Journalism

For me, the image of Mike Wallace as an iconoclastic journalist who challenged the status quo was always contradicted by his status as a hugely successful mainstream media personality. It's as if the few times he butted heads and dug into an interviewee were replayed over and over to obscure what he really was - the product and purveyor of predictable media pablum, that gray blob that dominates the news empire. The contrived and formulaic 60 Minutes set-up with guests, which was his signature, always seemed to mock real expose journalism and insult viewers.

Catonsville native Carolyn Vidmar is completing a second year of service with College Possible Milwaukee, a nonprofit, dedicated to helping low income students achieve college success. Through the AmeriCorps VISTA program, she coordinates media relations, contributes to the writing, design and photography for communications materials and maintains the website, along with social media accounts. An alumna of McDonogh School, Vidmar earned a journalism degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I have a lot of respect for Mike Tidwell, but I was disappointed in his op-ed piece, "The sky really is falling" (Feb. 14). In my opinion, it was a classic piece of Chicken Little journalism. No matter what weather we have -- snow, drought, heat or cold -- virtually anything that is out of the normal is blamed on global warming. Match a single extreme weather event with a single facet of a complex, multifaceted theory, and the conclusion is, "Aha! Proof! The sky is falling!" In fact, the global climate is an extremely complex, interrelated and incompletely understood system, affected by much more than air pollutant emissions from human activities.

If you want to get a real sense of a TV newsroom's priorities and values beyond all the "we're on your side" hype, check it out in times of stress. Stress is defined here as major stories breaking or unfolding at a time when there is an extra emphasis on ratings performance - and not enough cameras and bodies to cover all of the waterfront. Last week in Baltimore certainly qualifies, with two major trials under way at the downtown courthouse, the police commissioner resigning and the Ravens NFL Defensive Player of the Year tearing his Achilles tendon.

Whatever the ultimate impact of AOL's $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post on the new-media landscape, it's already clear that the merger will push more journalists more deeply into the tragically expanding low-wage sector of our increasingly brutal economy. That's a development that will hurt not only the people who gather and edit the news but also readers and viewers. To understand why, it's helpful to step back from the wide-eyed coverage focused on foundering AOL's last-ditch effort to stave off the oblivion of irrelevance, or Arianna Huffington's astonishing commercial achievement in taking her Web news portal from startup to commercial success in less than six years.

Editor: A single disgruntled teacher makes a statement at a community meeting in Edgewood and The Aegis prints a "front page, above the fold" article that states "teachers want the Superintendent of schools to be gone. " No surveys, no data, just one person's opinion was enough for The Ageis ' editor to target Dr. Robert Tomback for attack. Basic rules of journalism require that a topic sentence be supported by factual evidence. Yet, the entire article disproved both the misleading headline and the teacher's misplaced attack.

Eileen Ambrose, The Baltimore Sun's personal finance columnist, was recognized this week as one of the best business columnists in the country by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Ambrose was one of three columnists at large U.S. newspapers to win a "Best in Business" award. Ambrose, who joined the Sun in 1999, received the same award in 2008 for columns written in 2007. - Baltimore Sun

A note to the notably angry, sarcastic American, the "snarlygaster" who, in letters to this columnist or in postings on baltimoresun.com talk forums, expresses glee at the troubles of the U.S. newspaper industry and the hope that the nation's dailies disappear: Be careful what you wish for. You may end up with Andrew Breitbart. In the age of the Internet, I keep hearing these assertions, often delivered with cynical excitement: The mainstream media, with its leftist agenda, has become irrelevant to the mass of people, who get the "real news" from television, particularly Fox, and the blogosphere.

At the risk of compounding the senior generation's reputation for old fogyness, here's a warning about the latest virus of so-called social networking that is infecting American journalism. The august Library of Congress has decided to spend untold millions on archiving Twitter, that latest open exercise in getting off your chest in print anything that crosses your mind, in 140 characters or less. Announcement of the scheme came the other day in San Francisco in a speech by Twitter's CEO, Evan Williams, in what was oh-so-cutely called its Chirp Conference.

I was in the CNN green room in Washington Sunday when I heard about the death of pioneering CBS newsman Mike Wallace at 93 Sunday. Being a live show, host Howie Kurtz and the CNN team scrapped the planned opening and went with a segment on Wallace that I was part of. I will post that video here as soon as CNN makes it available. UPDATE (2:25 p.m): The video from CNN's "Reliable Sources" has been added at end of this post. But here's what I think matters most about Wallace, who I was lucky enough to interview over the years.

In a small, rural, rust-belt town there sits a nondescript office building not far from the town square. The building is an unassuming amalgam of storefronts, offices and vacancies. Near one of the offices, there hangs a shingle: "Psychiatrist's Office. " Patients arrive faithfully, dutifully awaiting the chance to receive comprehensive, compassionate care and the most appropriate medicine for their maladies. My mother runs this clinic, striving to provide the best and most cost-effective medicine possible.

News Roundup •••• Adam Sessler, host of G4TV's gaming flagship “X-Play,” has left the network and the long-running show. Sessler was a fixture on the network's previous incarnations, ZDTV and TechTV, having co-hosted “X-Play” with Morgan Webb for nearly a decade. [ Kotaku ] •••• A new study has found that playing “Tetris” can ease the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. It can also get you kicked out of math class if you play it too conspicuously on your TI-86 calculator.

Jean Gartlan, a retired journalist and a Catholic Relief Services program director who worked in 1960s refugee relief in southern Africa, died of cancer Sunday at Stella Maris Hospice. She was 88 and lived in Mount Vernon. "She was really a Renaissance woman," said Ken Hackett, former Catholic Relief Services president. "She was literary and traveled the world. She did some remarkable behind-the-scenes things, and ... you never knew she was there. " Born in New York City and raised in Washington Heights, she earned an English degree at the College of Mount St. Vincent and a second bachelor's degree, in journalism, from Columbia University.

For me, the image of Mike Wallace as an iconoclastic journalist who challenged the status quo was always contradicted by his status as a hugely successful mainstream media personality. It's as if the few times he butted heads and dug into an interviewee were replayed over and over to obscure what he really was - the product and purveyor of predictable media pablum, that gray blob that dominates the news empire. The contrived and formulaic 60 Minutes set-up with guests, which was his signature, always seemed to mock real expose journalism and insult viewers.

I was in the CNN green room in Washington Sunday when I heard about the death of pioneering CBS newsman Mike Wallace at 93 Sunday. Being a live show, host Howie Kurtz and the CNN team scrapped the planned opening and went with a segment on Wallace that I was part of. I will post that video here as soon as CNN makes it available. UPDATE (2:25 p.m): The video from CNN's "Reliable Sources" has been added at end of this post. But here's what I think matters most about Wallace, who I was lucky enough to interview over the years.

This week the Wall Street Journal's health blog celebrated its five year anniversary. And not with cake. With the Michael Phelps diet. Or, rather, with the memories of it. In a post looking back at its five years in existence, the bloggers recalled some of their biggest hits. Near the top of the list was one about the Baltimore swimmer's famously fattening power meals. "With over 475 comments and counting," the Wall Street Journal writers said, "it's still one of the most trafficked posts 3 ½ years after it was written.

The question at a political dinner the other night was ''the end of print.'' More precisely: When exactly did television replace newspapers as the dominant medium in American journalism?Where you stood on that question depended on where you sat. I thought the shift did not come until late in the 1970s, when satellite transmission gave the networks the ability to broadcast live from almost any place they could send in men with cameras. But perhaps I just represented the newspaper addicts who, like me as a kid, watched Yankees-Dodgers World Series games on TV, then rushed out to buy the papers to see if what I saw really happened.

Chelsea Clinton did her second report for NBC's "Rock Center with Brian Williams" Wednesday night, and it was just as flawed as the first. The learning curve does not appear to have bent one degree in the direction of growth. This one-dimensional, under-reported, naive celebration of a charter school in Rhode Island was just as much of an empty-headed puff job as Clinton's first report on an after-school program in Little Rock. And before you take to your computer to send an email telling me how mean it is for me to criticize this 31-year-old woman who has been given educational and workplace advantages generally belonging to the elite 1 percent we have been hearing so much about in recent months, let me say my criticism is not primarily directed at Clinton, but rather at NBC News, It knows the difference between jounalism and the silly crap she is doing.

Editor: A single disgruntled teacher makes a statement at a community meeting in Edgewood and The Aegis prints a "front page, above the fold" article that states "teachers want the Superintendent of schools to be gone. " No surveys, no data, just one person's opinion was enough for The Ageis ' editor to target Dr. Robert Tomback for attack. Basic rules of journalism require that a topic sentence be supported by factual evidence. Yet, the entire article disproved both the misleading headline and the teacher's misplaced attack.