One reason the Baltimore Sun’s Dan Rodricks has been celebrated over his 46 years of writing columns is that his opinion pieces – whether blazing with indignation or bubbling with delight – were always anchored by shoe-leather reporting and diligent research.

That goes back to his start in the business: Rodricks was hired as a reporter when he arrived here from Massachusetts.

“My first day on the job in September 1976, the city editor of the Evening Sun told me to go to the old federal courthouse on Calvert Street to help two senior reporters cover a trial,” he recalled.

“‘Who’s on trial?” the novice scribe wondered.

“The governor,” the editor said, referring to Marvin Mandel, who was later convicted and went to federal prison for mail fraud and racketeering (only to have his sentence commuted by President Ronald Reagan).

“Right then and there, I thought my newspaper career was off to a pretty good start,” Rodricks said, recalling his early days reporting at the Evening Sun, shifting three years later to writing a column that was soon moved to the newly consolidated morning and evening editions of The Sun.

We spoke with him about his personal history because Rodricks, who resigned from The Sun earlier this month, will be reporting and writing news features for The Baltimore Brew.

He’s also planning to write columns – one in the Baltimore Fishbowl and another on national issues for The Contrarian. (That’s the self-described, anti-authoritarian, democracy-focused Substack started by former Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin and former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen.)

But for us, Rodricks will be doing reporting – and we’re thrilled to have him.

“I’ve long respected The Brew and, in particular, its coverage of local government,” he said. “I want to report and write features about city life, with an emphasis on Baltimoreans trying to solve problems and improve their communities.”

Another reason Rodricks decided to bring his skills and sources over to our 15-year-old news website: he wants to support our award-winning accountability journalism.

“I hope more readers will discover and appreciate the role The Brew plays in this community,” he said.

Protean and Productive

It’s hard to imagine how the 70-year-old Rodricks is going to keep all this up. But a quick recap of his career shows that he’s been racking up accomplishments for years and, apparently, not sleeping much.

First, there’s his columns – more than 6,600 of them, he estimates – that began in 1979. He churned them out three times a week ending on January 10, 2025 with this final column.

Some were just fun and lively sketches of Baltimore characters, like his Fells Point muse, saloonkeeper “Turkey Joe” Trabert, who “loved Baltimore and baseball, beer and beer cans, snow domes and painted screens, grand opera and folk art, history and trivia, old jokes and dirty jokes, crab cakes, sour beef,” Rodricks wrote when Trabert died in 2019.

Rodricks took pains to document the many nicknames that Trabert bestowed to others.

“There was Baseball Billy Jones. And Johnny The Tambourine Man, Gasoline Nancy, Skates, Space, Monk, Rat, Trash Mary, Bernstein The Clown and Karl The Clown Hater.”

But the core of Rodricks’ commentary was his serious stuff about city and state issues: calling out government corruption, calling for wholesale reform of the state’s prison system, calling for compassion and concrete help to be extended to those who served time for a crime and return to the community.

“I’ve written extensively over the years about men and women who come out of prison, but have trouble landing jobs because of their criminal records,” he noted in a 2019 piece. “I’ve spoken to hundreds of them. The majority of them seemed earnest about living a straight life, though confused about how to get there and frustrated in the hunt for a job.

“Shutting them down as they try to go straight – rejecting them for employment without even giving them a chance – works against society’s best interests,” he continued. “It makes no sense.”

With these columns, he earned the Heywood Broun Award and many other honors for championing the underdog.

There’s more: Rodricks did years of talk radio (on WYPR-FM and WBAL-AM). He had a live morning television show (“Rodricks for Breakfast”) on WMAR. There was a podcast, too, “Roughly Speaking,” which continued for 450 episodes.

He also wrote books. A collection of Rodricks’ columns was published in 1989, and a second book, “Father’s Day Creek: Fly Fishing, Fatherhood and The Last Best Place on Earth,” came out in 2019.

A penchant for the theatrical is another Rodricks trait. When dynamic-but-moody William Donald Schaefer was governor, Rodricks penned columns imagining a Gilbert and Sullivan-esque opera starring the brooding “Don Donaldo.”

More recently, Rodricks made the move to actually writing and producing plays and performing in them: “Baltimore: You Have No Idea” just had a sold out run at the Baltimore Museum of Art after successful earlier versions in 2022 and 2023.

Baltimore Docket, based on court cases Rodricks covered, was staged in February. Another play is on the way, he says.

Meddling with the News

Speaking to host Tom Hall yesterday on WYPR’s Midday, Rodricks addressed the question of why he decided to leave The Sun after so many decades at the city’s newspaper of record.

He said he wasn’t ready to retire, but that changes to the newspaper under its new owners – Sinclair Broadcast Group executive chairman David D. Smith and conservative columnist Armstrong Williams – drove him to getting out.

“Early on last year, when people told me they were quitting because Mr. Smith bought the paper, I said, ‘Please hold on. You know, we’ve got a bunch of us still working here. I’m still working here,’” he recalled.

“As time went on, I saw the influence the ownership was having on the content of the paper – the news content. I don’t care about what happens on the opinion page, really,” he said. “But when it started influencing the news side, that’s when I got more and more uncomfortable, and it made it more difficult for me to defend the paper.”

Under past owners, even under the hedge fund Alden Capital, the news staff was never subjected to such meddling and the warping of journalistic standards, he said.

Asked about his sense of the future of Baltimore itself, Rodricks spoke with measured enthusiasm.

“I see so many people around town who are putting in the sweat to make this a better place,” he observed. “I always say it’s the city of such great potential, Our City of Perpetual Recovery from lots of serious problems.

“So I’m going to stick around and see what happens.”