Last year, I was in a Scambia County, Alabama, down at the bottom of the state near the Florida border.

It was the end of a reporting trip.

I had to catch a flight home in a couple hours.

I'd been there a few days looking into a situation where a couple of local journalists for a tiny paper called the Atmore News had gotten arrested for a story they published, and they were facing charges.

It had made national news for a second, then kind of gone away.

What happened was this.

A reporter for the Atmore News, actually the only reporter for the Atmore News.

Atmore is a town of like 8,000 people, had revealed in the paper details about an ongoing investigation by the county's district attorney and to officials at the Board of Education for the way they'd spent some

COVID-related funds.

The DA was looking into whether the schools had given that money out improperly as bonuses to

certain employees, and there was an impending grand jury about it.

Someone leaked documents anonymously to the Atmore News,

which showed that the DA was investigating this.

The reporter, Don Fletcher, confirmed it, and then ran a story about it.

Apparently, this exposure of his investigation, of a grand jury,

which is generally supposed to be secret, pissed off the DA, because he had the police show up at the newspaper's office and arrest Don Fletcher.

They also arrested the newspaper's publisher and co-owner, Sherry Diggman. Both Don and Sherry are in their 70s.

They were booked in jail, mugshot it, and charged with revealing grand jury secrets.

Two national press advocacy groups, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press

and the Committee to Protect Journalists, condemned the arrests.

They said they could find no other example in American history, where journalists had been arrested for something like this, that it was antithetical to the First Amendment and unconstitutional.

They put out an open letter to the DA, urging him to drop the charges.

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