What’s in Bay Weekly for You This Week?
Not so much as you’d find in the great city newspapers of 50 years ago, when editor Rob Warden called the paper he loved, the Chicago Daily News, “a daily novel of the life of the city.”
Bay Weekly is more like a weekly sketchbook of the life of Chesapeake Country.
As in any sketchbook — novel or newspaper for that matter — what you get is what caught the editor’s attention. We editors have big ears and eyes, compounded into arthropod-like attention by the awareness of all our staffers. Because of the word news in our name, what we’ll bring you to read in our pages will have to do with what’s happening out in the real world — rather than the made-up worlds of fiction or the interior worlds of poetry.
Because we’ve got a specialized mission, there are subjects you won’t find in Bay Weekly. We write mostly about what people do rather than what they say, so you won’t find lots of bloviating in our pages.
Crime, violence and the whole host of ways we can hurt ourselves, others and the places we live aren’t our subject, either.
You hear plenty of that in other places, don’t you?
What you do find are stories of sustainable ways of life in Chesapeake Country. One of the oddities of our mission — or of our gathering — is that an issue-worth of stories turn out to have a theme. Some weeks that’s intentional. Next week, for example, is our annual Dog Days of August issue, focusing on the animals that share our space and time.
Other weeks it just happens. This is one of those weeks.
Our three feature stories all happen to be about how people find their way in life. If I were writing in the vocabulary of Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson in last night’s debate, I’d call it actualizing.
Yet each of those stories has a different story in how it came to be in the paper.
Our story on the very charitable organization HOPE For All was a first-day assignment to intern Brad Dress, who may well have the right stuff to go on to be the kind of reporter who helped write Chicago’s daily novel for the now long-dead Daily News. I knew a little about HOPE from press releases and fundraising pleas. So it’s monthly second-Saturday yard sale seemed to me a good starting point for a story about how every little thing counts in a big mission. Brad went and saw for himself. Along the way, he learned how founders Leo and Diane Zerhusen found their own way by seeing a global need and filling it locally.
A second feature, S’more Than Cookies, also started with an appeal and entry in our 8 Days a Week calendar. The Girl Scouts of Central Maryland was seeking business sponsors for its Give S’more challenge Aug. 10 at Camp Whippoorwill in Pasadena.
With a couple of mothers of Scout age kids girl and boy in our office, we’d been batting about ideas for writing about Girl Scouts — of all ages. This event became our occasion to write a story about how women — including former Annapolis mayor Ellen Moyer — have followed the path and lessons they learned in Girl Scouts. Former Girl Scout Kathy Knotts, a mother of Cub and Boy Scouts, developed that story for us.
And that’s not all. Our busy Brad also tells us about the last act of quarter-century old theatrical partnership coming to Colonial Players this weekend only in the trio of one-act plays called Generations.
We have three more shorter stories on the theme of path-finding in Honoring Gold Star Families, Tour African American History, and Annapolis Gets a New Farmers Mercado.
That’s what Bay Weekly has for you this week. I hope you find these paths worth following — for at least the length of our stories.