Annapolis Capital Punishment

As with many of you, CP has a love-hate affair with The Capital. As meaty evidence of this, CP often refers readers to articles in The Capital. While it would be nice if they did the same for CP, I'm not holding my breath. The Capital does many things well and provides important, yes even crucial news for us, but they it is far from ideal. The biggest disappointment is that with all its resources and strengths, it just does not seem to "get it" half the time. The quality of reporting ranges mainly from adequate to acceptable, with a few notables at both ends of the entire range. Earl Kelly, Eric Hartley and Nicole Young stand out as real positives, but it is too heavy on sports and fluffy stuff for my taste. We are fortunate that it is a far cry better than many, if not most small town newspapers. However, as with all papers, change is in the air, and with this paper, it may be big and it may be imminent.

Capital editor Tom Marquardt opined about this, so CP took the liberty of using his words and changing key words in them to make a defense of blogs. Geeze--I hope I am not guilty of plagiarizing because I could not afford to fight this legal battle. On the other hand, it would be great publicity for CP.....

CP respects Mr. Marquardt's abilities and candor and gives him credit for many of the long term improvements that have taken place at The Capital. Below is CP's highly modified version of Marquardt's recent column, changed of course, to favor blogs, rather than newspapers. I do this to make a point that there are many types of blogs and bloggers, some good and some not so good, but that is true of newspapers as well:

Those of us who write blogs are still confident that we can continue to prosper. The reason, simply, is that people still want to know what is happening in their communities and blogs are in the best position to satisfy them. Who else has the unfiltered and unfettered viewpoints to cover everything from an insider's perspective?

Sure, there are plenty of newspapers such as The Capital that recruit aspiring writers to cover local news. That's fine - but do these outfits live up to their supposed standards? Are they capable of writing serious stories? I know of one that instructs its staff to avoid anything negative if it's about an advertiser, even if it means covering up controversy. I don't think this is what readers want.

There will always be a need for choices in local news, but I don't see blogs out of the picture. We know we have to embrace newspapers and satisfy people who prefer a newsprint to a computer screen. Our platform and even our people may be changing - but not our mission to produce the most comprehensive news report possible.

There are still a lot of people who would rather hold a computer mouse than a newspaper to get their daily fix of local news. Until that changes, you'll still find us on your computer.

Don't give up on us. We have a lot of new ideas and stories for 2008 that we hope will make your investment an even greater value.

Readers may wish to see Marquardt's original words at www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2008/01_06-42/OPN