As newspapers fight attrition, new media fights for credibility in Baltimore

The Baltimore Sun, the paper of record for Baltimore and the largest newspaper in the state of Maryland, is steadily shrinking.  Multiple rounds of staff cuts have rendered the paper incapable of covering beats it once devoted multiple reporters to.

According to a Sun story by reporter Lorraine Mirabella, the latest cuts occurred in April of 2009, and left the paper with 144 total newsroom staff.  At the height of the paper’s strength, it had employed as many as 500 people to cover Baltimore and its environs.

Last year, the Baltimore Examiner, a free daily that launched in Baltimore in 2006, shut its doors.  The paper’s mission had been to cover a lot of ground with short, quick hitting stories, functioning as almost a localized version of USA Today.  Officials at Clarity Media Group, the Denver based media company that owned the paper, blamed declining advertising revenue and proximity to its sister publication in Washington, DC.

A pool of experienced, unemployed journalists had formed in the city.  Soon, entrepreneurial web sites began popping up, bent on covering stories that local print outlets weren’t able to focus on.

Flexibility and Growing Pains

Stephen Janis is a former city hall reporter for the Examiner, and partnered with a few of his colleagues to form Investigative Voice, a news site devoted to in-depth coverage of issues peculiar to Charm City.

A recent collection of top stories: a story on community activists struggling against prostitution and drug use in Pigtown, a piece on an 81-year-old healthcare advocate being sent to jail for trespassing during a protest, and an insider story on Mayor Sheila Dixon conversing with the attorney prosecuting her on corruption charges during a break in the trial.

“The idea would be to be topical, and not as regionally focused,” Janis said of the site.  “That we would have a certain type of story, and that story could be within the confines of the city.”

According to Janis, the freedom of the web has allowed him to dig deeply into specific conflicts in various neighborhoods, more than the Baltimore Sun is capable of with its thinly stretched staff.

“We just did a series called ‘Dispatches from Brooklyn’, with multiple stories and multimedia, where we get into the neighborhoods, get to know everybody, and find out where the point of conflict is,” Janis said.  “Legacy media can’t interview an average homicide detective or a crack dealer, but it works in our environment.”

There have been disadvantages to being an independent news outlet.  Janis has occasionally encountered what he called “digital segregation” at news events.

“One thing we did is make professional press passes with our logo that identified us,” Janis said.  “You have to act the part and believe in what you’re doing, and you have to use your skills to get people to talk to you.”

The site has been a learning experience for Janis, a veteran investigative reporter, on what readers of local news sites are looking for.

“We realized that the public values really strong watchdog journalism, and doesn’t value just having someone at city council hearings,” Janis said.  “You learn to come up with a mix over time that works.”

Jeff Quinton runs Inside Charm City, recently named “Best News Blog” in the Mobbie Awards, a blog awards contest run by, ironically, the Baltimore Sun.

“I try to post hard news, with some opinion, especially angles of bigger stories that might get missed,” Quinton said.  “I hear a lot of positives.”

Quinton recently started using Google Wave, a new collaborative multimedia communication tool, to cover local news and initiate discussion among readers.

“I’ve also gotten news tips there,” Quinton said.  “Someone posted a statement from Hopkins Hospital that they’d had a settlement with the union of their maintenance workers, before it appeared anywhere else.  I’ve also been using it for reader engagement and town halls.”

Despite its success, Quinton’s blog has ruffled some old media feathers around town.

In April, Quinton said he received an email from a Sun reporter asking him to stop excerpting portions of Sun stories longer than four sentences in his blog posts.  When another blogger at Inside Charm City posted Sun material that exceeded the request a few days later, Quinton received a cease-and-desist letter.  The story was picked up in WIRED Magazine.

Then in November, as Mayor Sheila Dixon’s criminal trial was winding down, Quinton posted a piece critical of Baltimore Sun reporters in their coverage of the trial, saying that they had “dropped the ball” by not tweeting from the courtroom.  Sun reporters fired back, citing a courtroom ban on the use of Twitter and pointing to the rest of their coverage.  Local news site Baltimore Brew chronicled the exchange.  Quinton updated the post to clarify the courtroom ban and downplayed the flare-up.

“It was one of those situations where it was a longer blog post, and not everyone read the entire thing,” Quinton said.  “I tried to let it blow over because generally I have a good relationship with the people I deal with at the Sun.”

Indeed, several Sun reporters that blog on the paper’s web site have linked to Quinton’s posts about problems on the MARC train to DC, or speculation of the Real World television show coming to Baltimore.

Hope for Collaboration?

Dr. Stacy Spaulding is a professor of journalism at Towson University, where she teaches courses on new media.  Before moving to academia, Dr. Spaulding was a reporter for the San Bernardino County Sun in California.  She is the author of New Media Mobtown, a blog on new media trends.

“I think what they’re doing is what alternative media has always done well, and that’s covering news from angles that aren’t being covered,” Spaulding said.  “Having a lot of vigorous, outspoken alternatives is actually quite in keeping with what we’ve known throughout our history.”

Spaulding said that the Sun’s streamlined staff has come at a cost.

“We’ve lost our most experience layer of reporters and editors, which means you’ve got decades and decades of the city and its institutions and its nonprofits and its people that are just gone,” Spaulding said.  “While we have some wonderful, enthusiastic, talented reporters on staff, I just don’t think they can make up for the lost knowledge.

Spaulding has seen the Sun link to several Investigative Voice stories, and is hoping for increased linking between blogs, news sites, and legacy media.

“Despite all this talk of competition, journalists have always collaborated.  We’ve always called the television reporter to tip him off on a story, and gotten tips from their sources too,” Spaulding said.

“You Get What You Pay For”

Scott Peterson is the spokesperson for Mayor Sheila Dixon.  He is responsible for fielding inquiries from the television, radio, print, and now web-based media outlets who want access to the mayor’s office.

Mostly, the web outlets aren’t calling.

“The majority of who contacts me are still the mainstream media,” Peterson said.  “The one exception is Investigative Voice.  [Stephen] Janis is still engaging the media relations office.”

Peterson said, aside from Investigative Voice, mainstream media is still the source of the stories that get the most attention in City Hall.

“These other sites are not breaking news stories,” Peterson said.

Rafael Alvarez spent 20 years on the city desk at the Baltimore Sun, before exiting the newspaper business and moving to Los Angeles to embark on a career writing for television.  His credits include “The Wire”, the crime and political drama set in Baltimore City and created by fellow Sun veteran David Simon.

Alvarez has returned to Baltimore and regularly contributes to Investigative Voice, Baltimore Brew, Welcome to Baltimore, Hon!, and other local sites.

However, Alvarez remains skeptical of claims that blogs and other types of news sites can replace a fully staffed city newspaper.

“The old patient isn’t dead, and the new baby isn’t really totally born yet,” Alvarez said.  “I think we’re figuring it out as we go along.”

Alvarez cited a story he worked on for Investigative Voice on stem cell research as an example of how newspaper reporters possessed a level of curiosity that “bordered on OCD.”

He was covering a conference of stem cell researchers in Baltimore, and he asked a doctor from one of the labs what the best tool for getting the real story of stem cell research out to the public had been.

“Without missing a beat, she said ‘newspaper reporters,” Alvarez said.  “She said if she had the budget, she would hire them. They became almost as knowledgeable as the doctorate fellows in the lab, because they were writing about it every day.”

According to Alvarez, the written word has never been worth less than it is now, and he questioned the quality of news content available for free online.

“If there’s one thing that’s true of America, it’s that you get what you pay for,” Alvarez said.  “There were families who drank Coke, and there were families who drank Shasta.”

“Who the hell wants to drink Shasta?  There’s a reason it cost 19 cents a can,” Alvarez said.