We follow the mantra “stick to horse racing” for the most part all year long. Not because anyone tells us to, because for the most part they don’t. We stick to it because it’s what we know best and we know there are more than enough outlets in the world for people to satisfy their appetite for views on politics or current events.
Every once in a while the paths intersect here at This Is Horse Racing or in The Saratoga Special – remember Sean’s column “For Heather” back in 2017? – and it happened again in 2018.
The shooting at the Annapolis Capital Gazette newspaper in Maryland in late June hit home, and not only because we’re journalists who think the notion that the media is the “enemy of the people” is about the dumbest statement in the history of our nation. The shooting, which left five journalists dead at the hands of a lone gunman, left our Joe Clancy searching for answers in his blog post “Newspapers, tragedy, life” that checks in as the seventh most read piece at TIHR in 2018.
“I thought about those years, and all those people when I heard about the shooting at the Annapolis Capital,” Joe wrote. “I didn’t work at the Capital, but I know exactly what it was like and so do others in my profession. If you ever worked at a small newspaper, the attack that left five people dead was personal. It hit, hard.
“For me, I imagined five of those people in the first paragraph dying at work and those that survived being forced to make sense of it all. I suppose this is how teachers feel after a school shooting.”
The column ran July 6 and is No. 7 on the TIHR Top 10 for 2018:
No. 7: Newspapers, tragedy, life
Check out the rest of the TIHR Top 10 for 2018:
No. 10: Throwback Thursday: The first Winterthur Point-to-Point
No. 9: Three weeks…
No. 8: Fisher’s army marches to Far Hills
Check back Wednesday for No. 6.
