Paper

Ray Datema of Vermont spent the weekend on Main Street, hawking copies of the Sept. 7, 1995, edition of The Sun. Of course, that's the day after Cal Ripken Jr. played in his 2,131st consecutive game and broke Lou Gehrig's supposedly unbreakable record. It's also the day Datema and partner John Kaye ordered 3,000 copies of the paper for resale purposes. "Most of the guys [in the Hall of Fame] are regional, but Cal is a hero for everyone," Datema said. He has been selling the papers, some of them slightly yellowed, for $10 apiece at memorabilia shows and over the Internet and said he has only about 300 left.

Environmental Elements Corp. said yesterday that it has been awarded contracts worth $1.8 million to supply air pollution control equipment to two paper plants.The Baltimore company got a contract from Ahlstrom Recovery Inc. for a paper mill in Syktyvkar, Russia.The device to be sent to Russia will control emissions from a lime kiln. The project, initiated by Environmental Elements' Finnish licensee, SF Cleanair, is Environmental Elements' first contract in Russia. It is being financed by the Export-Import Bank of the United States.

GRAND FORKS, N.D. -- When flood and flames destroyed the offices of the town's newspaper last weekend, residents lost a way to reach back into their past.The blaze that destroyed the Grand Forks Herald's building was part of a huge downtown fire. Floodwaters kept firefighters from saving the building and the thousands of newspaper clippings, going back more than a century, stored inside. The newspaper covered the granting of North Dakota's statehood in 1889.Most of the history has been saved, since copies of every paper for much of this century have been stored, as is required by law, in the North Dakota Historical Society in the capital, Bismarck, and transferred to microfilm.

If paper and photocopies are the currency of education, then Howard County teachers say their supplies resemble the budgets of most Americans -- there's never enough to go around.And nowhere is this more evident than in Howard's elementary )) schools, where some teachers keep their paper secured under lock and key, many scrounge for scraps and all try to never discard a piece of paper without using both sides.Such limits on basic supplies stand in stark contrast to Howard's affluent image and the county's relatively high level of spending on education.

JACKSON, Miss. -- The story of the Hederman family and the Clarion-Ledger newspaper should have been written by Faulkner. It is a tale of a man burdened by ancestry. Familial loyalty and duty are stained by revulsion toward the past. The corrosive effects of racism are deeply felt, the scent of decay is strong.And Mississippi itself is a protagonist.The Hederman family ran what probably was the most racist newspaper in the nation. Some of its past reporting, when reviewed today, is nearly unbelievable.

What Dianna Richards remembers most about her grandmother, Marguerite L. T. Mills, is her energy. For 15 years, Mills used that energy to run the Severna Park Voice, which she founded in 1981. But she died last November of heart failure at age 78.Now Richards has picked up where her grandmother left off. The 22-year-old Severna Park resident is the new publisher of the monthly neighborhood newspaper."It's been a great experience so far," Richards said. "It's been exciting to be involved with the community and the people in the community."

DURING THE SEVEN decades of Soviet existence, Pravda, despite its circulation in the millions, never was the country's biggest newspaper. But as the official organ of the Communist ** Party, it was by far the most important. Dozens of satellite plants printed and delivered it, making sure party apparatchiks in 15 republics knew what the day's truth was, according to the Kremlin.This once-mighty paper has now suspended publication for the fifth time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its owners, two millionaire brothers from Greece, accuse the paper's editors and staff of working little, of boozing too much and publishing "nothing worth reading."

There's old money, and then there's really old money -- like the 15 million pounds of worn-out bills that the Federal Reserve shreds into spaghetti-like strands each year.Until a few years ago, those strands ended up mostly in landfills. But then a few of the 12 Federal Reserve banks around the country began recycling them into everything from fuel pellets -- and roof shingles to wall panels and Christmas ornaments.Now those shreds are turning up in a consumer goodie that smacks of, well, old money.

Havre de Grace. -- In 1982, when Irna and I were newspaper publishers here, the publisher of the competing weekly down the road in Aberdeen died, and we bought his paper. It was the right move from a business standpoint, but it brought us face to face with one very uncomfortable editorial fact.Newspaper readers are resolute in their belief that their newspapers should be local. And while ''local'' is an imprecise adjective, we soon learned that in Aberdeen, it didn't mean a newspaper with its home office in Havre de Grace.

Babe Ruth is looking down from a baseball diamond in the sky, and he is laughing.He is laughing because he has read the 90 papers that will be presented at Hofstra University's conference April 27-29 commemorating Ruth's 100th birthday. Academics from across the country have written about half of the papers, using their diverse scholarly backgrounds to find religious imagery in Babe Ruth movies, to analyze Ruth's behavior using Freudian psychology and to compare him with characters in Shakespearean tragedies.

Clarification: An article in Thursday's editions about ethical questions news media companies face when accepting money from entities they cover should have noted that Baltimore extended the financial break to Alter Communications Inc., the parent company of the Baltimore Jewish Times. Alter also owns Style and Chesapeake Life. Baltimore officials extended a financial break on Wednesday to the struggling Baltimore Jewish Times, which like many media outlets has been hard hit by the national economic downturn.

The newsroom of The Diamondback, the student paper at the University of Maryland, College Park, retains the feel of an old-school city room. Framed front pages line the walls and bound volumes of yellowing issues collect dust on tables. Daily meetings are oriented toward producing the next morning's newspaper. The staff members know it might be the last newspaper they ever work for. As the industry sheds jobs by the thousands and papers close or go digital-only, there is a rethinking of journalism education.

RALEIGH, N.C. -That night in Boston wasn't the culmination of anything. In fact, it was supposed to be the start. Kristi Toliver hit The Shot. The Terps cut down the nets. And I know I wasn't the only one thinking Maryland would be a regular visitor to the Final Four. After all, the starting five for the 2006 championship team featured a junior, two sophomores and a pair of freshmen. They were only going to get better. On paper, they were destined to hit more big shots and cut down more nets.

Finnish paper manufacturer UPM signed a 10-year contract with the port of Baltimore yesterday to ship at least 320,000 tons of product through the harbor annually, a deal Maryland officials said would help the port maintain jobs during the economic downturn. The 16,000-employee port is Maryland's largest provider of blue- collar jobs. The UPM deal will result in 120 jobs and $2.7 million in tax revenue, state officials said. Yesterday's contract-signing took place in a $32 million port-side warehouse built for UPM by the state about three years ago. The paper company has been shipping product through Baltimore since the early 1990s.

Jesse Thomas Crowder, a former Sun executive who played a role in the computerization of the paper's accounting practices and newspaper production, died Friday at a nursing home in Mount Dora, Fla. He was 84 and died after an illness partly related to severe osteoporosis. Mr. Crowder, an accountant, first ventured into the Sun building in 1961, when he was assigned to perform an outside audit. He was hired immediately after completing the job and quickly rose through the ranks to become the treasurer and chief financial officer of The Sun, which was then owned by A.S. Abell Co. When he arrived at the paper, most workers received their pay in cash from a "cash cage," and the paper was mechanically typeset.

This Sunday, we will unveil a reinvention of The Baltimore Sun. No The Sun. The Baltimore Sun. Changing our name after 171 years is no small matter. We did it because this is no small change to your newspaper, a Baltimore-based news organization that is the definitive source of news and information for this city and region. This will be a whole new Baltimore Sun. It's a more visual newspaper for a more visual age. It's bolder, with more color, more photos and more of our personalities displayed prominently.

Many in the newspaper business have embraced the Internet warily. For all the promise the Web platform has, it also holds some big pitfalls. Yes, the online world offers potentially broader audiences and the promise of cutting costs by slicing into publishing and circulation expenses. But the free content model on the Web is particularly scary for newspapers. If the content online is free, why would people bother to subscribe to the paper? And once enough readers flee, circulation falls and advertisers find less reason to buy ad space.

Ray Datema of Vermont spent the weekend on Main Street, hawking copies of the Sept. 7, 1995, edition of The Sun. Of course, that's the day after Cal Ripken Jr. played in his 2,131st consecutive game and broke Lou Gehrig's supposedly unbreakable record. It's also the day Datema and partner John Kaye ordered 3,000 copies of the paper for resale purposes. "Most of the guys [in the Hall of Fame] are regional, but Cal is a hero for everyone," Datema said. He has been selling the papers, some of them slightly yellowed, for $10 apiece at memorabilia shows and over the Internet and said he has only about 300 left.

The Federal Reserve Bank will eliminate 120 check-processing jobs in Baltimore by the end of 2009 as part of a consolidation of 22 regional processing facilities into four. "There's less paper to process," said David Fettig, spokesman for the Fed's Financial Services Policy Committee. Increasingly, payments are made with credit and debit cards or online transfers rather than paper checks. And those paper checks are increasingly processed as electronic images, rather than physically shipped around the country.

The acclaimed HBO drama that has drawn on Baltimore drug dealers, politicians and schools for its ripped-from-the-headlines feel will tap another vein for verisimilitude: local office clutter. Specifically, Baltimore Sun office clutter. Look for it next season on The Wire. I got this scoop simply by sitting at work one day, minding my own business, and looking up just in time to see a woman shooting photos of my very messy desk. She and a guy from the show worked the whole newsroom, taking note of old papers piled on the floor and jackets deposited on empty chairs instead of coat racks.