The Capital Gazette shooting, one year ago, reminded us of another threat to good journalism

Newspapers get sued even when they’re right

In-depth reporting has hidden costs.

One year ago this week — on June 28, 2018 — a man named Jarrod Ramos walked into the office of the daily Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Md., and gunned down three editors, as well as a young sales assistant and a 65-year-old columnist/reporter. Since 2011, Ramos had been angry at the paper and several of its staff members — none of whom were among the fatalities that day — after a columnist accurately wrote that Ramos had pleaded guilty to criminal harassment of a woman he had vaguely known in high school. The matter began around 2009, according to court documents on-line (https://tinyurl.com/RamosCourtDocs), when Ramos contacted the woman on Facebook, thanking her for being the only person who was nice to him in high school. According to the woman’s testimony, they exchanged pleasant emails for a while, but he eventually became belligerent, telling her to kill herself, calling her vulgar names, and sending her screenshots of her own social media posts. She went to the authorities “as a last resort,” she later told NBC News.

Ramos had been angry at the newspaper staff for seven years.