Jason Policastro

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.

Museum goers thoughtful against backdrop of troop redeployment in Afghanistan

For Betsy Northrop, the prospect of forgetting about what happened during the 9/11 attacks makes about as much sense as the attacks themselves.

Her 28-year-old daughter lived in New York during the attacks, and had to walk barefoot across the Brooklyn Bridge to get out of Manhattan, on her way to taking a train home to Williamsburg, Va.

Northrop, 56, couldn’t sleep for a month.

“For people to not remember this, or to think that it can’t happen again, I just don’t understand it,” Northrop said through tears during a Dec. 5 visit to the Newseum’s 9/11 Gallery.

Four days earlier, President Obama pledged a new plan for the conflict in Afghanistan that includes an increase in troop deployment. The goal of the plan is to root out al-Qaida, the group responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Northrop was optimistic about the new strategy.

“We either had to get out or rededicate in Afghanistan to succeed,” she said. “Now that we’ve done that, we have a better chance.”

Beth Borko expressed reservations about President Obama’s invocation of the attacks during his speech this week.

“It was pretty clear that it was geared to bring those feelings back,” Borko said. “For people who thought that 9/11 was directly related to the war, I think it worked, but for others I think it was frustrating.”

Randy Mcfayden is a 46-year-old private equity consultant, and his wife went to grade school with victims of the terrorist attacks in New York City. He said that he had just read former CIA director George Tenet’s memoir, “At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA,” which gave an insider’s account of the war on terror. Mcfayden questioned the priorities of the past presidential administration in handling the dual conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We went into Iraq too quickly,” he said. “We should have taken care of Afghanistan first.”

The 9/11 Gallery at the Newseum uses a variety of formats to show how journalists covered the events that day, including a wall of newspapers from around the world and a jarring short film titled “Running Towards Danger,” with behind the scenes footage and commentary from journalists who covered the attacks.

Mike Mcnamara was a fourth grade teacher on the day of the 9/11 attacks.  He was critical of the decision by some newspapers to run photos of office workers jumping from the windows of the World Trade Center.

“All of my fourth graders were talking about it, and they were confused,” he said. “I don’t think it belonged in the coverage.”

Cory Watson, 24, works as a guard at the Newseum. He watches quiet, often crying patrons make their way through the exhibit every day. He acknowledged the emotional power of the exhibit, but for Watson, the wall of newspaper headlines held the most impact because it demonstrated the country’s freedom of speech.

“Everybody’s got something to say,” he said. “Every paper tells its own first amendment story.”

After living in DC for the past eight months, I’ve noticed a distinct difference in the way crime is covered in the local media in the two cities. 

In Baltimore, there seems to be more attention paid to violent street crime, or crimes related to gangs and the drug trade. Crime coverage seems to be more unified, with an eye toward emerging trends and how crime is rising and falling in various neighborhoods.  Because of this comprehensive coverage, I now know that the Black Guerilla Family is a strong Baltimore gang, and that the Tree Top Pirus are a local sect of the national Bloods gang.  I know that there is an old rivalry between the drug crews of the east and west sides of town, with the occasional New York interloper thrown in, who could face violent interference from either faction.  I know some of the worst drug corners, and places where violent crime occasionally spills over into more well-to-do neighborhoods.  This is especially remarkable when you consider how dramatically the Baltimore Sun newsroom has been downsized by buyouts and staff cuts, and that the Sun is the only daily in town. 

In DC, crime is essentially non-existent in many NW neighborhoods, and coverage of the violence taking place in other neighborhoods must be sought out and found.  Most crime coverage is being treated one case at a time by, for example, the Washington Post.  I have no feel for the highest crime areas, aside from a neighborhood called Trinidad where there were nationally publicized police blockades last year due to an outbreak of shootings.  There’s almost no linear coverage of gang crime or the drug trade, though both are problems here.  The most I can find are one-offs of shootings.  The Post seems to be more focused on white-collar crime.  This city is pathologically obsessed with national politics, and that obsession hampers the public’s knowledge of what is going on in its own backyard. 

The new local news venture owned by Politico and helmed by former Washington Post editor Jim Brady would be well advised to take a close look at the metro crime beat when the new site launches.  It’s being neglected and many stories are going unreported.

The Baltimore Sun flexed its Fourth Estate muscle on Wednesday and filed a lawsuit against the Baltimore City Police Department, claiming that the department often ignored Sun requests for public information that they are required by law to provide.  The suit also claims that when the department did make requested documents available, it did so at an extremely high cost, in one instance attempting to charge the Sun $1,250 for a year’s worth of police reports about rapes.  Read the full Sun story by Jamie Smith Hopkins here.

I’m not surprised by this story.  BCPD spokesman Anthony Guglielmi is notoriously tight fisted with information that used to be made public on a regular basis.  He arrived in Baltimore just over a year ago.  In that short time, he has managed to build an impenetrable information blockade between the public and the department.  The department must now authorize any officer to speak with a member of the press, and officers who do so face stiff discipline.

Back in March, Guglielmi’s new policy of withholding the names of officers involved in shootings drew the ire of Baltimore’s few remaining true crime journalists.  Sun crime reporter Peter Hermann assembled a comprehensive blog post critiquing the new policy.  It includes this prophetic moment, from a segment on the Mark Steiner show featuring Guglielmi, former Sun reporter David Simon, ACLU attorney David Rocah, and Bob Cherry, head of the Baltimore FOP:

At one point, Simon told Guglielmi: “State officials cannot go against state law.”

Guglielmi: “David, nobody is going against the law.”  He added, “that’s why we have courts.”

Rocah: “You might find yourself there.”

And thanks to the brave remaining journalists over at the Sun who are still fighting for the public’s best interests, he has.  My hat is off to you today.  This will be a fascinating one to watch.

Today I stumbled across a report that was compiled in the wake of the BELIEVE campaign, the famed public call-to-action by the O’Malley administration that called Baltimore citizens to fight against the ills of drugs in their communities.  The report I found was a self-congratulatory assessment of the campaign by the advertising firm who worked with the city on the project, Linder & Associates, Inc., based in New York City with offices on Park Avenue.  You can view it here.

As part of their campaign, Linder & Associates conducted surveys to get a feel for where city residents stood on the problem of drugs.  Two particularly interesting statistics:

- “Caucasians in Baltimore are less likely than African-Americans to see Baltimore’s drug problem as their own problem, at least to the extent that they need to take some action to oppose it.”

- “Only 47% of Caucasians polled said they were likely to take some action as a result of BELIEVE appeals compared with 76% of African-Americans.”

Of course I realize that this was an advertising firm conducting a survey, but this is still revealing, and I think captures a fundamental breakdown in Baltimore’s efforts to right itself and truly change.  BELIEVE was a flawed effort but one thing it had right was that for Baltimore to make progress in the fight against drugs, the city will need everyone’s help, not just those living in neighborhoods most affected by the drug trade.  This is a complicated problem, but if time has taught Baltimoreans anything it’s that fixing this problem is going to take sustained effort on everyone’s part, not just those who are most directly at risk.

There are many passages in the report that time has made compelling, and I won’t rehash the full contents, but I felt that one section needed to be highlighted for irony’s sake:

“In the words of Baltimore’s Mayor, Martin O’Malley, BELIEVE is a call to the people of the city to rise up and ‘risk action on faith.”