The year 2009 opened on a sad note in Harford County with residents still mourning the death of prominent, longtime school superintendent Jacqueline Haas. Before the year was over, Harford County would lose two other wellknown female leaders – former delegate Joanne Parrott and Harford County Councilwoman Veronica Chenowith.
It was also a year of contradiction. Even as President-Elect Barack Obama slowed his inaugural train ride through Edgewood in January to wave and thank a thousand or so supporters, there were a thousand or so more Harford County residents who fought tooth-and-nail in September to prevent President Obama’s live address to be shown to their children during the school day.
Bel Air High School was demolished and Fallston Library was spared from closure. Art Helton survived another political scandal in Aberdeen while Harford County’s delegation to the Maryland General Assembly played a furious and humiliating game of musical chairs in Annapolis.
The Dagger apparently isn’t bush league enough to be considered for the Baltimore Sun’s “Mobbies,” a contest which highlights non-traditional media enterprises The Sun doesn’t consider a threat.
Or so we believe after reading the e-mail chain posted below between us and a polite Sun representative. To summarize: because we attempt to organize our reported stories instead of posting one long run-on list of links to other people’s work (as, say, the Politicker does) we’re not a blog and therefore not eligible.
In the Sun rep’s words:
“We have a blog defined in the official rules as “a blog, or weblog, is defined as a Web page with dated entries, with the most recent entries at the top of the page”
That’s kinda insane, as if someone decided earlier this decade that online news and comment couldn’t look any other way. We always hear people bash The Sun and other traditional media for ...Continue Reading
The president of the Harford County Board of Education wants the Edgewood Community Council to halt the “negative press” in their community newsletter. Will the ECC comply?
In a recent email copied to several recipients, School Board President Mark Wolkow writes to the Edgewood Community Council with some general advice on how to improve the ECC newsletter, which is typically sent to 1200-1500 area residents. Among Wolkow’s suggestions are that the newsletter should contain positive stories and “eliminate any trace of negativity”. Wolkow argues that there are plenty of other outlets for that.
A couple of weeks ago, a few of us sat down with Baltimore Sun Today Editor Andrew Ratner for about an hour-and-a-half. A Harford County resident himself, Ratner had been following The Dagger for some time and was interested in writing a story about us.
“The Dagger, a local news Web site, doesn’t do newspaper writing and reporting (or you could say newspapering) the way it is taught in journalism school. But it may be a glimpse into the way news will be covered in the future.”
The story continues with some interesting quotes from former Aberdeen Mayor Fred Simmons – “They also have people embedded in those places, and some of them write under other names;” ...Continue Reading
There are plenty of great local feuds in Harford County, but my personal favorite is the long-running war waged between Aberdeen City Council President Mike Hiob and the local media.
Now the two combatants are at it again. During a recent Aberdeen City Council meeting, Hiob read aloud from a letter he penned in which he criticizes the newspaper’s rhetoric regarding annexation.
With the Baltimore Examiner on the way out, where are we supposed to get our news now? the b? The Examiner may have been an object of derision among people looking for more than shallow sips of news, and from people adverse to a paper with a right-wing slant, but it brought some important things to the table in Baltimore.
For one thing, it brought another voice to a competition-starved market. For another, it offered job opportunities to relatively inexperienced writers and photographers. Unlike the Sun, it was a place where a Baltimore kid with a college degree and some experience in writing could get a job.
It’s rare these days to be in on a grand idea, an idea that for a short time is so free of the daily round of human nonsense that you are almost short of breath.
The idea was that a crew of mostly ex-newspaper writers could remake American Journalism the right way, the way that we thought we hadn’t been allowed to in our short years covering…, well covering.
It started about four or five years ago. We were local journalists and photographers hanging around during the lunch hour while our editors quibbled over details and brainstormed our next adventures in the meeting room. I think we were all becoming disenchanted with how things were done because we began talking about how things could be done. We were young and starry-eyed with a lot of fresh ideas, and we joked about starting our own newspaper business.
For anyone within earshot, tune your radio dials to WAMD 970 AM Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. to catch Part II of The Dagger’s interview on ‘Aberdeen Happenings’ with host Mark Schlottman. We somehow managed to squeeze about 8 or 9 of us, plus a cat, into the tiny Aberdeen radio station, but couldn’t squeeze our behind-the-scenes, tell-all expose into a single half-hour radio program.
The prolonged battle between Aberdeen City Councilman Mike Hiob and local newspaper The Record continued this week with the politician getting in the latest jab – a list of the top “uses” for the newspaper he read during Monday night’s city council meeting, which include wrapping fish, washing windows and checking to see how many headlines were ripped from The Dagger.
This war of attrition has been going on nearly since Hiob took office in November 2003 and was likely fueled by Hiob’s dislike for what he has called “sensational headlines” and “wrong information” in the paper and the newspaper’s dislike of Hiob’s propensity for verbose, minute and typically unwarranted/unjustified criticism – or nitpicking.
