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
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.
- Calling the Emergency Operations Center and trying to explain why a 911 hangup call had just been placed from his house and why police didn’t have to, and indeed shouldn’t, respond.
Like most things in life, good and bad, The Dagger started off innocently enough.
On September 7, 2007, the first introductory story, a two-paragraph piece aptly titled “Introductions,” was posted onto the Internet. Despite being called an introduction, the story posed more questions than it answered.
Today, September 7, 2008, we hope to finally answer some of those lingering questions as we celebrate The Dagger’s anniversary with some laughter, some tears and enough behind-the-scenes details to hopefully keep us relevant for another year.
Last Christmas I mailed a good friend of mine, an editor at the Aegis and Record newspapers, a gift. He mailed it back, unopened, with a curt note attached.
Maybe this was to be expected. About a month-and-a-half earlier, we’d allowed some local businesspeople to run an ad for The Dagger in The Record newspaper – a rude, punkish shot across the bow from a news upstart to the local established media. And, we’d written a story based on court documents suggesting that someone at The Aegis may have given favorable ad rates to a political group. The story was, without a doubt, speculative; but it was far milder than some of the despotic opinion-making I’d seen go on in my time at the paper.
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.
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.
Homestead Publishing Company, parent of the Aegis and Record newspapers, announced Friday morning that, in order to save ink, letters to the editor would be arbitrarily truncated – particularly if those letters make mention of a certain local news and commentary website peopled largely by ex-Homesteaders.
In order to save costs at the printing press, The Aegis today cut a few words from a letter to the editor written by former legislative aide and former District C county council candidate Brian Young. The (almost) same letter was published here February 19.
Here’s the closing paragraph from Young’s letter, as posted on The Dagger:
