The Atlantic

When a Local Tragedy Becomes National News

Annapolis residents are struggling to make sense of the attack at the <em>Capital Gazette</em>, which is already being politicized.
Source: Jose Luis Magana / AP

ANNAPOLIS, Md.—Wendi Winters was assigned to report on Davis’ Pub on Friday. The owner, Kevin Colbeck, told me she had pitched them an interview about life at a beloved local hangout; the bar is like “the Cheers of Annapolis,” one bartender told me. These kinds of stories were a regular part of Winters’s beat. The 65-year-old veteran reporter most enjoyed writing her column on the “teen of the week,” her daughter told me, and a recent series on “off-limits” places.

But Winters will never write that story. On Thursday, she was one of five employees shot and killed at the offices of the , Annapolis’s local newspaper.Keith Cyphers, an insurance salesman who works across the hall from the paper, described what he remembers seeing through the glass doors of

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