WBALTV's Jayne Miller

by FERN SHEN

WEAA’s Marc Steiner yesterday was touting the fact that he and his staff had broken the huge local story that Mayor Sheila Dixon planned to resign over corruption charges, but veteran investigative reporter Jayne Miller, of WBALTV, arguably beat him by over an hour. WBAL radio’s Rob Lang had the story too.

“Do you beLIEVE this?” Miller fumed, brandishing a cellphone with one of Steiner’s ubiquitous e-blasts, stating flatly at 1:36 pm that “Sheila Dixon resigned from her position as Mayor of Baltimore today.” This fuming took place in court, at a moment when Dixon’s plea deal had not yet been announced. Meanwhile, Miller knew she had first uttered the word “resignation” on a broadcast that aired at 12:11 pm.

((Update: comments from the Sun’s David Zurawik and some other thoughts are added below.))

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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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