June 24, 2015

Shout-Out to the Baltimore Sun, Which Just Bought Charleston’s Newspaper a Stack of Pizzas


This is a nice story. Last week, we wrote about the heroic efforts of Charleston’s main daily newspaper, the Post and Courier, and their dogged, round-the-clock coverage of the massacre at the Emanuel AME church.

We noted that city newsrooms have been leading breaking coverage during big, national news stories, from Boston to Ferguson, Baltimore to Charleston. In April, the Boston Globe sent lunch to the Baltimore Sun’s newsroom. It was their way of paying forward another act of newsroom generosity when in April 2013, the Chicago Tribune bought the Globe pizzas during the bombing coverage. “We can’t buy you lost sleep, so at least let us pick up lunch,” the Tribune wrote in a letter at the time.

Now, the Baltimore Sun‘s Executive Editor Trif Alatzas has sent a about a dozen pizzas from D’Allesandro’s in Charleston to the Post and Courier newsroom, as a way to pay it forward again:

I asked Mitch Pugh, the Post and Courier news boss, were the pizzas “hot and tasty?”

“They chose wisely,” he said.
 

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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