Regarding our latest City Hall story, the above document shows that TeleCommunication Systems submitted the highest bid for staffing city agencies with IT personnel – fully $4.4 million higher than ICS Nett. So how did the Bureau of Purchases end up recommending TeleCom to the Board of Estimates yesterday? (Well, it recommended the Hanover-based company [...]
“Like to confirm or squelch a rumor?” we asked Ian Brennan, a spokesman for mayors Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Sheila Dixon, by email yesterday. Amid reporting by The Brew that Brennan is moving to a $92,000-a-year job as the Fire Department’s PIO – and that he is a civilian unlike his predecessor PIOs – the Internet [...]
We Brew-ers have been gradually getting our act together to finally give our Kickstarter contributors their Thank You mugs, bumper stickers and other rewards. On Saturday we knocked out one more of those formal thank yous in a borrowed conference room downtown. It was a “Baltimore Brew Staff Meeting.” We mostly have lower-case “staff meetings,” [...]
Apologies, readers, if The Brew has been running on half-speed lately, but I’ve been in Central Jersey helping my Dad cope with Sandy and, much worse for him, the subsequent snowy Nor’easter. Since big nasty storms are, sadly, the new normal for our planet and since the Baltimore area escaped a clobbering this time only [...]
Just a note to tip Brew readers about an upcoming event by one of our sponsors, The Ivy Bookshop. A representative from Random House publishers will be at the store showcasing their new books and offering pre-release copies of many of them. Among the two dozen books they’re promoting: • Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, [...]
______________________________________________________________ Typically, Baltimore Brewreaders are attracted like flies to honey by our latest breaking online news about suspicious city spending or shady political maneuvers. So how would it go over, we wondered, when we trotted out a lengthy discussion of some books which – based on their publication dates in 2002, 2010 and 1961 – [...]
In response to bizarre allegations being circulated on the Friends of The Senator Theatre Facebook page, The Brew wants readers to know: We are not funded directly or indirectly by any individual or outside group. Financially we rely on reader contributions, limited ad revenues and our own resources. We are guided by what the editors [...]
Well, okay, things didn’t actually get physical Saturday at the Baltimore Book Festival’s giant public Scrabble game. But there was some serious head-to-head competition, the heads on both sides deeply furrowed with thought, the pumped-up crowd cheering and jeering, the 20-plus-point words flying. You’d think that, since worrying about words is my average day-at-the-office, I [...]
___________________________________________________ Up here at Brew HQ, it’s not unusual to get an urgent call from senior reporter Mark Reutter – sometimes dialed from a City Hall men’s room – reporting sotto voce on the latest doings by city pols or officials. But what he told me they did yesterday was beyond outrageous. They wrote up [...]
_____________________________________________ By Laura Flynn Biking, it seems, is the Brew thing-to-do. My first article I wrote for them as a new intern was about a bike trip and movie screening hosted by the American Visionary Arts Museum, three cycling groups and a bike shop. Brew reporter Mark Reutter, my go-to guy for insight about Baltimore, [...]
A daily news website that gets behind development deals, tracks campaign cash, features outsider artists and offers gazpacho recipes with equal verve. We’ve become a municipal must-read.
Since former Washington Post reporter Fern Shen launched the Brew a few years ago, the site has won plaudits from publications ranging from the Baltimore City Paper, which named it the best local on-line news site three years in a row, to the New York Times, which calls it “a reason for cheer.”
In “Smalltimore,” everybody knows everybody, says Mayor Rawlings-Blake. But the mayor’s friendship with Lisa Harris Jones goes back a long way – and the lobbyist’s rise to wealth and prominence in Baltimore and Annapolis is anything but conventional.