BUTLER, Pennsylvania. When Shots rang out at Trump rally where she was working, Butler Eagle reporter Irina Bucur fell to the ground like everyone else. She was terrified.
She barely froze, though.
Bucur tried texting the assignment editor through spotty cell service to tell him what was going on. She took mental notes of what the people in front of her and behind her were saying. She used her phone to record a video of the scene. All this before she felt safe getting up again.
When the biggest story in the world came to small village in western Pennsylvania from Butler a week ago, didn’t just attract media from everywhere else. Journalists at the Eagle, the community’s resource since 1870 and struggling to survive, like thousands of local newspapers across the country, have had to make sense of the chaos in their backyard — and the global scrutiny that has followed.
Photographer Morgan Phillips, who was on a step in the middle of a field with Trump’s audience that Saturday night, remained standing and kept working, documenting the story. After Secret Service agents pushed the former president into a waiting car, people around him turned to shout abuse at the journalists.
A few days later, Phillips’ eyes filled with tears as he recounted the day.
“I felt really hated,” said Phillips, who, like Bucur, is 25 years old. “And I never expected that.”
“I’m very proud of my writing,” said Donna Sybert, editor-in-chief of the Eagle.
After establishing a cover plan, she fled to a nearby fishing trip with her family. A colleague, Jamie Kelly, called to say something had gone terribly wrong, and Sybert rushed back to the newsroom, helping to update the Eagle’s website until 2 a.m. Sunday.
Bucur’s task was to talk to community members present at the rally, as well as those who set up a lemonade stand on hot days and people parking their cars. She did her reporting and prepared to receive text updates about what Trump was saying to the site.
The shooting changed everything. Bucur tried to interview as many people as he could. A little dazed after authorities cleared the lot, she forgot where she had parked. This gave him more time to report.
“Going into reporter mode allowed me to take my mind off the situation a little bit,” Bucur said. “When I got up, I wasn’t thinking about anything. I was just thinking I needed to interview people and get the story out because I was on deadline.”
She and her colleagues Steve Ferris and Paula Grubbs were invited to collect their reporting and impressions for a story in the Eagle’s special eight-page print edition on Monday.
“The first shots sounded like fireworks,” they wrote. “But when they continued, people in the crowd at the Butler Farm Show site fell to the ground: a mother and father told their children to squat. A young man hunched over in the grass. Behind him, a woman began to pray.”
The special issue clearly resonated with Butler and beyond. Extra copies are for sale for $5 in the Eagle lobby. That’s already a bargain. On eBay, Sybert said, she’s seen them going for as much as $125.
In addition to its status as a local newspaper, the Eagle is an endangered species.
It resisted the ownership of a large network, which often deprived the media. The Eagle has been owned by the same family since 1903; its patriarch, Vernon Wise, is now 95 years old. Jamie Wise Lanier, a fifth-generation family member, flew in from Cincinnati this week to congratulate the team on a job well done, said general manager Tammy Schuey.
Six issues are printed each week, and a digital website has a paywall that has been reduced for some of the shooting stories. The Eagle’s circulation is 18,000, Schuey said, with about 3,000 of them digital.
The United States has lost a third of its newspapers since 2005, as the Internet devours once-robust advertising revenues. An average of 2.5 newspapers closed every week by 2023, according to a Northwestern University study. Most were in small communities like Butler.
The Eagle abandoned a newsroom on the other side of the city in 2019, consolidating space in the building where its printing plant is located. He diversified, opening a billboard company and taking on extra printing work. It still stores the remains of a long-closed local circus and allows locals to visit.
The Eagle has about 30 employees, but is now short two reporters and a photographer. Cabinets of old photos sit among the jumble of desks in the newsroom, with a whiteboard listing which employees will be on duty that weekend.
His team is a mix of young people like Bucur and Phillips, who tend to move on to larger institutions, and those who have put down roots at Butler. Sybert has worked at Eagle since 1982. Schuey was initially hired in 1991 to teach composing room employees how to use Macs.
“This is a challenging business,” Schuey said. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
When big news hits the city, with national and international journalists following it, local media continue to be a precious and valuable resource.
The Eagle knows the terrain. Know the local authorities. Smart national reporters who “parachute” into a small community that suddenly releases news to seek out local journalists. Several have contacted the Eagle, Schuey said.
Familiarity helps in other ways. Bucur encountered people at the rally who were suspicious of national reporters but answered their questions, and the same was true of some officials. She turned to her network of Facebook friends to report help.
This fundamental trust is common. Many people in small towns have more faith in community newspapers, said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute.
“It’s great to support locals,” said Jeff Ruhaak, a trucking company supervisor who took a break during a meal at the Monroe Hotel to discuss Eagle coverage. “I think they did a great job covering it for their size.”
The Eagle also has another advantage: it doesn’t go anywhere when the national reporters leave. The story will not end. The injured people need to recover and investigations will determine who is responsible for an alleged assassin managing to shoot Trump.
In short: responsible journalism as civic leadership in distressing times.
“Our community has been through a traumatic experience,” Schuey said. “I was there. We have some healing to do and I think the newspaper is a key piece in helping guide the community through that process.”
Likewise, the people in Eagle must heal, as Phillips’ raw emotions attest. The administration is trying to give employees a few days off, perhaps with the help of journalists from neighboring communities.
Bucur said he would hate to see Butler turned into a political prop, with the murder used as some kind of rallying cry. The division of national politics had already infiltrated local meetings and staff members felt the tension.
Sybert and Schuey look at each other to try to remember the biggest story the Butler Eagle journalists worked on. Was it a tornado that killed nine people in the 1980s? Any particularly serious traffic accidents? Trump had an uneventful campaign visit in 2020. But there’s no doubt what’s at the top of the list now.
Despite the stress of the assassination attempt, covering it was a personal revelation for the soft-spoken Bucur, who grew up 30 miles south of Pittsburgh and studied psychology in college. Her plans changed when she took a communications course and loved it.
“This,” she said, “was a moment when I told myself I think I’m cut out for journalism.”
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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him on http://twitter.com/dbauder.
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