The City That Reads

The Baltimore Sun is the "illustrious" newspaper from my hometown. Baltimore has taken on the self proclaimed nickname of "The City That Reads." From these two statements, one would assume that the Baltimore Sun has been holding readership in this age of floundering print media. This would be a false assumption.
As of April 2009, readership was down almost ten percent from the previous year. The Sun hasn't released any more recent statistics because, one can only assume, they are not getting any better. As someone from Baltimore, I can safely say that I do not lament my parents decision to cancel our subscription. When my father called the hotline to cancel, he was essentially begged to downgrade to a weekend-only subscription for a fraction of the price. The Sun is not informative. Half of the daily paper is comics and sports.
This brings us to the question of whether or not Baltimore can any longer justify being called The City That Reads. It seems like a more fitting slogan is the ever-popular "City That Reeds" in recognition of the Baltimore Raven's Pro-Bowl Safety, Ed Reed.
One thing that I know is that The Sun has been trying to put an emphasis on its Web site.,pparently looking to become the City That Browses. Because of this I took some time to browse through the site and I was not impressed. My last post was all about the world of blogging. I decided to take an in depth look at The Sun's blog page. Once again, I was not impressed. The majority of the posts are extremely short and uninformative. It's more like an opinion blog than a professional news site. A few of the posts that were linked on the Web site were fantastic and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them, but the vast majority were an extreme letdown.
I love Baltimore with all my heart. I have been a devoted reader of The Sun since entering high school. I am afraid however, that Baltimore is no longer the City That Reads, and it's going to take much more effort to turn it into the City That Browses. For now, let's stick with the City That Reeds.

Posted by Jordan Powell