The Wire is looking to expand its Audience Engagement team. He calls every area hospital. ", So it's my first correction -- an ugly one. In one favorite he is a dramatic 5-year-old from a politically involved, biracial family, visiting North Carolina from Philadelphia. ", "John, I happen to know the feature editor you brought in here to encourage narrative writing -- she read the story in the kill basket and then came in here and told you she couldn't see why you spiked it. I tell her that I am, in my mind, a newspaperman still. He pulls a name and an address on Lennox Street. [21] He has been working at The Baltimore Sun for twenty years. [4] His managing editor is a colleague from their days working in Philadelphia, Thomas Klebanow. Maybe they dont care about gangbangers, but they care about newspapers and how information is transmitted.. - Spearheading The Wires presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube Community, etc: providing coverage of breaking news and live events, conceiving and executing innovative social plans for campaigns and engaging readers in audience-centric projects, - Developing and continuously refining the voice of The Wire on all our off-platform channels, exhibiting excellent news judgment and audience-sensitive framing, - Building creative social native content (e.g. Well, 10 minutes ago I'd' have said this whole thing was complete bullshit. The window will close; newspapers will not be getting better, stronger, more comprehensive. As I say, it was not an important story or the best story. And so we settle in. [17] Fletch's failure to meet deadlines earns him a reproach from city desk editor Gus Haynes.[6]. [6], Mike "Fletch" Fletcher is a general assignments reporter for the metro desk of the paper. But it sits in my mind today as the moment when I was, if not living the life of kings, then at least among the princes of my city.

I'll never have. Mom, this water is not colored, he wails as the water bubbles up, a line that makes the other passengers erupt in laughter. [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. But it's the editor who returns the call. For me, the religion was in the chase, the pursuit of accumulated fact and quote, the rush to deadline, and the arrogance of standing up like the village griot at the campfire and running down a story that hadn't yet been heard. 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. This much I knew. 2. The Wire commenced publication on May 11, 2015, and is run by the Foundation for Independent Journalism (FIJ), a not-for-profit company incorporated on September 16, 2015 under Section 8 of the Companies Act. Options: I had been a busboy. Your piece took a bad bite there, Gus Haynes tells a young reporter in one episode. The communications unit has no record of ambo calls for service going back more than a few weeks, but did the billing unit, by chance, keep records for longer? 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. Venu, Sidharth Bhatia and Siddharth Varadarajan. 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. Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. "Who the hell's going to read the second paragraph?" That came from an old court case, a file Zorzi dug from the courthouse basement. 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. After getting his permission, Fletcher publishes an article about Bubbles. Zorzi is beside me, checking his notes. If the newspaper cares about something in December, it cares nothing about it in January; the prize cycle follows the calendar year. When the first buyout offer was finally on the table -- a year's salary to anyone who left the Sun voluntarily -- I interviewed with the Washington Post and was offered a job on their metro desk's investigative unit. I have no way of knowing that for all of its claims to renewed greatness, The Sun will glean three Pulitzers in twelve years, as compared to, uh, three Pulitzers awarded to The Sun and its yet-to-be-shut-down evening edition during the twelve years prior -- a scorecard that matters only to a handful of rsums and means nothing to the thousands of readers soon asked to decide whether they need a newspaper that covers less of their world. -- Anticipate readers prospective social and search needs sparked by an exclusive by The Wire or a news event 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. Fresh faces with great reps and rsums -- John Carroll from Lexington, a Sun veteran, and Bill Marimow from Philadelphia. A general assignments reporter at the Sun who writes a character piece on Bubbles. For this we need a teammate with experience in journalism and managing social media accounts. [6] In the David Simon-written Homicide: Life On The Street episode "Wu's On First", Thomas J. McCarthy played a Baltimore Sun editor who has come from Philadelphia obsessed with winning Pulitzers, not unlike Whiting or Klebanow. He gives me the name. ", "Yeah," he nods, ready for it. I had managed to declare that oral sex was no longer a crime in Maryland. This role will work weekends and evenings and is location agnostic. For that alone, I can have no regrets.

We may earn a commission from these links. [8] Phelps is a smoker and often spends time on the loading dock with his colleagues Gus Haynes, Roger Twigg and Jeff Price.

He'd worked with me on the college paper, then at The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Washington Post. "I know she was in the hospital. His next directing project is a film called Chinese Wall, about the politics of oil in Nigeria. On a given day, I learn something that you didn't know and then, my authority drawn only from scrawl on pages of a pocket notebook, I write it up clean so the rest of you can get your hands filthy with ink, reading my righteous shit. She gives a small sound, buries her face in a pillow. The Sun storyline is largely used as a vehicle for David Simon to reflect on journalism, contrasting his own no-nonsense, context-rich style in the form of Gus Haynes with the more essay-like, narrow-focused journalism of the Sun's owners. It's about a couple of homicide detectives -- smart, competent players -- who are working a last week before taking retirement. I was in the family, he said. Phelps is played by actor Thomas J. McCarthy.

Many of them would be legitimate and some would be manufactured, and, yes, there is stuff in my yellowed clip book that creeps into those categories. [1], She is named after real-life former Baltimore Sun editor Rebecca Corbett. The divide between new hires who embrace the prize culture and the old guard, many of whom find it a little shameful, will be exacerbated. So on a hunch, my plainclothesman runs the alias, and we come up with a minor arrest eight years back on Greenmount Avenue and a request for a gun permit to work a security job. Television would be the new tabloids, but newspapers would hire more and better writers and transform themselves into the new magazines. ", "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.". ", "It's the third time you've retracted one of this guy's stories. "I don't want to go up there cold," I say. 3. It will be fast, I tell myself. [7], Thomas Klebanow is the paper's managing editor and is responsible for the day-to-day running of the paper.

Hes the bookend of the show, in terms of directing. Except it hadn't happened. I got that much by convincing a plainclothesman to sign into the system and do a search for me. He is roped into the fake serial killer story, and ends up winning a Pulitzer while his more scrupulous colleagues are demoted. Too many people write the top of the story and then have nowhere to go. And good things come to the patient and faithful, to those who sit and wait. Four years later, I am in an editing suite in New York, working on an HBO miniseries. Sidharth Bhatia Philipose is a senior and highly regarded journalist with decades of experience as a reporter and editor at various newspapers, including, most recently, the Indian Express. Founding Editors of The Wire. Not corrections -- I'm talking about the very premise of the story having to be retracted. as an alias, pretending to be someone else at his sentencing on a gun charge. Sure enough, he's pulling on the screen door, using his key. "John, there's nothing honest about it.

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. 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. It didn't. At the four o'clock meeting in the conference room, there is revelry -- at my expense no doubt. If I needed mayoral quotes, I had Banisky, who owned City Hall. And it will not be the deadwood; those taking the buyouts or simply leaving outright will be the ones with options: Struck, Alvarez, Robinson, Zorzi, Thompson, Wooton, Lippman, among far too many others -- the departures will be the veteran voices of a good newsroom. [11] He often has to correct the mistakes of younger reporters like Alma Gutierrez. 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. Listening to my excuses, Phelps had been short and blunt: "Write the correction and call it in to rewrite.". "It was trying too hard not to be a newspaper article. That part of the story is set at The Baltimore Sun, and it has generated plenty of ink about the strained relationship between creator David Simon and The Sun, where he worked as a reporter for 13 years. His father, an African-American, grew up tagging along with his mother as she cleaned homes on the Main Line outside Philadelphia. And when the Chicago Tribune Company buys Times Mirror and more buyouts follow, the tipping point will be reached. . 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.

You ever notice how mothers of 4 are always catching hell? All that remained was a Bushido-like end to it, a slow, ceremonial evisceration on the newsroom floor. Clark Johnson plays a Baltimore newspaperman on The Wire this season. If you had to get bought, everyone says, Times Mirror was the way to go. Advertisings down. Based on the few new episodes he had seen, Mr. Franklin was less keen on how The Wire depicted Baltimore and the newspaper business and dismissed a coming story about a fabricating journalist as a clich. Phelps is particularly displeased to be beaten to a story by the Daily Record. This means relying principally on contributions from readers and concerned citizens who have no interest other than to sustain a space for quality journalism. Another journalist character named Scott Templeton is played by a different Tom McCarthy. 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. Rebecca Corbett gets it. But if you spiked it and you're telling me that kind of journalism has no place at The Sun, then I guess I have no place at The Sun.". No, it won't be personal when The Sun closes its evening edition and combines staffs, making it a one-newspaper town. ", He says nothing to that, so I press him: "That's some of my best work, John. ", He was polite: "Let us know if you change your mind.". I don't yet see it as a zero-sum game in which a serious newspaper would cover less and less of its city -- eliminating such fundamental responsibilities as a poverty beat, a labor beat, a courthouse beat in a city where rust-belt unemployment and crime devour whole neighborhoods -- and favor instead a handful of special select projects designed to catch the admiring gaze of a prize committee. And so this was journalism. The first book, Homicide, had done well and been made into a television show. I have a story in The Baltimore Sun tomorrow. And for an adolescent growing up in the mid-1970s, it appeared exactly that. [6], He is named after Jay Spry, the rewrite man during David Simon's tenure at the Baltimore Sun. The aim is to build a platform that represents digital news media.. If you prefer cheques, please make yours payable to the Foundation for Independent Journalism and mail it to: Manager On the surface hes a laid-back, casual kind of guy, she said. I tell him that he's asked me for a general sense of what was being said in his newsroom and I had provided such. [20] Fletcher may be based on former Baltimore Sun reporter Michael A. Fletcher, now at The Undefeated. Klebanow handles the day-to-day running of the paper and the handling of cutbacks from the paper's owners. Scott is promoted and receives a Pulitzer Price for his "investigative reporting", and Gus is demoted. This means you will grow our presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, chat apps and emerging platforms. A scavenger hunt -- from A to B to Z on a patchwork of known facts and guesses. Her mandate will be to examine and, where appropriate, investigate complaints and concerns that readers may have about its coverage. Fuck it, I call the publisher and leave a message.

For much of Simon's tenure, the Sun was run by the Times-Mirror Company out of Los Angeles. Twitter: @TheWireScience, URL: https://livewire.thewire.in/ It's just time. Timothy A. Franklin, editor of the real Baltimore Sun, said he found Mr. Johnson impressive as the city editor. Like the black guy rolling down the street -- age, height, and weight to match the police-computer readout. At the very edge of being rendered irrelevant by the arrival of the Internet -- at the precise moment when their very product would be threatened by technology -- newspapers will not be intent on increasing and deepening their coverage of their cities, their nation, the world. TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Instead, I returned to the newsroom and, employing everything I'd learned about crime, violence, and nonfiction narrative from the book project, managed to become a better reporter. And even after the first buyouts, there was still a lot of talent in the newsroom, a reservoir of beat knowledge and institutional memory and ethical ballast. he asks again. If you are an Indian citizen and wish to make a donation to The Wire please click here. And then the next day, maybe, doing it again. It leads to shit like this. . The permit request gives us this Baylis address. My mom set up relief programs in third world countries, Mr. Johnson said. He'd killed a guy, carjacked and abducted a couple others -- a salesman, a Hopkins physician, taxpayers, white people. However, like most of the institutions of The Wire, it has fallen on hard times of late, losing money at a prodigious rate and suffering from a staff brain drain, as ambitious reporters use it as a springboard for careers with the New York Times or Washington Post. Most all of America's newspapers were going to improve, except maybe for those afternoon editions already being butchered on the altar of television news. ", "Well," he says, "one bad hire out of twenty-five is a pretty good record, don't you think?". [16] Zorzi often smokes with his colleagues Phelps, Twigg, Haynes and Price. 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. 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. Never mind the clouds on the horizon. "We got the mother," I tell Rebecca minutes later, doing my best to make it sound inevitable. 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. And yes, there's talk of some buyouts, but the rumors were talking about no more than twenty or thirty positions across the newsroom. And yet, the business model that underpins most Indian news media seldom allows editors the freedom they need. Now you pick a target and, to the exclusion of all complexity, you hammer on that target, story after story. my girlfriend asked. And I was still about forty credits short of an academic degree.

Ms. Swarna Rajagopalan, founder and director for the Prajnya Trust To this day, I can -- if I suffer to think on it -- stand apart from the moment, watching as I try to slip my own skin, to disappear myself. Price is quick to explore the story further and Haynes still gives Price full credit for finding the story. He checks with the patrolmen working the neighborhood where she's last seen. Mr. Johnsons mother came from a wealthy white family and grew up on Park Avenue.

There are quotes that no one ever said. The article was favorably received by both Haynes and Bubbles. Seems he was going to be sentenced to community service in Upper Marlboro. Film is the only language I speak, he said, and I have been lucky to be involved in some great stories. 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. Shit, I am in that newsroom looking like the college kid I am, a fifth-year senior anyway, surrounded by the battle-hardened professionals of a delicate, precise craft. 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. Or Did He? Haynes is played by Clark Johnson. In addition, The Wire publishes The Wire Science and LiveWire as standalone digital publications. He has covered the beat since before Tommy Carcetti became Mayor and was once leaked a story about police department funding by Carcetti. I knew every role intimately. He also directed the series finale of The Shield, scheduled to be broadcast on FX sometime this spring. As a publication, The Wire will be firmly committed to the public interest and democratic values. Nina Noble, the executive producer of The Wire, said: Theres an incredible poetry in Clark directing the last episode. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/TheWireBaltimoreSun. [6] Klebanow is based on former Baltimore Sun managing editor Bill Marimow, whom series creator David Simon despises. [6][10], He is named after real-life former Baltimore Sun editor Steve Luxenberg. -- 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. 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. I really hope people who havent tapped into the show will tap into it, he said. 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. I laughed until I hurt and left the theater oversold. 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. That week -- my first as a Baltimore Sun stringer -- I had done something remarkable. Dontay Carter pretended to be you in court some years back, using your name and D.O.B. He also directed the last episode of the series, a fitting bit of closure after directing its first episode in 2002. It was bittersweet, Mr. Johnson said of directing that last show. To most, the staffing reductions of the 1990s will seem inevitable, almost sensible given the loss of The Evening Sun. I am a free agent at that point, clear of any newsroom politics or careerist worries. The veterans are waiting to see." So journalism was out. Clark Johnson plays a newspaper editor on HBO's "The Wire. Roger Twigg is a veteran police reporter for the City Desk. To contribute an article to The Wire or enquire about syndication, please write to. The name itself? Paress' spouse, Lawrence Gilliard, Jr., portrayed D'Angelo Barksdale in the first two seasons of the show. If you can source something to The Sun's reporting -- to documents obtained by The Sun or The Sun has learned -- it reads better than to simply cite the facts, even if they are from the public record. They hired me to fill in for a reporter on leave, and when that reporter returned, Luxenberg gave me a permanent position. I rise and actually drop my eyes. When they come for Littwin -- our best columnist -- it will involve their anger at a Guild bulletin written during contract negotiations. Dontay said so.". .

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. In Baltimore. See what's up.". Then I go to see Rebecca, who is editing one of my last stories. There were stories to be written that would argue for social change, stories that might challenge the institutional status quo, stories that might win prizes. 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. Because of cuts by its owner, the fictional Suns city editor and his staff are buffeted by buyouts, closed foreign bureaus and less space for news, all of which have afflicted the real Sun and many other newspapers around the country. In this advance look at an essay from Esquire's March issue, Simon makes his case. While researching a feature on the homeless, Fletcher gets to know Bubbles, spending a considerable amount of time with him over a span of a few weeks,[18] In the meantime, we make a simple appeal: read us, share and tweet our content, and send us your feedback. Mr. Johnsons story illustrating a bent toward great expectations that has come in handy in the elbows-out world of show business was told recently as he sipped coffee in Doma, a cafe in Greenwich Village. He also directed Boycott, the widely lauded 2001 film on HBO about the life of the Rev. Achieving true diversity and inclusion is the right thing to do. He is pressured by cuts to staff and funding. I knew what he said about newspapering, what he claimed for the profession. Haynes dispatched Twigg to report on a rowhouse fire that Haynes spots from the Newsroom window. Would they be signing on in Baltimore if the future here is anything but bright? In the less fevered lobes of my brain, it was as pure as that. Not any of it.

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.

. For a lot of us itll define our careers.. CLARK JOHNSON, who plays a crusading newspaper editor in the fifth and last season of The Wire, beginning Sunday night on HBO, likes telling autobiographical stories. Her cursor rolls down the screen and she highlights a quote from one: "My friends are all gone now and the place doesn't seem the same to me. Mr. Simon has made no secret of his unhappiness with The Sun, which has gone through two changes of ownership in the last eight years. "What are you going to do?" But when I think back on what I love about newspapers, I think of sitting in that car, waiting with Bill Zorzi. A young reporter who falsifies his stories. Former Supreme Court judge Justice Madan Lokur And in covering a rape trial involving a student victim, I misinterpreted an appellate decision and single-handedly liberated the blowjob from the shackles of Old Line State tyranny. [21] Twigg has heard enough tall tales to see a newspaperman's joke coming long before the punchline and his humble attitude and wealth of police department sources often enable him to get the truth on a story.[21]. [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. And after rushing across town and interviewing the stepmother, we learn more about the life of a violent young man but that, no, she has no idea where Dontay had been staying or where his birth mother can be found. You hired them. URL: thewire.in I Will Punish Your Friend for Your Failure. He leaves and I stand there for a long moment, looking around the newsroom: Phelps at the state desk, twisting that god-awful mustache, editing. . As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. No longer would the journalism be rooted in the organic work of reporters sent into the streets to learn new things and then pull smart, balanced stories through the keyhole. Emerging from childhood, I had seen Halberstam and Hersh take apart the fraudulent premises and practices of Vietnam, then followed daily as my hometown paper brought down Nixon for stealing an election and lying about it. Never mind that the paper was sold by the Abell family after a century and a half of local ownership. He cites Mario Puzo's Godfather, the passage where Tom tells Michael that it's business, it's not personal.

It will be fast and then I can go.

A young Hispanic reporter who has the bad luck to come onto The Baltimore Sun as it is downsizing. 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. Why? I like the yin-yang of a cops life, where hes part fascist and part saint, he said.



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