unknown. We saw one of the. Editors of I mean, I knew at the moment that this was going to be, you know, bad for me personally covering this story. It was going to be bad for me personally. I knew as soon as I turn my car around that this was going to be sticking my hand into a fire, because there was definitely a sense of like, you know, we're going to put the newspaper out and like, this is going to hurt. And the sun's going down and the police car lights are reflecting off of everything. It's a moment that I feel kind of stuck in. I remember just having like a fleeting thought of, like, this is what it's like now. In a moment of unbelievable chaos. Just blow your mind. This is not supposed to happen in Annapolis. This is not supposed to happen anywhere. You know, putting out the paper has value beyond what's in the paper. We know readers may not want to read another story about another mass shooting. You know? With each one, we all become a little number. Our souls are a little better. That's why it's up to us as journalists to figure out the way to make it matter for readers. So we've tried to cover as many aspects of it as we can. It's hard because there are limits, and what I can ask my staff to do, I just hated being. I still hate being the story. I think it's important for the trial to stay in this community. I think that if we pursue this story, you go ahead and you work to verify his story. As best you can confirm that he was in the jail cell. We made a commitment. We're going to cover the trial of the man who shot his way into our newsroom. And we've hired someone new who was not part of the news organization. And he's going to pursue it into the trial. He doesn't want to get away with an insanity defense. All right. So every time I read something about it, I wonder who's going to be affected and how much it kills you to think that you know something that you say it really could hurt somebody else. It wasn't just like we were in the news and now we're out of the news. We constantly have to go back and report on ourselves. It's going to be really hard when that trial comes. It means I get on the stand and they have to hear my testimony and Phil's testimony and Rachel testimony and Paul's testimony, if that's what it takes. All right, let's go. All right. So if everybody I don't have a bell, but bring in Let's go or we meet in the conference room was clear the desk off in there. Nobody in this newsroom has covered a mass shooting. What are the stories? What are we going to write about? What don't we write about? It's we're figuring it out as we go. All right. First of all, this is an emotional subject. This is the one year anniversary of the shooting. And my plan is that we will go Sunday to Sunday with stories. We will call this one year later, you know, something like that. You have said you want to be involved in the coverage. Are you interested in writing anything? I would be glad to write something. I do think that we have an opportunity to write a story about recovery in terms of what's been successful and what hasn't been successful. And recovering from this disaster. When I pitched writing something for the anniversary, I don't know what I'm going to write, but I'm sure I like, I, I have so much stuff saved up from what's happened in the last year. I think probably I want it to be something like more uplifting. I remember right after the shooting, I kept telling people, I wish that I could take my eyes out of my head and give them to them because I just viewed the world in such a different way. Employees hid under their desks while the shooter's bullets pierced the glass front door. Some said they could hear screams as their friends fell around them. There are people all around the country and all around the world who are just sitting with these massive amounts of PTSD, and we need to know how to get through it. I explained in an editorial this morning why I'm sort of taking the extraordinary step of putting down my reporter hat and talking to you all about this issue. On June 28th, I survived a mass shooting at the Capitol in Annapolis. Five of my colleagues were killed and I was injured. I heard it pop, and I saw that our glass door was shattered and I crouched under my desk. Everything fell silent until the police came and escorted us out, instructed us to keep our eyes forward and step over Wendy's body for two months. Any loud noise had the potential to trigger a fight or flight response in me. Please. It's a shooting. Please. We have to run. It's a shooting. I struggled to breathe properly. I was sobbing. I was terrified. But I got through it. I'm doing better. There's no end date to the post-traumatic stress disorder. It's an experience that just affects every aspect of your life. And it affects the color of the sky. It affects the taste of food. It's life altering. This past year. Has been really tough because I've had problems with PTSD and anxiety and depression and, you know, and it's like I'm constantly trying to find distractions to keep me from just being alone with my thoughts. You know. I'll just say it because people need to hear it, which is like thoughts of suicide and hurting myself, you know, but keeping busy, it keeps you away from that. I am on antidepressants right now because I thought that I could just push through and I was doing great and I wasn't going to need medication. And sure, I was pushing through and doing great, but I was also having terrifying nightmares and panic attacks. And it's helped a lot, at least so far. I'm the most privileged shooting survivor in this state. People gave me free mental health care after this happened. There are people that live in my city of Baltimore that experience the same violence that we did every day. And they don't get any of that. They don't get any of that. We're having a national conversation about mental health and anxiety, but we've got to do something to talk about what happens after. You're saying I would have to like see your notes and see what it is, but start. I mean, I wouldn't have encouraged to do it or would have said after the meeting, maybe you take a policy like that. I'm not afraid to tell somebody that's a bad idea. Okay, I have it up here. There. All right. So this is a huge improvement over yesterday. This is more insightful. Well, the truth is that I've written probably ten op ads that I've made and read that we didn't publish for for one reason or another. Some of the things Rachel submitted in those earlier drafts were to made her too vulnerable, in my opinion. You know, I mean, for me, I'm keeping really, really, really busy and that's probably a good thing because I don't have time to stop and think about it. You're going to be thinking about it there. That's that's emotional. So this will run in Friday's paper, which means you're going to have to come back after the oath and finish it pretty quickly. If you decide I don't want to do this, no harm, no foul. Okay. Okay. All right. I think she thinks that maybe I'm overprotective of her and maybe I am. Cool. All right. Thank you. Yeah. She's in a far better place now than she was six months ago, and the value in writing about something, it helps crystallize your thoughts. It is a thought process in itself. It's a way of processing your emotions, I guess. So right after the shooting, I wrote a column in which I wished I could have traded places with some of the people in the newsroom who died. I feel an incredible amount of guilt about what happened. It's not a reasonable thing. It's an irrational thing. It's my responsibility to protect the people here. And there are definitely feelings that I felt at that. There's a difference in writing it and publishing it that would have been horrible for my family to see in the paper. The way I've gotten through this is that I have shown up for work the next day. I mean, people have been very nice and said nice things about me, but the God's honest truth is I just showed up for work. That's it. I've gotten so I can now speak and I'm almost able to do it without my throat closing up. My normal modus is probably a little like clam, you know, and speak through the paper. My wife, my kids, my family, they're the ones who get to hear me talk about me personally. And that's private. Generally, when we do a story on the victim, we try to run the picture of the victim if we get from the family. That seems like a good idea. But I think that what we haven't spelled out is what's the proper thing to do on Twitter. If I'm scrolling through Twitter and I just see this face, like that's what's traumatizing. So I think just the difference between making it a featured image or a thumbnail and just putting it inside small is it's worth it. I mean, it's shocking sometimes to see his face when you're not ready for it. And that's just something I wasn't familiar with either until this happened. You know, whenever we write about the shooting, we use pictures of the people who died. And, you know, I want news organizations to be mindful of the art that they use. There are opportunities to be sensitive to the people who've been affected. And I think sometimes journalism equates sensitivity with censorship. And I think that that's not always how it works. I don't want to see a story about a mass shooting on a seven or eight who I want to see the story about the mass shooting on on the front page above the fold, because that's it's not normal. Putting it inside like it's no big deal makes it normal. I've told reporter after reporter after reporter, if what you write every day does not in some way touch a reader, happy, glad, sad, mad, crumple up the paper, throw it away. Write a letter and say I loved it. I hated it. Have some. Share it with somebody. You failed because it makes no difference if you're writing a story that nobody reads. Maybe she feels like she needs to write this. I think she can. You know, she'll figure it out to figure it out. She will. This is where I was on June 28th, 2018, before the shooting in our office occurred. I was going to come back in the afternoon to cover something called the Oath of Office, but I never made it. I decided to come back a year later because I think I'm just stubborn and I don't like that somebody wouldn't let me finish something and I want to finish it. Now it's important on a day like today to just think about for a moment where exactly we are. We should be mindful that tomorrow, one year ago, the dastardly act occurred just our citizens and friends here in the city of Annapolis. Last year we were going through this very induction day ceremony. The cowardly gunman broke into the offices of the Annapolis Capital Gazette, needlessly taking the lives of five professional journalists Rob Hiaasen, Gerald Fishman, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith, a longtime friend of the Naval Academy. Wendy Winters. Post-Traumatic stress disorder is not a weakness. It's what used to be it. Some people have actually dropped the disorder. I don't know that supposed weakness. I think that's and I think, you know. How about we just take it out. On the job on this? I hope that it showed healing just through the fact that I was still there and still a reporter. Huh? How about that? How about the AP photo? How about that? Yeah, that's a good picture. Oh, you know what? Actually, it's a it's a happy picture, which is kind of what we want here. I think right after the shooting, the thing that motivated me to come back was more wanting to be around everyone, wanting to be there to support everyone. And there is also an element of just being like, Well, look at me. Look what I'm still doing. We've changed laws at this paper. We've helped people right wrongs of this newspaper. And that is an incredibly powerful feeling. We're starting a new phase of this newspaper. We are recovering and establishing something and building off of what happened to us so that what happened to us doesn't go in vain. Rob was here and he's not. Gerald is here and he's not. The gap and the whiplash of that event is so extreme that I think that the emotional bruising will take years to heal. Every time you think you turn a corner on it, you know, you've just stepped a little bit further away from it and you can see how big it is going to mean. And then you step a little bit further back and it's even bigger. You know, you just keep you just keep walking backwards. And if and you just get a bigger idea of like, you know, the size of the trauma. We're not the only victims here. The impact of a mass shooting like this in a community like this, or maybe any community, it resonates along lines that you don't necessarily see. I really think the story is the community. And I think the story is that the people who died and I think the story is as much as I hate to say it, I think the story is the fact that, you know, we've kept going. Well, any anybody with your organization who is familiar with that kind of law, who might be interested in talking about that, why that might be relevant. Every day you're here is another day farther away from what happened. Every day you're here is another day where you're alive. And we have friends who are not. And every day here is another day where we can honor their memories and do the work we love. I think that today was a big relief for me. Big emotional relief. I definitely feel a little bit better and a little bit lighter after after this plea. My thoughts are with the families of the people who died during this tragedy and my thoughts are also just remembering them and. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6085485/capital-gazette-shooting-justice/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6085485/capital-gazette-shooting-justice/"},"headline":"The Capital Gazette Found Justice. 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