Baltimore media reporting truly new news. (Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism. Click to enlarge.)

by FERN SHEN

Worried about what’s ailing the American news media, researchers from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at one week of Baltimore news coverage last summer and found traditional media — the Sun, television and the business publications — still do most (61 percent) of the original reporting around here.

But the detailed analysis is pretty embarassing for Charm City’s entire “media ecosystem,” as journalism talking heads now refer to the whole cast of news producers in a city, from newspapers with staffs and real estate to kitchen-table-bloggers.

Government press releases – often just repeated verbatim – drive print and pretty much everyone else’s news coverage, for the most part. Minor crimes, like the kid in Medfield arrested for stealing a scooter, pre-occupy broadcast. “New Media” with their relatively minute output, often ignore what the others are doing or simply link to them, sometimes casting news produced by others as if it were their own.

Depressing? Wait, there’s more. Guess how many fewer stories the Sun did in all of 2009, compared with 1991?

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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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  by FERN SHEN

       The state just rested in the trial of Sheila Dixon — a shocker, since they still hadn’t called their star witness, Dixon’s boyfriend, developer Ronald Lipscomb.

     How do we know about it? Live tweets from inside the courtroom. Reporters may not have cameras or microphones in there but they’ve been texting away madly. For those who want up-to-the-minute tweets, Jeff Quinton of Inside Charm City has assembled them all here .

     For political junkies, it’s addicting. WBAL reporter Jayne Miller, for instance, asked Dixon’s defense lawyer Arnold Weiner if he would be calling Lipscomb to testify and, according to the WBAL tweets, he “touched her on her arm and said, need a little mystery.” Fox followed soon after with the simple but newsy: “the defense is arguing for an acquittal.”

        Now, the judge has thrown out two of the seven counts in the indictment, the ones having to do with Lipscomb. This afternoon we’re going to hear from those character witnesses and by tomorrow, looks like, it’s in the hands of the jury.

     While we pause to allow the ”conventional wisdom” to play itself out  (should just be less than a day), a few thoughts on history and technology.

Another Maryland public official who stood trial in Courthouse East.

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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 »