Capital Gazette Wins Breaking News Award For Coverage Of Its Own Newsroom Shooting

The Capital Gazette on Tuesday won a national award for their breaking news coverage of the mass shooting at their Annapolis, Maryland, newsroom last year, which left five employees dead.

The News Leaders Association, an organization consisting of the American Society of News Editors and the Associated Press Media Editors, announced The Capital Gazette and The Baltimore Sun as the winners of the 2019 News Leaders Association Awards.

“The journalists put their mission above their misery to inform the public, honor their fallen friends, and still somehow ‘put out a damn paper,’” the judges wrote in a press release about the awards. “The work they produced lived up to the highest standards of breaking news reporting while covering a horrific tragedy in their own work place, their own lives.”

On June 28, 2018, a gunman opened fire at the offices of The Capital Gazette, which publishes The Capital and The Maryland Gazette dailies. Five people ― Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith, and Wendi Winters ― were killed and several others injured.

The NLA judges gave “special recognition to the Capital Gazette staff members that did stellar work that day and have continued to do so in the weeks and months since the tragedy.”

Rick Hutzell, editor of Capital Gazette Communications, praised his colleagues in a tweet Tuesday.

“Working as a team, they produced a remarkable body of work under uniquely trying circumstances,” Hutzell wrote. “We mourn our losses but remain focused on the hard work of community journalism.”