Minor brushes with the law sometimes dog people as they attempt to make a new life, try as they might to brush them under the rug. Frank Keegan, editor of the now-defunct Baltimore Examiner, apparently figures, if you've got it, flaunt it.
Here's how Keegan bills himself on the Web site for the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, a journalism nonprofit where he is a national editor.
"In 2006 he helped launch the Baltimore Examiner, a revolutionary free-distribution newspaper that quickly rose to more than 400,000 daily and 640,000 Sunday readers, and a Web site with more than 300,000 uniques and 1.1 million page views a month. Baltimore Police arrested Keegan in his home less than a week after the Examiner published full department payroll data on its Web site and called for overtime cost control in an editorial. The state dropped all charges a month later." (Italics mine.)
Hey, Keegan left out the part where police said he pointed a shotgun at Federal Hill neighbors enraged that his cigarette smoke was seeping into their rowhouse. How does a journalist leave out that sort of gripping detail?
At the same time, I have to admire Keegan for breathing new life into a story that seemed over in June 2007, when misdemeanor assault charges against him were dropped. Who knew police arrested Keegan because he'd published payroll data in the paper?
"[H]ey, it probably was just a coincidence, right?" Keegan wrote me. "Why don't you ask some Baltimore Police Officers what they think?"
Stop the Examiner presses!
Oh, wait. They've already stopped.
WJLA-TV Channel 7 broke the news Wednesday, quoting an anonymous source: Bob Ehrlich will announce he's running for governor April 7.
How'd a station in Northern Virginia get that scoop?
Just a guess here, but Greg Massoni, a longtime Ehrlich aide currently employed with the ex-governor at the law firm Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, was a producer and director of news for the station from 1995 to 2002, according to Massoni's bio on the Womble Web site.
Nomalleywatch.com Just when you think we're going to have a doozy of a governor's race on our hands, omalleywatch.com goes dark. Or rather, goes green.
Against a Day-Glo O'Malley green backdrop, it reads: "Happy St. Patrick's Day. I'm Done ..."
At least I think that means the site is gone. Either that or Martin Watcher is still sleeping off a March 17 bender. Perhaps in the Twitter era, the site suddenly feels so 2007. (It has been a reliable burr under the gubernatorial saddle since May of that year.)
Expect Twitter's fakeomalley to start getting busy.
Dr. Peter Pronovost, a Johns Hopkins anesthesiologist, was on CNN recently talking about the checklist he's developed to reduce hospital-acquired infections. It's a list of simple safety procedures, like washing hands, that can play a big role in saving lives.
CNN's Sanjay Gupta asked Pronovost if he uses checklists in other areas of his daily life. Pronovost said that he does and even provides them to his kids.
"Every week I ask them to rate how good of a dad I was," he said. "It's pretty humbling."
The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!
Too bad there's nobody around to rejoice.
In the 2100 block of N. Calvert St. on Wednesday, The Sun's Peter Hermann spotted new phone books just delivered to the steps of three boarded-up rowhouses.