Complete Story
09/13/2018
ASNE panelists suggest taking newsroom security more seriously
Editor's Note: The ONMA is offering a few webinar for members on preventing workplace violence on October 10. For more information and to register, click here.
If the leaders of the Capital Gazette could go back in time — before the shooting that took five newspaper employees’ lives — what would they do differently?
“We’ve thought a lot about that,” said Trif Alatzas, publisher and editor in chief of the Baltimore Sun Media Group. "We believe news organizations need to be in their communities … And what we learned is that if somebody wants to get in, they can force their way in. The key is how do you give people more time.”
On June 28, authorities allege a man who had a grudge against the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, fired a shotgun to break a glass wall and then started shooting the newspaper’s employees. Alatzas called it “one of the darkest days in the history of American journalism.”
A panel of security experts and newspaper leaders at the ASNE conference in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday talked about the shooting and its effects on news organizations, combined with the growing anger against journalists arising from partisan politics.
