URL: thewire.in It's just time. And now, with about twenty-five inches filed and sent to the state desk, I have come to rest, waiting while editors in the four o'clock shape the next day's local front. I only know, as I hang up the editing-suite phone, that I've lost my religion, that too much of what I genuinely loved is gone. Theres no explaining it, he tells the reporter when she asks why. She is not an employee of The Wire and will function independently of its editorial structure. DIGIPUB has set up an internal committee to provide members with an addtional level of self-regulation. Twenty-five years ago, newspapers -- the big ones at least, those controlling their markets -- were unrivaled in their relevance. Tall, 50ish, with a low, unhurried voice, Mr. Johnson is perhaps best known for portraying Detective Meldrick Lewis in Homicide: Life on the Street. His directing credits include episodes of that series and The Wire as well as The Shield, Sleeper Cell, The West Wing and others. He'd worked with me on the college paper, then at The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Washington Post. . Mom, this water is not colored, he wails as the water bubbles up, a line that makes the other passengers erupt in laughter. You will also work with reporters and editors across the newsroom on how social media and readers voices can inform our journalism, both pre and post publishing. ", So it's my first correction -- an ugly one. I have hair and forty less pounds. All that remained was a Bushido-like end to it, a slow, ceremonial evisceration on the newsroom floor. Some kid had goose-stepped down the hall of a campus dormitory and fired a BB pellet into a coed's leg a few months back. And immediately I know. Apart from providing authoritative analysis and commentary, the aim, as our resources grow, is to build ourselves as a platform driven by good old-fashioned reporting on issues of national and international importance and interest. I go back to the newsroom, where a full take of Carter's history in foster care, along with careful, annotated notes from Canzian, greets me. Mr. Johnson said he found Mr. Simons views fairly congruent with reality. On the surface hes a laid-back, casual kind of guy, she said. And for an adolescent growing up in the mid-1970s, it appeared exactly that. It was a chance to get back and just be an actor, Mr. Johnson said, and not deal with all the problems of directing., As both an actor and director, Mr. Johnson said, police shows seem to find him. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheWireHindi/, URL: http://thewireurdu.com/ He cites Mario Puzo's Godfather, the passage where Tom tells Michael that it's business, it's not personal. So The Sun would also rise. HBO's The Wire has been labeled by many (including us) as the best TV drama ever made. Impact means prizes. The show's fifth and final season began this month and it focuses, in part, on the struggles of a daily newspaper in decline. The veterans are waiting to see." Not for any technical reasons, but because when someones character ended, wed give them an ovation. "How the hell did you find me?" And so this was journalism. The Wire undertakes to publish her views on its coverage without editorial interference. [6][10], He is named after real-life former Baltimore Sun editor Steve Luxenberg. Worse, it has slowly eroded professional standards of reporting and contaminated the media ecosystem with toxic practices like rampant editorialising, paid news and private treaties. So I write a memo to the top editor, arguing this privately, urging him to reconsider this self-defeating mythology in which no one here knew a thing about newspapering until the new regime. ", She moves on to some of my own verbiage: ". From the Swopes to the Runyons, from Broun to Pegler to Mencken, then back again to Hecht and MacArthur, Homer Bigart and Meyer Berger. In addition, it is now run by the Tribune Company from Chicago, who are less interested in local journalism than they are with doing gltizy "state of the nation" feature pieces with one eye on a Pulitzer Prize. It didn't. "Brother," I say, "we got out just in time.". Too many people write the top of the story and then have nowhere to go. Siddharth Varadarajan He pulls a name and an address on Lennox Street. I felt sure of this when I wrote such and had it published in my state's largest newspaper. They will be instead in the hands of out-of-town moneymen offering unfeeling and unequivocal fealty to stockholders and the share price. And Warmkessel is over at the city courts if we needed anything else from the clerk's office there, just as Ettlin or Jane Smith is on rewrite if we need to throw last-minute calls. [14] His experience has given him a touch of complacency. Ms. Swarna Rajagopalan, founder and director for the Prajnya Trust while Bubbles acts as Fletcher's guide to the city's homeless population. Would they be signing on in Baltimore if the future here is anything but bright? -- Anticipate readers prospective social and search needs sparked by an exclusive by The Wire or a news event I turned it down before talking money with anyone, telling the Post M.E. . So journalism was out. Hes the bookend of the show, in terms of directing. They now feel shortchanged. With data and interactive charts, video and audio as integral parts of the narrative structure when warranted. Spry and Ettlin on rewrite, catching dictation from Paris or Washington. Arguments over quotidian matters such as the slant of Mideast coverage, or an ethical debate over attribution, or the use and overuse of a stylistic device will soon bring transfers and demotions until, finally, an exodus begins. At that moment, I can't yet fathom all the still-to-come Tribune Company cost cutting at The Sun, the Kafkaesque reductions in staffing, the slow-motion demolition of the Washington bureau, the shuttering of the foreign bureaus. Except it hadn't happened. There were 30 original crew members with the show at the end, and everyone knows everyone well, and Clark is probably our most beloved director. I had edited my college newspaper, and now, given the chance to report for one of the great gray ladies of American newspapering, I was a fucking joke. Here is a breakdown of The Wires funding sources since 2015: Pie chart of The Wires funding, 2015-2021. After two years, I'd gone back on leave to report a second book, a year in the life of a city drug corner. [6], Bill Zorzi is a veteran reporter for The Baltimore Sun facing an increased workload since the last round of buyouts. Timothy A. Franklin, editor of the real Baltimore Sun, said he found Mr. Johnson impressive as the city editor. No response, not a word, except the editor manages to spike my next story without explanation or comment. Anyone can read what you share. Having edited the campus daily the year previous, I was confident in The Diamondback's reporting and comfortable using it as boilerplate for Sun articles I wrote about the university. I hung up the phone, wondrous that my shame had not been referenced, then drove to the circuit court the next morning. "Stealing Life: The crusader behind "The Wire", "Character profile - City Editor Augustus "Gus" Haynes", "Character profile - Executive Editor James Whiting", "Character profile - Managing Editor Thomas Klebanow", David Simon at My Nemesis (Stoop Storytelling Series), "Character profile - State Editor Tim Phelps", "Character profile - Rewrite man Jay Spry", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Journalists_of_The_Wire&oldid=1078621877, Fictional journalists and mass media people, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 22 March 2022, at 13:43. Fresh faces with great reps and rsums -- John Carroll from Lexington, a Sun veteran, and Bill Marimow from Philadelphia. He calls every area hospital. For much of Simon's tenure, the Sun was run by the Times-Mirror Company out of Los Angeles. Advertisings down. The meeting was about something else entirely. To most, the staffing reductions of the 1990s will seem inevitable, almost sensible given the loss of The Evening Sun. [11] He is a veteran reporter and now takes pride in ensuring the standards of the paper are maintained. His next directing project is a film called Chinese Wall, about the politics of oil in Nigeria. I have a story in The Baltimore Sun tomorrow. At the door minutes later, I use the guy's name as if I'd known him my whole life, talking fast, leaving no spaces for him to argue or usher us out. I didnt just go into somebodys kitchen. At one point, Klebanow gives Gus some grief about Gus' use of salty language, pointing out the lack of respect and breach of office decorum. She got burnt with lye. "About you? [5], He comes across as vain and lacking character strength, but he has a good sense of the bottom line and the potential of a story to draw readers. Editor for The Baltimore Sun, who does his best to keep the paper alive and relevant during bad times for the industry. It leads to shit like this. Sidharth Bhatia Shows what I know, I guess. Good thing, too, because Spry is long dead, and Ettlin retired last year. ", And in response: "Have you ever read The Godfather?". I was staying in Baltimore. A black reporter, though, tells her that her story has the wrong zip code, explaining that had the murder victims been white and affluent, the article would have landed on Page 1. The Wire has not attracted viewers and awards the way other critically lauded HBO series like The Sopranos and Sex and the City did. He'd killed a guy, carjacked and abducted a couple others -- a salesman, a Hopkins physician, taxpayers, white people. It will be fast, I tell myself. There are quotes that no one ever said. You need to report everything. We would do things like go to Bogot with her instead of summer camp. These days Mr. Johnson, the father of two college-age daughters, keeps a home in Toronto and an apartment in Chelsea in Manhattan. And when it finally comes together and it's time to write, it would be Rebecca Corbett moving it to the desk, and she will protect the copy. . Former Supreme Court judge Justice Madan Lokur The aim is to build a platform that represents digital news media.. Before I leave, though, I do one last thing: I speak up for some people in the newsroom, honest players who had watched as standards had changed and who are too scared to complain openly. "I was disappointed in that story," he says. Engaging our readers, monitoring on-site and off-platform conversations for story ideas and integrating readers contributions and insights into the daily edit meets would be vital. Fuck it, I call the publisher and leave a message. I was an angry kid, by and large, with a cynic's wariness of authority that was in harness with a good newspaperman's contempt of cant and hyperbole. The fifth season of the show included a focus on the media and in particular a fictionalized version of The Baltimore Sun. TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Zorzi is beside me, checking his notes. To work a story with him is to double your reach, and if there is a fact that needed to be known and could be known, he would eventually bring it back and lay the notebook page in front of you like a house cat offering up a murdered mouse. ", "But that's a good story going tomorrow.". If you are an Indian citizen and wish to make a donation to The Wire please click here. It was not the most important story I'd report on, nor my best work. I had read my Mencken. Being on the web also means using new media technologies to change the way stories are told. I turn to David Mills, my coproducer on the HBO project. The ministers -- one of whom was quoted at length about the righteous things he told the governor about The Sun's Pulitzer-worthy issue -- had uttered nothing of the sort. Admittedly, I can't even grasp all of the true and subtle costs of impact journalism and prize hunger. "It was trying too hard not to be a newspaper article. For a lot of us itll define our careers.. I tell her that I will go to television on a lark, learn a new skill set, but I'll eventually get back to what it is I'm supposed to be doing. Twitter: @livewire I was in the family, he said. For this we need a teammate with experience in journalism and managing social media accounts. What Has the DOJ Got Up Its Sleeve for Trump? Sure enough, he's pulling on the screen door, using his key. For that alone, I can have no regrets. It's always good when you get your own editor. To contribute an article to The Wire or enquire about syndication, please write to. . At five that morning, I drive to an all-night drugstore, buy six copies, return to bed wide-eyed, alert. And while we sit on Baylis Street, I know that Eileen Canzian -- having covered social services and poverty for years -- is quietly working sources, pulling Dontay Carter's juvenile files and copying each relevant page. He is an acerbic and profane presence, particularly when his workload increases. We were Baltimore's newspaper, and we were writing about a kid who had terrorized Baltimore. Another journalist character named Scott Templeton is played by a different Tom McCarthy. My mom set up relief programs in third world countries, Mr. Johnson said. As I say, it was not an important story or the best story. noteThe Baltimore Sun was bought by the Tribune Company, whose flagship and namesake newspaper is the Chicago Tribune, in 2000, before The Wire started but after David Simon left the Sun. Maybe they dont care about gangbangers, but they care about newspapers and how information is transmitted.. From 2016 to 2020, the Independent and Public Spirited Media Foundation provided substantial financial support to the Foundation for Independent Journalism (FIJ) for the purpose of reporting and publishing stories of public interest. Because the new way of doing business apparently leaves no place in the newsroom for fundamental disagreements about content, about reportage, about the substance of what we are doing or not doing. Instead of a news report so essential to the high-end readers that they might -- even amid the turmoil of the Internet -- still charge for their product online and off, American newspapers will soon be offering a shell of themselves in a market unwilling to pay for such and then, in desperation, giving the product away for free. I am a free agent at that point, clear of any newsroom politics or careerist worries. I laughed until I hurt and left the theater oversold. Is it any wonder that readers have begun to notice the erosion of professional standards, ethical breaches and fall in quality? I get up to go, feeling as if I'd cut my right arm off with a butter knife. But there's a fellow here who is cooking it. The Wire On the walk back to the newspaper, he asks me again, and I tell him that it is unfair of him to ask me to betray the confidence of coworkers. He also directed Boycott, the widely lauded 2001 film on HBO about the life of the Rev. Well, 10 minutes ago I'd' have said this whole thing was complete bullshit. No, it won't be personal when The Sun closes its evening edition and combines staffs, making it a one-newspaper town. Judging by his gestures and mannerisms, Klebanow is well aware of Templeton's lies and even with evidence he learns that Gus' protests regarding Templeton are well founded; still, he shuts down Gus in every instance claiming that he is jealous of Templeton and has a personal vendetta against him. ", "John," I said finally, "if I was the editor of a major metropolitan daily and I had to retract three stories by the same reporter, I would remember it until the day I fucking died.". [6] He left the Sun after accepting a buyout, depriving the Sun of its most senior police reporter, and leaving Alma Gutierrez in the position of senior cop reporter. [6], He is named after Jay Spry, the rewrite man during David Simon's tenure at the Baltimore Sun. This means relying principally on contributions from readers and concerned citizens who have no interest other than to sustain a space for quality journalism. The rewrite man -- the legendary Jay Spry -- took the time to re-explain my obvious failings in the matter, all the while addressing me as Mr. Simon, as if decorum required the condemned be granted one last comic honorific. This season the newspaper industry is in the spotlight. "Black family? my girlfriend asked. I loved a snide turn of phrase. I cowrote a script for the drama, won a screenwriting award, and was offered a television gig for more money than The Sun could ever pay. Bainbridge, Banisky, and two dozen others I couldn't yet name banging out copy at the deadline rush. Mr. Johnsons mother came from a wealthy white family and grew up on Park Avenue. -- Respond to readers real-time social and search needs, - Developing testing strategies around medium (images, video) and message (headline, social share text), to inform a constantly updating set of best practices for engaging off-platform audiences (Social, Search, etc. For a week or so, he was a one-man crime wave until police finally ran him down and charged him, identifying him as simply Dontay Carter, of no fixed address. Founding Editors of The Wire. For the paper to get better, it needs to retain the talent it has and add more. She starts to cry and I am secretly delighted. This means you will grow our presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, chat apps and emerging platforms. This bullshit about having impact and winning prizes? He is roped into the fake serial killer story, and ends up winning a Pulitzer while his more scrupulous colleagues are demoted. He's trying too hard to write impact stories and he's making it up and John, we've retracted a couple stories already. A very pointed example comes when he's confronted for his fabrications, he angrily waves a notepad he knows is empty around yelling at Gus that all his story is in his notes, and he even almost appears to believe it's in his notes for a moment, despite him taking not a single one. Thats where the good dramas are.. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. [12], Scott Templeton is an unscrupulous and ambitious young reporter. If the newspaper cares about something in December, it cares nothing about it in January; the prize cycle follows the calendar year. Email for ombudsperson: ombudsperson@thewire.in, The Wire is a founding member of Digipub News India Foundation, established in 2020 by a number of digital media organisations with the intent to help ensure the creation of a healthy and robust news ecosystem for the digital age. City desk: Clark Johnson, right, as the city editor Gus Haynes, with Robert Poletick, left, and Bill Zorzi. Murder, hit and run, burnt up in row house fires, swindled by bigamists. "You can tell me, and I won't reveal the source.". And worse still, in the newsroom where I grew up -- a semi-intellectual environment where everyone once seemed to be arguing about everything all the time without actually impairing their careers -- dissent will become problematic. Fletcher visits Bubbles in various settings: the soup kitchen where he volunteers, an NA meeting, and while selling newspapers. [13], Jeff Price is the city hall reporter for the metro desk. .css-gk9meg{display:block;font-family:Lausanne,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal;margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0;padding-top:0.25rem;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}@media (any-hover: hover){.css-gk9meg:hover{color:link-hover;}}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-gk9meg{font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.15;margin-bottom:0.25rem;}}@media(min-width: 40.625rem){.css-gk9meg{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.2;margin-bottom:0.625rem;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-gk9meg{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 73.75rem){.css-gk9meg{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.2;}}Sam Alito Jokes about Overturning Roe, Republicans Just Scored Some Spectacular Own-Goals, A Glimpse at the Bizarro World Jan. 6 Committee, Mississippi's Misspent Welfare Scandal Has It All, Former Agent on Secret Service's Jan. 6 Mess, Gun Makers Pretty Sure None of This is Their Fault. [8] Phelps is a smoker and often spends time on the loading dock with his colleagues Gus Haynes, Roger Twigg and Jeff Price. Each season the series has picked apart some looming national problem the failed war on drugs, the deterioration of working-class life, dysfunctional political leadership, overwhelmed urban schools as it affects a sprawling group of characters that has included cops, drug dealers, politicians, teachers, longshoremen and other (often tawdry) Baltimoreans. And then Phelps turns and whispers something to the tall editor beside him, something about me, clearly, because the tall guy is heading my way. Not ever again. [15] Price misses a potential story in the zoning section of a council meeting agenda that is picked up by his editor Gus Haynes. I spent the fifth year of college pulling more than a hundred bylines in The Sun. Most especially, you write additional accounts highlighting the "impact" that The Sun's coverage has achieved -- covering your own coverage -- the better to show that the newspaper has effected change. Nina Noble, the executive producer of The Wire, said: Theres an incredible poetry in Clark directing the last episode. A scavenger hunt -- from A to B to Z on a patchwork of known facts and guesses. [7], Tim Phelps is the editor of the paper's State Desk. When they come for Littwin -- our best columnist -- it will involve their anger at a Guild bulletin written during contract negotiations. Haynes dispatched Twigg to report on a rowhouse fire that Haynes spots from the Newsroom window. From my perch on the metro desk, I hear Phelps, the state editor, say something, his words followed by a burst of laughter. And yes, there's talk of some buyouts, but the rumors were talking about no more than twenty or thirty positions across the newsroom. He enjoys a promotion to senior line editor when Gus is demoted at the end of the series. The address has come from the police computer, listed as the last location on a twenty-something black guy with a particular name. Never mind that the paper was sold by the Abell family after a century and a half of local ownership. Weve got a smaller news hole.. Shit, they were going to be publishing masterworks if they wanted to compete with the best newspaper writing. [2], Jay Spry is the overnight copy editor, or rewrite man, for the metro desk of the paper. [17] While he is still young he is savvy enough to know that a victim's background is more important than good writing in getting a murder story on the front page. I am sitting in a car on the 900 block of Baylis Street in southeast Baltimore, engine off, watching a door and waiting. IPSMF does not take any legal or moral responsibility whatsoever for the content published by FIJ on their website thewire.in or on any of its other platforms. They won't be chasing the weaker reporters; they'll be alienating the core of the institution, leaching as much talent as they hire. It doesn't much matter to anyone past the Sunday when it ran. And here was the thing in 1983: The Sun was going to get better.