by FERN SHEN

 Benn Ray, owner of Hampden’s Atomic Books, couldn’t get over the language in the Baltimore Sun’s Friday Wal-Mart story, their first on the fact that a north Baltimore development proposal now includes a Wal-Mart, as well as a Lowe’s.

“A second Walmart store will open in Baltimore by the fall of 2011…” was the lede sentence.

“Why does it say ‘WILL open?’ The whole thing is being couched as a done deal, but they need to get a PUD,” Ray pointed out, correctly noting that, in order to be built, the mixed-use development would need to be green-lighted by the City Council as a  ”planned unit development.”

 “It’s unbelievable,” said Ray. “The government and the media are just accepting this is going to happen.”

Indeed, within hours after the Wal-Mart news broke, Baltimore government, community and media types  were staking out their positions, overtly or implicitly, on this hot button issue.

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Remember the Baltimore Sun’s first website: “Sunspot?” That “cutesy” name was just one of the indignities the site’s early staffers had to suffer, recalls a bitter Kevin Naff, Sunspot’s content manager when it was launched in 1996.

Naff (now the editor of The Washington Blade) describes in a recent Huffington Post essay what he felt was a vicious print/web culture clash at the Sun in the late 1990s.

  (The clash is worth exploring, he argues, because it “hastened the industry’s undoing.” With The Baltimore Sun among the nation’s most dramatically ‘undone’ newspapers, Baltimoreans may find Naff’s reminiscence, clearly from the webby side of the clash, of historical interest.)

Newsroom types at the Sun regarded him as “either the enemy to be destroyed or a dilettante to be ignored,” he complains. They “didn’t respect my work ethic, dedication or journalism experience,” he writes. Naff, meanwhile, also had a low opinion of his own digital-side underlings. The poorly-funded SunSpot was, in his view, “a dumping ground for underperformers from print.” Read the rest of this entry »

When they got to the camera car, people had a weird compulsion to. . . take a picture.

We  thought the most amazing thing to happen at this year’s Artscape was the human foosball game over near Penn Station. Harnessed to white plastic pipes, the players scooted from side to side, kicking a mooshy orange ball and making up in hysterical enthusiasm for what they lacked in 360-degree spin capability.

Human foosball was a kick.

Even more amazing, though, was what ensued when former Baltimore Sun correspondent Antero Pietila sauntered up to the table where Sun folks were trying to entice people to sign up for home delivery with discount coupons for movie passes and restaurant meals.

The heck with standing on principle about the dismantling of the Fourth Estate, etc. etc. You could get a coupon for a free oil change!

((To read Pietila’s story – and to see if you turned up in our Artscape photos — click here.))  Read the rest of this entry »

COLD TYPE: A Baltimore Media Blog

By JOAN JACOBSON

 A spark of hope for the newspaper industry arrived today in the form of a Chicago Tribune story that quoted unnamed sources who said the U.S. Bankruptcy Court overseeing the Tribune Corporation’s reorganization may transfer control of the company from Chicago billionaire Sam “the Gravedancer” Zell to a group of investors and banks that hold more than $8 billion in debt. Read the rest of this entry »

Left to right, John J. Oliver Jr., Kevin Klose, Monty Cook, Mark Potts

by JOAN JACOBSON
Near the end of last night’s symposium, billed as an exploration of the future of local journalism in Baltimore, panelist John J. “Jake” Oliver Jr., The Afro-American’s publisher, put his finger on the problem:

“I get the sense here tonight that this is a wake,” he said. Indeed. With The Baltimore Sun looking increasingly end-stage, and hometown dailies folding across the country lately, the panel did little to advance the urgently-needed discussion of how to create real journalism (and how to pay journalists) as news moves from print to web.

Even more frustrating was the insistence by Sun editor Monty Cook that the paper is still doing investigative journalism. Here is a man whose firing squad just felled dozens of veteran journalists — while pouring resources into the vapid Sun tabloid “b” — still touting the “watchdog values” of his shrunken and shriveled newspaper.

But he had a tougher audience than he may have thought. Panelist Jayne Miller, longtime WBAL investigative reporter, set him straight. When the Sun combined the local and front sections of the paper, Miller said, to the audience of nearly 100, she’d had it: she called The New York Times for delivery.
“I need something to read,” said the always-blunt Miller.
((* Mark Potts on his Baltimore visit. Click through for some of the other links spawned by this event.))
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