By: Anna Lee
There are countless writers and reporters everywhere. Although the content and style varies from writer to writer, there is a main goal that all honest writers aspire to: to write with integrity. I know that many would disagree, but I have always been taught that to write is to inherently share something with and for someone, whether that be for a designated audience or for oneself, and writers owe it to themselves and their readers to deliver something of integrity.
This is incredibly difficult, because the idea of writing with integrity often gets skewered or misrepresented. It’s not about always writing about facts, although in journalistic writing that is incredibly important. However, across all spectrums in both fiction and nonfictional works, writing with integrity means writing with courage and honesty, about a real-life person or a fictional character. It seems that Phil Davis is one of those writers.
On June 28th, a shooter killed five reporters in Maryland’s Capital Gazette, a newspaper company in Annapolis. It was horrific, tragic, and devastating. Shootings in public places in America have seem to become a cultural norm- mass shootings in schools, festivals, churches, and now in newsrooms. And despite protest after protest, it seems that palpable legislations have yet to be passed on the floors of Washington.
I, like the rest of America, have been reading constat updated news about this shooting. One article that caught my eye was about a Capital Gazette reporter named Phil Davis who tweeted about the experience on the day the shooting occured. He was in the building during the shooting and his tweets are an immediate response to what has occurred. One of them reads, “There is nothing more terrifying than hearing multiple people get shot while you’re under your desk and then hear the gunman reload.”
There is something brutally heartbreaking, yet honest about his tweets. The emotions- shock, grief, loss- range, and his subsequent tweets following the shooting consisted of likewise material, where Davis continues to contribute to further discussion of gun violence in the U.S. Although tweets aren’t traditionally viewed as an acclaimed writing style, it does provide a space for honesty and integrity that many writings forms lack. It’s immediate, limited, and quick. It allows the writer to respond to any given situation instantaneously, restricts not only the characters typed but the convoluted sugarcoating artifice that comes with longer pieces, and can be sent out to the world with a click of a button. It’s Phil Davis’s tweets that leak this integrity, because even in the face of something so tragic and heartbreaking, there is a writer who feels that he needs to tell the world the truth, and he delivers it ever so eloquently.
Perhaps what’s more amazing is that Capital Gazette published their newspaper the day after the shooting. Chase Cook, another reporter at the Capital Gazette tweeted this the day of the shooting this: “I can tell you this. We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow.” And they did. Cook, a survivor of the shooting, wrote an article three days later about the incident. It’s heartbreaking and honest, and you need to read it. Perhaps it’s writers like them who are going to make a palpable change, whether that be gun violence or otherwise, because writing with integrity and honesty has the power to change lives.
Journalistic Writing
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