Maryland Business

The Sun’s Jay Hancock got well-deserved props in the Twitterverse Tuesday for his column on the latest in the St. Joseph Medical Center stent investigation (including praise from an old Daily Record/Maryland Business friend now at the Wall Street Journal).

Hancock revealed his star turn in some Abbott Laboratories’ e-mail correspondence subpoenaed by the Senate Finance Committee as part of its investigation into allegations that St. Joseph and Dr. Mark Midei needlessly implanted stents — metal mesh tubes, which Abbott makes, designed to prop open clogged heart arteries — in hundreds of patients. It seems an Abbott marketing exec took exception to a Hancock column on stents and asked a colleague if a “Philly” connection might be able to take him outside and, shall we say, do him bodily harm.

I won’t speak for Hancock, but this is typically a badge of honor for a newspaper columnist.

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Foreclosures, holiday shopping and troublesome text messages — these staples of the modern-day news diet dominated the list of the top 5 most-read business stories this week at The Daily Record’s website. There was also a very scary tornado that touched down in Baltimore; luckily, no one was hurt.

1. Former Baltimore Sun editor resigns from UNC over racy text messages

Journalism school Dean Jean Folkerts says she contacted the university’s lawyers after the student’s former boyfriend confronted Monty Cook about the texts.

2. Bank of America making changes in foreclosure process

Among the changes, the legal documents used in the process will each be reviewed by the signer and promptly notarized, said Barbara Desoer, president of the bank’s home loans division.

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This month, two former Baltimore Sun staffers posted blog summaries of their experiences at the struggling Tribune-owned newspaper, both of which are either (a) meant to make me hate my life and despair for my future in journalism, or (b) make the management at the Sun feel bad about themselves, which, if half of what’s in these two remembrances is true, they should.

One of the two accounts is from Kevin Naff, former “content manager” for The Sun’s web site, writing on the Huffington Post about how badly the paper misjudged the Internet as both a craze and a tool for media outlets. To hear him tell it, the online component of The Sun, originally known as sunspot.net, and later as baltimoresun.com,  and the people who worked for it, got absolutely no respect from the rest of the paper of the first five or six years of its existence.

Some of Naff’s stories — as one of my editors pointed out after reading it — are so outlandish as to call the reliability of his memory into question. A “senior manager” from the newspaper had never been taught that holding down the “shift” key on a keyboard produces capital letters? Really? Did he pre-date typewriters, too?

The more interesting part of Naff’s essay is that his insider’s view of how The Sun worked allows him to pin the incompetencies of the paper’s relationship with the Internet on corporate executives, rather than the editors. In one section, he makes the rather well-trodden suggestion that Craigslist, if seized upon as a concept by newspaper execs, could have been part of a newspaper or of every local newspaper, instead of the main source of woe for classified ad salespeople, but he elaborates by showing us what The Sun was doing instead of thinking of ways to adapt ads to the web:

In the mid-90s era of monopolistic control of local markets, and profit margins that would make Warren Buffett blush, Times Mirror and other newspaper behemoths should have funneled some of that cash into research and development. Instead, we were tasked with forming endless “partnerships” with third-party Internet startups, many of which were more interested in eating our lunch than collaborating on product development.

If the industry had embraced the change that was already at their doorstep, a newspaper company might have invented Google, Craigslist, Facebook or Twitter. Instead, we handed over our content to companies like CitySearch, Monster and others that promised quick, cheap, “co-branded solutions.”

The other recherche du temps perdue that I noticed in August is just that: a heartbreaking, somewhat sentimental recollection of a 10-year-long career in journalism from former Sun reporter Steve Kiehl, with whom I’ve had the privilege of covering some of the same stories and comparing my own work. Kiehl is going to law school at the University of Maryland this fall, and along with The Sun, he is abandoning Crumbler, a music blog he authored with a friend. From that site comes his account, titled “After 10 Years, Why I Left,” which includes such maddeningly sad passages as this one:

I would not be going to law school if newspapers were healthy, if I believed that journalism could support into the future a sizable group of people making a decent living doing it. Perhaps it was a happy accident that newspapers in the second half of the 20^th century could employ a large professional workforce, could give people the means to buy decent homes in nice neighborhoods, send their kids to college and take pride in their work. I no longer believe that is the case.

It doesn’t get better.  He describes the disillusionment he felt in 2006, when, after being groomed to go to one of the Sun’s foreign bureaus, which were one of the strongest suits of the blue-collar town, they all closed. He admits to the damaging trend in newspapers that so many reporters gripe about but don’t put into print until they’re out of the game, generally:

Those days are over. Not just the limitless expense accounts, but the adventure of chasing a big story, of seeing places you haven’t seen before, of taking the time to live in a story and emerge with something special. Now, often frivolous stories are quickly spun out, based on a bare minimum of reporting, designed to drive hits. But they are ephemeral, forgotten before you’ve even clicked on to the next one.

Geez, it’s getting kinda late. I need a drink.

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For my article in today’s paper about the renovation and re-opening of the Polish Home Hall in Curtis Bay, I interviewed Catherine Benicewicz, a 90-year South Baltimorean and a child of Polish immigrants.

Mrs. Benicewicz is, for starters, adorable (when I asked how to spell her name, she said, “Be Nice W-I-C-Z”), but she also had a steel trap memory and wonderful stories to tell me. The best, however, was about her father, Anthony Tanowski, who was on the board of the Polish cultural society that owned the hall.

Tarnowski came to the U.S. on a boat in 1906 or 1907, Benicewicz said, from Czarist Poland. There, he was forced to speak Russian in schools, and learn to read and write the Cyrillic alphabet, even while speaking Polish at home. When he got to America, at age 16, the first thing he did, she said, was to buy a handwriting manual to improve his penmanship in the Western alphabet. The next thing he did was buy a copy of The Evening Sun, and was a loyal devotee of that newspaper for decades to come.

“Over there, you can’t even learn your own language in school,” she said, “but over here you have the right to be informed, to know what’s going on.”

Take note, all you Internet newspaper freeloaders: A 90-year-old Polish lady in South Baltimore just schooled you in the art of learning to appreciate what you’ve got right in front of your nose.

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This morning on the radio, I heard the voice of The Wire’s creator/producer and former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, testifying before a Senate committee called together by Massachussetts Sen. John Kerry to discuss the future of the newspaper industry. Many of our elected leaders, including Maryland Sen. Benjamin Cardin, found themselves in the odd position of calling for government solutions that would allow newspapers to better scrutinize them, and their activities, a proposition that has ruffled some serious feathers for its glaringly apparent conflict of interest.

Cardin proposed 501c(3) tax protection of newspaper publishers. Other solutions have been batted around. An impressive array of media industry bigwigs have testified, including blog empress Arianna Huffington and James Moroney, publisher and CEO of the Dallas Morning News. But I found Simon’s comments, as usual, because he’s a showbiz guy with a good sense of drama, to be the catchiest:

“The next 10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption. It is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician.”

Tellingly, the congressional leaders in the room produced one of the most awkward and nervous-sounding collective laughs I’ve ever heard, in response to this comment.

Simon’s is a thought that occurred to me recently as well, after the recent blood-letting at the Sun’s newsroom. Tribune managers gave the axe to 61 editors, reporters, designers, photographers and others two weeks ago, cutting the newsroom staff to about 140, down from about 500 in the late 1990s. The last great (alleged) local political corruption story broken by the Sun was the indictment of Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon. The two journalists on that story, investigative reporter Doug Donovan and City Hall beat reporter John Fritze (who I had the privilege of working alongside until about a year ago) have since left the paper, for The New York Times Digital and USA Today, respectively.  Those were guys who had major contacts who leaked information to them and serious noses for government reporting.

All of this is not to disparage the current stable of political reporters at the Sun, or other local media outlets, who remain today. I know many of them, and they are talented, hard-working reporters. But Simon is right: as you whittle down the ranks of the Fourth Estate watchdogs and gouge out the eyes locked on our elected officials’ every move, it becomes scarier and scarier to think what some of them may be getting away with.

And perhaps the scariest part of all is that the honchos at the remaining newspapers seem to be confirming this. In a recent speech at Johns Hopkins University, Monty Cook, the Sun’s current editor-in-chief and a page designer by trade, said, “The days of six-part series are gone.” Will there ever be another great investigative story in this town? Or is Simon right, and are Baltimoreans and Marylanders in for a rough decade?

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Wednesday was a challenge for me.

Editing The Daily Record’s story about the layoffs at The Sun was difficult because the journalists let go were “my people” — men and women who are about my age, many of whom I worked with for many years. One of the editors let go Tuesday, Ray Frager, is one of my best friends, and we started working together at The Dallas Morning News in 1982. We were on our interviews together, and he got hired first — for which I have never forgiven him. But I got to The Sun first (after an ill-advised detour to Hartford, Conn.), in January 1985, and three months later, when we had an opening for an editor with his skills, I was the one who called him and encouraged him to apply.

So Wednesday was spent trying to keep track of who was going and who was staying. And updating my Facebook status more on one day then I had in the entire year or so that I had been on it. I got more Facebook messages and instant messenger messages than I ever had.

And to top everything off, the top-seeded Goucher College lacrosse team, which includes freshman attackman Gordon Waldman, lost its semifinal Landmark Conference playoff game to Scranton, 10-9.

And did I mention that I had to do what I actually get paid for doing: putting the paper out. A bigger paper, ironically (I’ll have to ask former Sun Copy Desk Chief John McIntyre if I used ironically correctly … most people don’t), because in The Daily Record’s recent redesign we have actually added four pages of news to the paper every day.

One of my former colleagues at The Sun, Lane Harvey Brown, now a freelance writer and editor in North Carolina, I think put it best in a response to one of my updates. It was, she said, like watching a fire and knowing that your friends are trapped inside.

Things have to get better, don’t they?

(By the way, another former Sun colleague, David Michael Ettlin, has a very detailed and emotional story on the layoffs at his blog, The Real Muck. I highly recommend it.)

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This week’s Forbes magazine has a great article by former Baltimore Sun reporter Gady Epstein about a developer in Chungqing, China, who thought he was going to benefit from the government’s seizure of prime land near a highway and commerce center. He ended up losing out, as a government official showed favoritism to another developer, seized his land, and eventually denied him about 75 percent of the compensation that he, and the courts, thought he deserved.Why does this sound familiar to me?

Oh yeah — because Chen Yun, the real estate developer in question, could be any number of Baltimore landowners who have lost their property to the city or seen it conveyed to another private interest, and been, in their opinion, unjustly compensated. In fact, we wrote a three-part series about that very subject last month.

We already know that China, and Chongqing in particular, has a miserable record on property rights — but what a strange coincidence that reporters who have worked in Baltimore are still poking at the same types of stories, even in China. At least we have one thing in common!

ROBBIE WHELAN, Business Writer

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After Monday’s news that the Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy, what will happen to The Baltimore Sun? It seems the two have not had the best of relationships.

Since Tribune bought The Sun in 2000, the newspaper’s union-represented work force has decreased by 50 percent, according to the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. That includes more than 100 jobs cut this year at the paper.

The Tribune has steadily gone into debt and The Sun has lost subscription and advertising revenue. Per a mandate by the Tribune, the paper folded its standalone Maryland and Business sections this summer.

Theodore G. Venetoulis, a publisher who has put together a group interested in buying The Sun and returning it to local ownership, has not changed his stance on buying the paper through all the negative news this year.

Do you think the paper should be returned to local ownership? How important is the tradition of “the Sun paper” to you? Does it need saving?

LIZ FARMER, Business Writer

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When I wrote a series of articles covering the Baltimore Sun’s staff and budget cuts this summer, I received a handful of e-mails from readers who said they thought the “Sunpaper” had already gone downhill because it had a liberal bias and wasn’t fully reporting both sides of the story anyway.

But an article on the Project for the Excellence of Journalism’s Web site Friday pointed out that the perceived liberal bias of the media is only a recent phenomenon.

“The criticism has not always come from the political right,” the article notes. “During the Vietnam War, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon alike condemned the press for what they saw as undermining of their war efforts. Bill Clinton’s relationship with the press, never good, soured further during the scandal over Monica Lewinsky, and variously included complaints about both liberalism and a right-wing media machine.”

This week The Sun has run Associated Press articles titled, “Alaska lawmakers meet secretly on Palin ethics report” (Oct. 10), “VP candidate Sarah Palin wrongly suggests that Congress has imposed ban on US oil exports” (Oct. 9), “Cindy McCain accuses Obama of ‘dirtiest campaign’ in history, raps him on troop funding vote” (Oct.9) and “Palin takes questions from reporters after weeks of limited contact with the news media” (Oct. 7).

Leaving alone the fact that these are all AP stories and not written by The Sun staff, do you think Baltimore’s biggest daily newspaper has a liberal slant? Or is it just running what the other papers are to stay competitive?

LIZ FARMER, Business Writer

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The Baltimore Sun certainly does get around. In the last six years it’s made three content- or staff-sharing deals with two local stations (twice with ABC affiliate WMAR-TV and once with NBC affiliate WBAL-TV and radio) and Tuesday announced yet another deal — this time with CBS affiliate WJZ –TV.

(The Sun is just one local news station short of hitting for the cycle…has someone notified the Fox affiliate WBFF-TV to stand by?)

Touted as a “content-sharing partnership,” The Sun will air WJZ’s local news videos and the two outlets will share story leads and partner on major journalistic projects, according to a station press release.

The Sun’s past collaborations with television stations have included journalists being featured or interviewed on WMAR’s evening news, and WBAL-TV’s chief meteorologist, Tom Tasselmyer, on the back page of the Maryland section and answering weather questions on The Sun’s Web site.

According to the release, WJZ’s sales team will be responsible for selling advertising inventory within WJZ video content on baltimoresun.com, and the station’s regional news coverage will include stories provided by The Sun’s four county bureaus, and WJZ will promote the newspaper’s top stories in its newscasts.

Content sharing between the organizations is expected to begin by the end of the month, and WJZ news video is expected to be available at The Sun’s Web site by mid-October.

Tim Franklin, editor and senior vice president of The Sun, said in the release that the move benefits readers because combining the two outlets’ resources provides “an even more comprehensive news report.”

But are some news readers concerned that “combining resources” really means that the same news will be rehashed on both outlets, effectively reducing the variety of news reported? What do you think?

LIZ FARMER, Business Writer

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