Double Down said:
Baltimoreguy said:
Q. What did you know about Baltimore when you took the job?
A. I had never been here. I knew a bit about the rich sports history and the sports teams. It's been an education from the moment I stepped foot in town, and it's continuing today. I have books about the city's history and the sports history and I have a job where you go out and talk to people every day - the best way to learn.
I think it's a great idea to give a column to someone young. But I think it's a big mistake to give a column to someone lacking the foundation of knowledge that's a prerequisite for the creation of an informed opinion. And I think Maese has struggled in Baltimore when writing about the local sports scene -- he simply doesn't have the knowledge to write credibly about anything that happened here before he arrived two years ago.
Maese says he was in the Albuquerque newsroom from the age of 14. I have no doubt he could write unbelievably good columns about Albuquerque. I wish The Sun had been able to find someone young who possesses the same kind of knowledge about Baltimore that Maese must have about his hometown.
I think, and I don't mean this as a personal shot at you BmoreGuy, that Baltimore people need to get past the idea that no one can write about their city unless they grew up there. Newspapers don't have John Steadmans anymore. Either a columnist is able to understand a city's history and write credibly about it, or he (or she) isn't. Geography, in the end, has very little to do with it. No one in Portland says that John Canzano can't understand the Blazers because he's not from Portland. Or that Mitch Albom doesn't "get" Detroit because he grew up in New Jersey and went to Princeton instead of Michigan State. Or that Selena Roberts has no credibility writing about the Yankees, Knicks, Giants, Mets and Jets because she was born in Florida and went to college at Auburn. But people in Baltimore whine about this all the time. It is, in my opinion, a prime example of how provincial and insecure the city is. If Maese doesn't connect with his audience, that's an opinion and perhaps a fair one. But it's silly to say "well, it's because he's not one of us."
DD,
I completely understand what you're saying, and I agree that Baltimore is amazingly parochial. But my point was more that for a columnist to be effective, he or she must first be perceived as (and be) a credible expert. If the columnist lacks expert knowledge, then who cares what his or her opinion is?
Traditionally, writers spend long years on the beat before being adjudged expert enough to merit a column. In Baltimore, Ken Rosenthal eventually became a very popular columnist because his years on the beat served as proof that he had the requisite knowledge to make his opinion meaningful. I dont think thats the only way a columnist can be developed.
I like The Suns embrace of younger writers on major beats. And I like the idea of giving a column to someone whos not an older white guy jaded by two decades on a beat (I still like the occasional Sports Guy column particularly when he sticks to the areas where hes proven himself an expert, like all the funny and goofy **** you see when you watch televised sports for 10 straight hours on a Sunday). If there were some 25-year-old who knows Baltimore sports the way Simmons knows Boston, I would love to read his column.
But to give a column to someone who has neither ever set foot in the city before, nor worked to amass a body of professional expertise upon which to draw, is in my opinion a mistake. Simply put, it's hard to care much what Maese says about the Orioles when he knows almost nothing about the team and his status as a credible authority on major league baseball hasn't been established.
And I dont think this is just a Baltimore issue. Are you telling me people in the cosmopolitan hub of Boston would enthusiastically welcome a columnist who had never once set foot in the city before the day he started writing for The Globe?
