Radio

The new year brings some new jobs on radio and Internet for one-time Baltimore media figures Anita Marks, Marc Clarke and Troy Johnson. Marks, a former show host at 105.7 The Fan, will start Jan. 5 as a weekend host on NBC Sports Radio. Her shift will run from noon to 3 p.m. Saturdays. At this point, no Baltimore stations carry the NBC Sports Network. Several stations in Washington do, but none carries the full lineup of NBC programming. You can, however, listen to NBC Sports Radio online here . The new job for Marks was announced and reported on Dec. 18. You can read one of those reports at sportsmediajournal.com . I wonder if the Baltimore guys who seemed to so love hating on Marks when she was at 105.7 The Fan will be checking out her new network gig. Meanwhile, Clarke and Johnson, of The Big Phat Morning Crew that left the airwaves at Baltimore's WERQ (92.3 FM)

The arrest of a Baltimore blogger this weekend showed how a normally mundane bit of police work - the serving of a warrant - can be complicated in an age of Twitter and Internet radio. It briefly put a national spotlight on what normally wouldn't even make the local news. Frank James MacArthur, 47, a steady presence as an observer at city crime scenes and a cab driver by trade, took to Twitter and an online radio service to stream his dealings with police at his home Saturday to execute an arrest warrant connected to 2009 weapons charges for which he had received probation before judgment.

Twitter and web radio carried a new kind of prime-time crime drama in Baltimore Saturday when a Waverly man refused to allow police to serve a warrant and then broadcast the ensuing standoff after a S.W.A.T. team arrived. He was on the air live Saturday night for more than 5 hours, much of it spent talking to a police negotiator before surrendering peacefully. Another day and night in the brave, new world of social media… Frank James MacArthur, a cabdriver, who tweets, blogs and broadcasts on the Internet as The Baltimore Spectator, left the airwaves just before 11 p.m. saying, “All right, it's 10:57.

Harvey G. Alexander, who founded and served as executive director of the Baltimore Film Festival and also read poetry on WBJC-FM, died Nov. 23 of pulmonary edema at Franklin Square Medical Center. He was 77. "I first got to know him in 1964 at Martick's. They wouldn't let me in, but I got to know him behind Martick's back in the alley," said film director and writer John Waters. "Harvey was an eccentric intellectual and a real bohemian, but always very friendly," said Mr. Waters.

Independent U.S. Senate candidate Rob Sobhani agreed to pull down an advertisement he began airing on black radio stations this week that attacked incumbent Sen. Ben Cardin after state Democrats complained Friday the spot was riddled with inaccuracies. The ad plays a passage from a 2006 debate in which Cardin's one-time opponent, Kweisi Mfume, criticizes him for his time in office. "You get in Washington, you get this Potomac Fever -- you just think that God put you there," the ad quotes Mfume saying at the debate.

On one side there's Alveda King, the niece of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, saying marriage should not be redefined. On there other, President Barack Obama, the country's first black president, says he  gays should be allowed to wed. Both sides of Question 6 unholstered their heavy-hitters today in dueling radio commercials for the final stretch of their campaigns. Early voting starts Saturday. Political strategists believe that as many as one in four Marylanders going to the polls this year will be African-American, and each of the three ballot questions with organized campaigns are wooing black votes . With same-sex marriage, the state's black voters are shaping up to be swing voters that could turn the outcome one way or another.

Gart Westerhout, an internationally known radio astronomer who established the astronomy department at the University of Maryland, College Park and was scientific director at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, died Sunday of congestive heart failure at the Charlestown retirement community in Catonsville. He was 85. The son of an architect and a writer, he was born and raised in The Hague, Netherlands, where he also graduated from high school. Dr. Westerhout earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics, physics and astronomy in 1950 from the University of Leiden, and earned his master's degree in the discipline in 1954.

The Maryland Democratic Party is asking state prosecutors to investigate what it says are "serious campaign finance violations" by a group that opposes the state's Dream Act. The director of the group called the claims "bogus. " Brad Botwin, who founded Help Save Maryland six years ago, described the challenge as "another violation of my First Amendment rights. " The Dream Act, if approved by voters next month, would extend in-state tuition breaks at the state's public colleges and universities to some illegal immigrants who have graduated from high school in Maryland, whose families have filed state income taxes, and who meet other requirements.

Baltimore Ravens' Terrence Cody is fat, according to Mike Golic from ESPN Radio's Mike and Mike in the Morning show. Golic's comment was made on Friday morning, during a discussion about Cody's objections to the new NFL jerseys : "Terrence Cody is about 350. Terrence, I don't mean this in a bad way, but you're fat. I mean am I making up that you have some fat on you when you weight 350? Listen, if you're under 10 percent fat percentage, god love you, but I am pretty sure you are not. "

Bryan Nehman, co-host of the "Brian and Bryan Show" on Washington's WMAL radio, has been hired by Baltimore's WBAL to replace Dave Durian during morning drive time. Nehman previously anchored morning news on the politically conservative talk and news station in the nation's capital from 2001 to 2011. He's been at the station 12 years. He started as a street reporter, and "was put in the news anchor chair right after 9/11," Nehman said Thursday. "Bryan is one of the brightest young men that I've met, and he is the guy who's going to lead WBAL into the next 20 years of broadcasting," Dave Hill, program director at the station said.