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Tia Mitchell started covering Washington, D.C., for The Atlanta Journal constitution in October 2019. She’s not sure what normal there feels like.
“It’s pretty much been a whirlwind.”
Photojournalist Dee Dwyer, who covers Wards 7 and 8 for DCist and is a freelancer, said normally this time of year she’s covering Martin Luther King Jr. Day parades and staying inside during D.C.’s bitter cold.
“Now I feel like we are definitely in the middle of a war zone.”
WUSA9’s Lorenzo Hall grew up in D.C. and moved back two and a half years ago. He’s thinking about people trying to get to work or doctor’s appointments through the heavy security following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capital.
And Alejandro Alvarez, with WTOP, isn’t sure he can remember living through anything normal in the nation’s capital. D.C. doesn’t feel like a war zone to him, he said, but it’s still shocking.
Every time a local story becomes national, I reach out to local journalists to see how they’re covering it. One message I hear is always the same — we’ll be here when the spotlight moves on. That must be true, too, in D.C., where we just saw the start of a new presidential administration, right?
Right.
I spoke with Mitchell, Dwyer, Hall and Alvarez about their work in the last few weeks and what they’ll cover when the fences in D.C. come down.
Alvarez said something I think a lot of local journalists can relate to.
“It’s one thing to observe these massive earth-shattering events from a distance, and another thing to live in the middle of it.”
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