Front Page News

While Howard County made history this week by electing our first African American County Executive on Tuesday night, the front page of Wednesday’s Howard County Times didn’t seem to acknowledge that. Instead, the week’s cover story is about the career and retirement of longtime prosecutor Dario Broccolino. The information about Dr. Ball’s victory has been added in on the lower left corner of the front page photo.

I have read some rather blunt quotes on social media questioning the wisdom of this choice. I haven’t had time to touch base with folks and get approval to run those comments here, so I’m going to err on the side of caution and ask you to take my word for it.

A few thoughts on this:

The Howard County Times is not a daily publication. It’s a weekly, and as such it probably has a different timeline for preparing longer pieces. At what point in the week do they “put the paper to bed”, so to speak? Modern technology allows them to work like mad and slot in election results but the longer stories may not be movable pieces. When you think about it, the fact that the election results are coming in on a Tuesday night and they somehow manage to get any of them in at all by Wednesday is kind of amazing.

Why?

It’s a weekly. It’s a free weekly and they have a staff of about two and a half people who are worked like dogs until they burn out and they make a shockingly low income. I’ve heard many locals explain why they just can’t afford to pay for a subscription to the Baltimore Sun/Howard County Times and yet they somehow expect that it will keep operating like newspapers you see in the old Hollywood movies.

It just doesn’t work that way. As important as this election is to us, we are not a major market that supports an in-depth daily paper like The NY Times or the Washington Post. And so the decisions that get made about what runs, and when, are different for us. Fewer options, smaller scope. You know how I rant about supporting local journalism? This is why. (Support local journalism.)

My guess it that the folks at the Howard County Times are spending this week preparing that front page feature on Calvin Ball. My gut tells me that those pieces take longer and have to be done farther in advance.

If they don’t lead off with the County Exec upset next week you’ll see me here joining the rest of the critics.