Fly like an 'Iggle'

The Dundalk Eagle is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week. 

This milestone and subsequent anniversaries will always have a connection to my life and career in journalism.

After working a largely unfulfilling government job for too many years of my relative youth, I threw caution to the wind and in April 1999, applied for a reporter position at the Eagle.

A second interview resulted in a job offer and I started at the paper on May 5. My first issue - that of May 13, 1999 - celebrated the "Iggle's" 30th anniversary and paid homage both to the vision and perseverance of founder Kimbel Oelke and the storied history, people, organizations and events of Greater Dundalk.

I had two bylines in the paper that week as the result of two evening assignments on my first day. I first covered an event at the North Point Library and then headed to a fundraiser at Sparrows Point Middle School.

My more senior reporter colleagues wrote much of the anniversary coverage that they had been working on for several weeks.

As a result of that career change, I began paying closer attention to local media coverage and I read the work of other reporters as on-the-job training. I learned to craft better leads, how to build stories and what questions to ask, all by reading the work of others.

Much has changed in those 20 years, in terms of the creation and delivery of news content, even if many of the messages remain the same. The Columbine High School shootings were still a raw, painful current event in May 1999, and 20 years later, it seems as though we read about a domestic mass shooting at least weekly.

Image courtesy of Dundalk Eagle Facebook page

The art of journalism has changed, thanks to the evolution of increasingly powerful and speedy computers, smart phones and other devices, to say nothing of digital cameras.

When I first started at the Eagle, we still shot with film cameras. I'd take my trusty Pentax K 1000 to an event, shoot photos, do my interviews and, on my way back to the North Center Place office, drop the film at Rite Aid's hour processing desk. It was always disappointing to discover that, in each of 10 images, at least one person always had closed eyes.

I worked full time for the Eagle as a reporter, columnist and associate editor until late 2007 and was fortunate to continue writing the Talk of the Town column as a freelancer through 2008.

Over those years, I had the privilege of sitting in living rooms, classrooms and board rooms, covering events and meetings in every nook and cranny in Turner Station, Dundalk, Edgemere and Fort Howard. From parades and festivals to community meetings and political events and elections, the Eagle was there.

During my Eagle tenure, I was honored to win more writing and photography awards than I can remember from state, regional and national journalism organizations. Those awards as judged by my professional peers allowed me to slowly drop my feelings of not being a "real journalist," having been a recreation and parks supervisor for the first half of my working life.

I grew accustomed to people saying the Eagle covered their lives from cradle to grave. For many residents, their scrapbooks started with a clipping of a birth announcement and continued with kindergarten graduation photos, Little League team action, dance recital recaps, news of academic and athletic awards, high school and college graduations, job promotions, engagement and wedding announcements, followed by the birth announcements of their own children and obituaries for their parents. All published by the loyal local newspaper.

I have special memories of a few memorable people I was honored to meet through my Eagle travels.

I "discovered "  now world-famous, highly decorated Paralympic swimmer Jessica Long. The Middle River resident was a plucky 11-year-old when I met her. The double, below-the-knee amputee was a member of the Dundalk-Eastfield Swim Club, a local recreation council team that practiced at CCBC Dundalk. She competed against normally abled swimmers, and while she never won races, she consistently honed her technique and lowered her race times.

It didn't take the U.S. Olympic Committee's Paralympic division long to notice her. As a 12-year-old, she was the youngest member of the Paralympic team to go to Athens in 2004. While the experts told her to set realistic goals and use the meet as a learning experience, she came home from Greece with three gold medals tucked carefully in her suitcase.

She has since competed in the Paralympics in Beijing, London and Rio de Janiero and is training for 2020's gathering in Tokyo. She has traveled the world, made lifelong friends and met presidents at the White House as a result of her Paralympic experience.

I also spent many column inches covering a local community college chancellor who was an unpopular leader who was perceived as being too authoritarian and intimidated folks who were "not on his train." I was celebrated by the community when he "resigned."

While Jessica's story is more high profile than most, it is symbolic of the tens of thousands of stories the Eagle has shared with the community in its 50 glorious years. From quirky hobbies to volunteerism, from unique jobs to community activism, everyone has a story and community journalism specializes in telling the stories that won't end up in a major metropolitan daily.

The creation of the Eagle is itself a story of passion, dedication and perhaps a bit of temporary insanity.

As shared by Oelke family members, Mr. Oelke had grown increasingly frustrated by a local paper that was giving a smaller and smaller voice to Dundalk as it spread out to cover other parts of Baltimore County. The legend holds that, after mulling his options, Mr. Oelke asked for his beloved wife Mary's blessing to essentially sink their life savings in a new venture to be known as the Dundalk Eagle.

To say it was a big risk for the couple, who would eventually have 11 children, is an understatement.

But obviously the experiment took, with the paper enjoying a high circulation rate and successful advertising sales through the salad years of journalism.

The Eagle was owned by Oelke's heirs until 2015, when it was sold to an out-of-state publishing group with newspapers in many different states.

Much has been said over at least the past 10 years about the perceived changes in Eagle coverage. Because of a cruel economy, the pages are physically smaller and there are fewer of them in each issue. (I have memories of staff struggling to fill 56- and 64-page issues). 

There are fewer writers now on staff (during my tenure, the paper boasted four full-time reporters, a photographer, an editor and an editorial assistant/community announcement writer). Seven full-time editorial staff members for a community weekly! Unheard of today.

Fewer writers naturally means fewer events can be covered and fewer invitations are accepted. A smaller page count means less room to tell stories.

But let me tell you this, as the Eagle celebrates this significant milestone. No matter who owns the paper, no matter how few pages each issue contains, no matter how many stories don't get told, it is important to support it. 

Subscribe to the print edition. If you're an environmentalist and don't want the physical paper, subscribe to the online version. The Eagle has a fairly user-friendly website, which also offers an electronic version, page for page, of each week's paper.

Because here's the deal. This country is losing too many papers, which translates to too many communities losing their media voices. In addition to never learning about a resident's collection of owls, the loss of papers and journalists snuffs out the light needed to expose crime and corruption.

We are living through a good example of the results of competent, old-fashioned, shoe-leather investigative reporting.

The discovery of Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh's perceived unsavory transactions with the University of Maryland Medical System is the result of Baltimore Sun reporters digging through UMMS Board of Directors records.

Their reporting uncovered the financial trail involving the purchase of books authored by Pugh, and shined a light on the conflict of interest involved.

Without reporting like that, corruption will not get uncovered. I would dare say that corruption would increase without the threat of reporters digging deep into obscure, boring reports.

While every other news outlet picked up on the work of the Sun reporters, it's important to acknowledge that the Sun bankrolled those reporters and provided them with paychecks while allowing them the needed time to dig out that story. 

I hear less informed folks say that journalism will never go away, and then they point to bloggers, YouTubers and Instagrammers as examples to support their argument.

I disagree. I don't know a single blogger or vlogger putting in 40 hours a week performing real, credible, researched and vetted journalism. Most, if not all, of those folks have full-time jobs elsewhere and are hobbyists when it comes to writing. Many are deliberately inflammatory and write essays or produce videos designed to stir up crap, pit groups against one another and spread false information.

No community paper can do it all. There will always be folks who are disappointed that the editor didn't buy their story pitch; that a photo didn't get published as quickly as they wanted; or that a story missed the mark.

But any community paper is better than no community paper. Support the Dundalk Eagle (or whatever your local paper is) while it's still here to support.

I personally know all too well the pain of a news outlet closing. I'm involuntarily retired because of the East County Times' demise. And I know the loss suffered by the community, which lost a well-written, objective, accurate voice for a diverse community.

Fifty years for any mom-and-pop business to thrive and survive is an accomplishment of which to be proud. 

For a plucky, salt-of-the-earth community weekly to survive that long, to say nothing of weathering the past 15 cruel years, says the product is needed and wanted.

Local journalism might be on life support, but each of you has the opportunity to serve as an IV bag. Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe.

Support the patient while it's sick and can still recover. If the funeral's being planned, it's too late.

Congratulations to the Eagle's current and former owners and staff members. I'm proud to have played a small role in the history of such a storied and respected institution, and wish it at least 50 more years.