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I’ve been covering Baltimore’s creative community since I was 21 years old, and one thing that has remained constant in that 10 years is that there’s no shortage of artists pleading to be heard, considered and appreciated.
In many ways in the years since I started my career in journalism, this city’s media platforms have failed its artists. Alternative weekly papers were the best source for what was happening on the ground, but even they largely overlooked anything outside of Central Baltimore for the majority of their existence.
The big newspapers and magazines didn’t seem to care about anything that wasn’t institutional. Both were painfully incomplete. And I say that as someone who grew up on the city’s east side — with family and friends on the west side — who was deeply connected to the creativity coming out of the inner city. I couldn’t help but notice that those communities were being ignored, unless it was about crime and corruption around them.
Those limitations in local coverage prompted me to start my own media platform, True Laurels, which sought to honor, acknowledge and contextualize the creative Baltimore that I grew up knowing — I just celebrated 10 years of doing that work. Those limitations were also why I left the city in 2016 to pursue jobs at magazines in New York City. By that time, I felt I had hit a wall in what I could accomplish covering arts and culture here.
In New York, oddly enough, I was able to do much more for Baltimore’s creative community than I ever did at home. I wrote about local artists for publications with an international reach and in the process made readers with little knowledge of the city cognizant of the amazing work people were doing in Baltimore.
But I still felt there was more I could be doing — a more in-real-life impact I could make. The pandemic brought me back to Baltimore so I could be closer to my family. My work — now remote — still mostly came from New York, outside of what I was doing with my own platform.
Local arts and culture journalism had become bleaker since I left Baltimore. The alt weeklies had all crumbled, the big paper finally stopped pretending to care about what was happening in the creative scenes, and now artists couldn’t even go out and have a healthy outlet because everything was shut down.
When I started to hear rumbling about The Baltimore Banner, I was intrigued because it felt like a new opportunity for someone to take arts journalism by the horns. I’d never told anyone this, but while in New York I always planned a five-year stay to see what I could accomplish. After that, if I had the knowledge, connections and resources to come back home and make a real impact, then that’s what I was gonna do.
I’m overjoyed at the opportunities my new role as arts and culture editor at The Banner will offer because I know that, in my heart, I have the entire city’s best interests in mind, not just the places in Central Baltimore. This city has a wealth of creativity in every crack and crevice. It’s my mission to search and dig through each of those crevices for a truly balanced take on what’s happening here.
I’m tired of a media landscape that doesn’t reflect the demographics of this city. I’m tired of the communities that I come from being ignored when they are largely responsible for the edge and grit that attracts outsiders to come here. And I’m tired of seeing artists give up way earlier than they should because they feel like no one is here to listen to them.
My heart is set on getting this right. It won’t be without fault, but I promise to move with supreme sensitivity and intention in my role at The Banner. If it works my way, I can guarantee that you’ll be hearing from and learning about more people who add to the eccentric and intriguing character of this city.
lawrence.burney@thebaltimorebanner.com
Lawrence Burney was The Baltimore Banner’s arts & culture reporter. He was formerly a columnist at The Washington Post, senior editor at The FADER, and staff writer at VICE music vertical Noisey.
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