MICA's Brown Center was a great venue for TEDx MidAtlantic

I've driven past, or under it nearly a hundred times, but today was the first time I had the opportunity to spend time inside The Brown Center, the glass-curtained building with the thrusting overhang that opened on the MICA campus a few years back.

All I can say is: Wow. Modern spaces can often be cold and odd and, while The Brown Center is certainly quirky, it fits in nicely on MICA's semi-urban campus, reflecting from the outside and providing amazing vistas from the inside.

[caption id="attachment_1103" align="alignnone" width="516" caption="The building sometimes appears mirrored, sometimes clear."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1104" align="alignnone" width="516" caption="Clouds and church reflected in the glass wall."][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_1105" align="alignnone" width="516" caption="The view out, from upstairs."][/caption]

Tom Stoppard on writing, via Scott Simon at today's TEDx MidAtlantic

It had been years since I'd thought of this beautiful passage about writing until I heard Scott Simon quote it this morning at TEDx MidAtlantic. It comes from the amazing play The Real Thing, by Tom Stoppard:

"Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead."

You can see Scott Simon's magnificent presentation here:



(No direct link, sorry. Select his talk from the scrolling list on the left)

Brit makes Baltimore reporters look like gits

Healthy skepticism -- in blogging and in Big Iron reporting for a metro daily -- is a necessary tool to have at all times.

Take yesterday's YouTube embed, allegedly from Baltimore's tourism office, suggesting that Baltimore, the city, is safer than you'd think from watching The Wire on television.

My initial reaction was shock at the thought that someone in Visit Baltimore could make such a colossal mistake in judgment to sell the city on the stacked-up backs of the dead. But after a few minutes, and a second watching, my BS meter pegged. Nobody could possibly be that clueless, even in Baltimore.

Apparently, this makes me more skeptical than several reporters in town. The City Paper took the bait. And so did Peter Hermann of The Sun, who got snared by another piece of the same hoax, a fake Mayor's site.

It was all a hoax by british blogger Alex Hilton. Peter Hermann, to his everlasting credit, corrected his original and wrote at length about what happened.

I hate to say it but this all happened simply because of a Reporting 101 failure: neither reporter bothered to verify it.

When I saw the YouTube video yesterday morning, my second action (after sputtering an some unprintables) was to DM both the Visit Baltimore office and the person who manages their Twitter account and ask whether they had actually created the video. I asked at 8:06 a.m. and had my emphatic answers -- No! -- a half-hour later.

I was able then to change my blog entry  from "this can't possibly be real, right?" to a note that it was, in fact, a hoax.

The old newsroom saying was "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

If she says it on YouTube or elsewhere on the internet, that goes double.

Baltimore: Not quite as lethal as you think

This is a joke, right? Because, if not, the blowback and the apologies will certainly be entertaining to watch.

Update: It's definitely not the work of Visit Baltimore, the city's tourism board, despite what the snookered City Paper says.

Best in Baltimore

I don't work there anymore, but I put a quarter of my life into it, so this makes me smile:

baltimoresun.com was just named Best Baltimore-Related Web Site by The Baltimore City Paper.

Poke around Baltimoresun.com for an hour and you'll find the mark of the city, its moods twisting like so many threads of anonymous rants. You'll find good web-only content, such as the documentary videos that sometimes accompany stories, and a blog lineup that doesn't cast too wide a net.

To me, this is better than a nod from NAA or ONA or E&P or any other navel-gazing journo-award, because cp.com is a whole lot more representative of Baltimore and its readers.

Congratulations to the team at baltimoresun.com.