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.))

Then she asked the audience how many were former Sun journalists. Several dozen hands went up. It looked like half of the room.

“The fact that all those people raised their hands who are not working in journalism is all we need to know,” she said.

The symposium, sponsored by the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, and organized by former Sun editor (now Abell Professor) Sandy Banisky, was billed as a discussion of what might happen to local news if Baltimore’s daily paper shut down.

“Who will fill the void?” was one of the questions that the panel tried to answer.

The people who used to fill it – and who still could, if someone could figure out how to pay them – were right before them.

In the room were dozens of journalists who wrote and edited with authority and clarity about city school incompetence, global warming, the fine print of health insurance rip-offs and the pollution that is turning the Chesapeake Bay into one big dead zone.

They unraveled racing industry finances and illuminated the finances of sports as big business. They told when one mayor let his friends build the most lucrative hotels, and recorded the indictment of another. They outed not-so-altruistic non-profits wasting tax dollars and covered the federal trials of international spies. They tracked the mental illness of a killer who ran loose for days in Baltimore’s suburbs and accounted the life of a little known organized crime ring. They brought home for Baltimoreans the Vietnam War and South Africa’s apartheid.

In this room were editors who orchestrated prolific suburban and city coverage, and editors who put the Morning Sun’s editorial page and the Evening Sun’s Op-Ed page to bed every day for decades. One night editor in the crowd scrutinized our reporting with an unparalleled relentlessness that is long gone.

There were journalists who once knew the lapses in both taste and ethics of Maryland’s elected officials, down to one senator’s secret hair weave. In this room of journalists who once unraveled political dynasties, Monty Cook wouldn’t know a Mitchell from a Curran.

Where to spend those fewer dollars
Cook spoke, without too many specifics, of the Sun’s approach to “monetizing” news reporting: developing niche publications and a plan this year for some more “conversational” features. That doesn’t sound too promising but still, for the Sun to cry poor seems a bit disingenuous, considering the money they’re wasting on ersatz journalism in its year-old publication, called “b,” which has practically no original journalistic content. Cook has said previously that it’s profitable but it’s hard to believe. (Sources say “b” has eight employees who work out of the Sun’s Calvert Street building and the Sun’s vastly shrunken advertising sales staff is under pressure to spend their time trying, unsuccessfully, to sell ads for “b,” in addition to selling ads for the rest of the operation. )

On the future: Cheerful or scornful but, mostly, vague

When talk turned to what lies ahead, former Sun editor Tim Franklin, another panelist, said these times are like the days of the penny press when anyone with a hand press could crank out a publication of his own. “Where does this take us?” asked Franklin, who finds the prospect of the next 5 to 10 years either “pretty scary or pretty exciting.”

The one person on the panel positioned to get us beyond handwringing somehow never managed to. This was Mark Potts, former reporter-turned proponent of hyperlocal user-generated news sites. (He was also a co-founder of Backfence, a series of hyperlocal sites that started cash-rich in 2005 but that folded in 2007.)

 Potts showed the crowd quick – very quick – examples of promising new local websites, in Baltimore and elsewhere in the country, but did not delve into any of them in depth. He didn’t explain that some sites are aiming to provide real journalism ( like Baltimore Brew or Voice of San Diego or New Haven Independent  ) and mingled these in with websites run by realtors and personal injury lawyers and the so-called “mommy bloggers.” Others that flashed by were actually promising local sites (Localist and 600block) not purporting to expose the next Watergate but to help users find and rate restaurants, theatrical productions, volunteer opportunities, community gatherings, etc.
No wonder Miller heaped scorn on the lot of them. Perhaps another panel will be convened to explore all this in more depth.

As the evening wound down, moderator Kevin Klose (Merrill College Dean and former president of National Public Radio) failed to call on one last audience member standing at a microphone waiting to ask a question.
Too bad Klose didn’t recognize the man and let him speak. He was, in fact, the only Pulitzer Prize winner in the room – and not another ex-Sun journalist.

Here is what he told us he wanted to say about what he’d heard:
“There were a lot of false dichotomies here,” said Taylor Branch, award-wining author of the trilogy “America in the King Years.”

“People made print synonymous with public service journalism and therefore ‘good’ and the web synonymous with fly-by-night and therefore ‘bad,’” said Branch, who lives in Baltimore, speaking after the event.

Branch noted that newspapers have always had a consumer side, subsidizing their civic side and that “Walter Chronkite was able to report on Vietnam because of those Chevrolet ads.”

Now that journalism has lost the cash cows that used to fuel it (car ads, classified ads, etc.) there may be no way to painlessly “monetize” it, as in days of old, he noted.

“In a way, it’s going to make it more honest,” he said. “We’re going to find out what civic journalism is worth to people.”

 Editor Fern Shen also contributed to this piece.

Other related links:
* Tim Windsor at Nieman Journalism Lab.
* More by Windsor.
* Liz Farmer at The Daily Record
* City Paper’s take
* Web blogger Dave Troy.