TBM 17-20 Columbia Series Oct 2016.Indd

The October 2016 Monthly Presents… A�E�O�R OFAC�T� Columbia at50 Media in the New Town: Communications Part of Building Community; The Flier and All the Rest This is the fourth part in a series of 12 Post’s Howard Weekly. There were other There were urban TV stations, most In October 1970, after much back and monthly essays over the next year leading publications along the way, The Business of them part of the three major networks, forth, Howard Research and Development, up to Columbia’s 50th birthday celebra- Monthly among them. broadcast over the airwaves to antennas. HRD, the Rouse division managing the tion next June. But the paper that would become the And radio, the early 20th century inven- new town, announced that Time-Life had dominant news source for Columbia’s first tion, was available almost everywhere. been granted a franchise to establish ca- By Len Lazarick quarter-century was that puny little free All these systems were regulated by ble television in Columbia. But the cable “shopper” that started on a dining room the government at the federal or state level, franchises were still under local control, Tom Graham’s decision to move from table. with a complicated set of licensing. and Time-Life backed out when it balked The Howard County Times to the Colum- Some of the planners at the Rouse at provisions in the Howard County leg- bia Flier was a bit puzzling to me as I vis- Planning for Co. wanted its own radio station, but that islation. A local group won the rights in a ited him and the new planned community didn’t happen until WLMD, a Laurel sta- partnership with Warner Communications. for the first time in early 1973. Communications tion, set up a small studio in the mall in The Howard franchise was sold to Storer After 14 months, Tom was leaving Communications is one of the thinner 1979. It lasted only a couple of years. Cable, which became Comcast in 1993. the well-established Times that looked volumes in the many Green Books at the Columbia’s central location in the like a traditional newspaper for the mag- Columbia Archives that document the Baltimore-Washington corridor put it at Local Programming meticulous planning and proposals for all the edge of both these big media markets. azine-sized Columbia startup that looked Andy Barth moved to Columbia in Au- aspects of Columbia life. The available television channels were like it came out of a typewriter — because gust 1971, the week The Mall in Columbia it did. “The whole subject of communica- used up, with only slim possibilities for a It turned out to be a smart decision that tions in the planning of Columbia can only UHF TV channel and an AM radio station. See Columbia at 50, page 18 gave Tom a quarter-century of employment, be described as a mystical religious icon opportunity and influence. He was attracted which everybody revered with poignant by the enthusiasm of the new editor, Jean regularity,” wrote Wallace Hamilton, Moon. Jean says she recognized that Tom Rouse’s director of institutional planning. was better at reporting on zoning than she “‘We’ve got to think about communica- was, and she also offered a small raise. tions,’ people would say. But nobody ever “Despite that, I didn’t say yes until really did anything about it, except write I had a face-to-face with Zeke Orlinsky, long reports for longer conferences and the publisher,” Tom said. Tom’s future got more and more people into the act to wife, Mary Kay Sigaty, “was working as a share the general confusion.” bank teller at the time, and she had warned “We got intrigued with technology me that the Flier’s checks sometimes for technology’s sake and lost track of bounced. When I asked him about this, function,” Hamilton observed. Zeke said that would never be a problem Although their focus was on technol- with my paycheck, and it wasn’t.” ogy, the goal of the planners remained Maureen Kelley and I moved to Co- the same as for the village centers and lumbia a few months later, in June 1973. neighborhood gathering places — encour- Maureen, newly graduated from nursing aging community life and spirit. The early school at Boston College, where all four of planners reached out to the companies that us had met, got a job as a visiting nurse on were developing futuristic technologies her first interview. I got a job with another that would become the driving forces of newspaper in town, Columbia Life, which American communications in the final was supposedly “recapitalizing.” decades of the 20th century — cable TV Columbia Life survived for another and then the Internet. But the planners issue or two and then died without a trace. were 10, 20, even 30 years early as they I sued the publisher for pay. All I got was contemplated interactive TV loops and an office desk and chair. other forms of electronic two-way com- Other newspapers have come and gone munications. — Columbia Villager, the News Columbi- For those under 40 and those who an (an edition of the conservative Central have forgotten, it’s worth refreshing what Maryland News), The Columbia Times (an communications was like in the 1960s. edition of The Howard County Times), and There were telephones, an invention a bit later, the Columbia Forum. In the of the late 19th century, but they were all following decades, dailies would enter the what we now call “landlines,” connected local market with the Howard Sun and the by copper wires, owned and operated by a single local monopoly we called “the An array of Columbia newspapers from 1973, taken from the files of the Columbia © Copyright by Len Lazarick telephone company.” Archives. Photo by Len Lazarick Page 18 October 2016 The Business Monthly Columbia at 50 tabloid it became in 1974, growing to 64 Zeke Orlinsky and his weekly “Publisher’s certainly gave no hint of the powerhouse pages. After I became associate editor in Note.” But love it or hate it, people read it would become. from page 17 1975, I covered education, business and it. At one point, a survey found that 92% “I got pissed at something in the How- politics. In 1976, I wrote the cover story of Columbians read the paper that landed ard County Times,” recalled Orlinsky in opened, conveniently located between for its fi rst 100-page issue, a piece titled free every Thursday on their doorsteps and an interview last month from his home in Baltimore where he worked as a reporter “Banned Books” on efforts to ban some driveways. Westport, Conn. “I didn’t have a vision.” for WMAR TV (Channel 2) and The fi rst issue of theFli- his wife’s job in Silver Spring. er was indeed a fl yer — eight “At fi rst it was just conve- pages of legal paper folded nient; then we became converts” with a Merriweather Post Pa- to the Columbia vision of an in- vilion ad on the front, ads for tegrated, inclusive community, cars and tires, and a calendar of said Barth, now press secretary events. This fi rst issue on Co- to Howard County Executive lumbia’s June birthday in 1969 Allan Kittleman. was reprinted several times For two or three years, over the years as a reminder WMAR had a bureau located of how far the newspaper had in the Exhibit Center next to come. Lake Kittamaqundi staffed by When Jean Moon joined reporter Glenn Cox. the fledgling operation as a “TV was very, very com- writer two years later, free petitive then,” said Barth. He circulation had grown to 9,000, eventually spent 35 years at and there was real news in WMAR before retiring to run the Flier, but they were still for Congress in 2006. cutting and pasting the type- “Columbia was a story at that written copy on a dining room point” as the new town grew, he table. said. “We did a birthday story At the time, Orlinsky pretty much every year.” wrote: “To refl ect the growth Many Baltimore TV per- of a new city like Columbia sonalities made Columbia their is to meet new challenges. It home, recalled Barth: the late calls on a publisher to throw Al Sanders, Denise Koch, Dick away the old and tired concept Gelfman, Jeff Hager, and brief- of journalism. Journalism is ly, a young Oprah Winfrey, more than just information and among others. news. Journalism should excite Throughout the years, How- and guide a community.” ard County and Columbia have That statement was still been part of a tug of war for eye- being pointed to 20 years later balls between rival TV stations in a history of the paper given for this lucrative, high-income to new staff members. market. Moon, who had come to There were many TV sto- Columbia with her husband ries about the progressive ideas Bob for his job as an architect embodied in the Columbia con- at the Rouse Co., was totally cept, such as interfaith religious on board with the concept of centers, but “at some point it community journalism — “that stopped being new,” said Barth. we weren’t dailies” and the Yet, for all that, these were mission was to “play a role in stories done for a wider regional the community,” she recalled audience. recently. In its first 30 years, the By 1973, Moon was editor Columbia community relied on and general manager, she had the oldest of the mass media, Patuxent Publishing staff, including Columbia Flier, sometime in the 1980s in the foyer of the Flier building.

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