What is Montgomery Reporter?

What is Montgomery Reporter?

Rockville town square

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By Len Lazarick

Len@MarylandReporter.com

Montgomery Reporter just published as complete a list as we could come up with of candidates in Montgomery County for local, state and federal office.

What is Montgomery Reporter anyway?

Montgomery Reporter is the edition of MarylandReporter.com devoted to news about Montgomery County government and politics.

MarylandReporter.com is a seven-year-old nonprofit news website about state government and politics supported by foundations and donors. We do a daily roundup of state news as well as original content, and we send out a daily email to 7,700 addresses. You can sign up on our home page.

Montgomery Reporter is the name I came up with in 2015 on the day the Gazette newspapers closed. That day I registered the domain names of MontgomeryReporter.com, .net and .org.

Realizing that Maryland’s largest county was becoming a news desert, I spent a few weeks researching the possibilities for a nonprofit news website in Montgomery County.

I realized that I had neither the time or the energy to get such a site funded. I also found that there are a couple of news organizations trying to fill the information hole in Montgomery County.

They include Bethesda Beat produced by Bethesda magazine, funded by advertising, and MyMCMedia produced Montgomery Community Media (Montgomery Community Television), a nonprofit largely funded by the County Council with cable fees. There are also some blogs doing good work such as A Miner Detail and Seventh State.

Bethesda Beat and MyMCMedia have been doing more coverage of the political scene lately. We’ve been linking to more of their content in the daily State Roundup, along with content from the blogs.

Several smaller counties in Maryland get more and better coverage than does Montgomery County because of their legacy newspapers. The Gazette’s model of multiple editions for different communities also reflected the fact that Montgomery residents tend to think of themselves as residents of Bethesda, Rockville, Gaithersburg or Silver Spring — not the county as whole.

There’s still too much news in Montgomery and not enough reporters covering it. We’re trying to fill in some gaps where we can, trying to do stories others are not doing. As the saying goes, it is better to light one candle than curse the darkness.

Montgomery Reporter is our candle. We’d be happy to light up more if additional funding became available, and launch MontgomeryReporter.com as a separate website.

About The Author

Len Lazarick

len@marylandreporter.com

Len Lazarick was the founding editor and publisher of MarylandReporter.com and is currently the president of its nonprofit corporation and chairman of its board He was formerly the State House bureau chief of the daily Baltimore Examiner from its start in April 2006 to its demise in February 2009. He was a copy editor on the national desk of the Washington Post for eight years before that, and has spent decades covering Maryland politics and government.

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