Virginia journalists mourn one of their own this week.
Early Saturday morning, about 2 a.m., gunfire erupted outside a Norfolk pizzeria. Sierra Jenkins, a reporter for the Daily Press and Virginian-Pilot, was one of the two young people killed in the shooting.
News reports say she was struck as she was leaving the restaurant, an awful instance of wrong place, wrong time. Just six days before, she and her family had celebrated her 25th birthday.
A social media post from the Virginian-Pilot described the staff’s devastation. “For two years, she’s covered the stories of Hampton Roads with compassion and care,” the Twitter thread reads. “Sierra was funny, energetic and full of enthusiasm. We are absolutely heartbroken.”
The Pilot staff learned of Jenkins’ death in a particularly haunting way. Originally hired as a breaking news reporter, Jenkins had advanced to covering the education beat.
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However, as is common at many newspapers, including The Roanoke Times, Jenkins was part of the rotation covering weekend shifts, and that Saturday she was scheduled to work.
That morning, the Pilot’s editors tried to contact Jenkins to request she investigate the fatal shooting, but could not reach her. They asked another colleague to fill in, and it was that reporter who discovered Jenkins was one of the people killed.
A Norfolk native who had previously worked as a CNN Health news assistant, Jenkins had a trailblazing career ahead of her. In one of her stories filed in February, she examined a sweeping, complex topic, examining at a state and local level the battle over how “divisive concepts” related to race and racism should be taught in classrooms and how that battle affects teachers.
The shooting that took her life was part of a rash that unfolded throughout Hampton Roads that weekend that left four dead and at least 11 more injured, starkly illustrating the national problem with escalating gun violence, a problem residents of Roanoke are all too familiar with — and that journalists such as Jenkins have examined, in search of solutions.
Every loss of precious life that weekend, every unnecessary death brought about through this proliferation of gun violence, represents a gut-wrenching tragedy, a person’s potential cut cruelly short, their loved ones bereaved and bewildered.
Jenkins was not on the job when a bullet took her life, but had she not been where she was, it would have been her job to find out as much as she could about what happened for the sake of explaining it to the public as clearly as she could. Her death cuts close to home, and not just because The Roanoke Times and the Virginian-Pilot were once sister papers.
The news arrives amid mounting evidence of the fragility of journalism as a profession, even as the services journalism provides the world could not be more vital than they are right now.
Since the beginning of March, four journalists have been killed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
On March 1, Ukrainian television camera operator Yevhenii Sakun was killed when the Russian military shelled a TV station in Kyiv.
The next day other television towers in the country were destroyed. The Russian Defense Ministry said the strikes were carried out “to thwart informational attacks against Russia.”
On March 13, American documentary filmmaker Brent Renaud was shot and killed in Irpin, a city just west of Kyiv. Ukrainian officials blamed the Arkansas native’s death on an attack by the Russian military. He was in the country working for TIME Studios on a project about the global refugee crisis.
PBS Newshour reporter Jane Ferguson, who was nearby when gunfire slew Renaud, described an outraged Ukrainian police officer shouting, “Tell America, tell the world, what they did to a journalist.”
The next day, an artillery strike in the village of Horenka, directly northwest of Kyiv, killed London-based veteran cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and 24-year-old Ukrainian television producer Oleksandra Kuvshyno, both of whom were working for Fox News.
Zakrzewski had dual Irish and French citizenship. Months earlier in Afghanistan, he not only covered the American withdrawal and the Taliban advance but, according to his Fox colleague Greg Palkot, helped out Afghans seeking refuge.
A statement from Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense commenting on the killings said that “the truth is the target.”
These travesties are not weighted more heavily than the uncountable number of others brought about by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unjustified, unconscionable invasion of Ukraine. They are one element in a vast tapestry of tragedy. But they also fit into a larger picture of another kind.
Last week also brought word of an eighth journalist slain in Mexico, which a story in the Guardian described as “ one of the most dangerous countries for journalists outside war zones.”
Press activist groups have decried Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s indifference toward the targeted slayings of media workers. López Obrador is known for smearing his critics in the media and laughing off calls to tone his rhetoric down — an eerily familiar playbook.
The website of the Committee to Project Journalists keeps a database that holds even more stories of harrowing slayings and murders. However, threats to the institution of journalism and America’s freedom of the press need not be so extreme or borne from such physically dangerous conditions to engender incontrovertible and long-lasting harm.
In 2022, print journalists have to perform their jobs while dealing with the daily pressures from a metaphorical vice. From one direction come volleys of misinformation and propaganda, often spread through social media, aimed at undermining the credibility of their work and even basic, normally indisputable facts.
From another direction, economic forces reduce their numbers, not only because of loss of direct advertising revenue to internet sources, but because industries like retail chains that were once stalwart purchasers of newspaper advertising have themselves faltered in the face of online competition.
It’s a daunting environment, a challenging career track, that demonstrates why the loss of a colleague like Jenkins hurts so deeply.
Knowing those obstacles would be in her path, Jenkins chose journalism. Sharing truth was her choice.
