Columbia resident Ricardo Whitaker launched the Guilford Gazette in 2011 and gradually expanded its focus to cover the entire county. It morphed last year into the web-only Howard Courier, which covers local politics, sports and more. Photo by Ken Nadali Photography

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In a world of disappearing small-town newspapers, a new source of news has emerged in Howard County.

The Howard Courier is an independent, web-based news platform that endeavors to report on local happenings with integrity and without bias.

Founded by Ricardo Whitaker, the Courier is less than a year old and has already provided Howard County and surrounding areas with information on local crime and justice, sports, entertainment and more.

“A newspaper for me is about caring for the community,” said Whitaker, 64, of Columbia. “Our aim is not to go head-to-head with the Baltimore Sun or the Baltimore Banner,” he said, emphasizing that the Courier’s “niche is local coverage.”

Whitaker was hooked on politics from a young age. Growing up in Washington, D.C., he and his classmates had the opportunity to visit the U.S. Capitol, where they met with a senator. Whitaker recalled that the local news affiliate was late to the meeting.

“I was like, ‘This is not good news coverage,’” he laughed. “So we had to reenact the meeting. That gave me a bad impression about journalism, which I was starting to get interested in. I was reading Newsweek every week, the Washington Post, and so forth.”

Despite this first impression, Whitaker continued to pursue journalism. At Allegheny College, he took every elective course that had to do with writing and interned at the Inter-High Connection, the newspaper of the D.C.-based Lemuel A. Penn Center (a now-defunct high school), to fulfill the college writing requirement.

But Whitaker credits his entire newspaper education to the year he spent writing for the Capitol Spotlight, a Black-owned paper founded in the 1940s.

During his time at the Spotlight, in 1979 and 1981, Whitaker learned how to write headlines, conduct interviews, lay out the newspaper and prepare it for weekly publication — all on a manual typewriter.

Though he left journalism to do social work and “bounced around” working as a buyer for Lockheed Martin and the Railway Products Group in Baltimore, he was drawn back to the field. He tried a few times to start a newspaper in D.C. before moving to Howard County in 2009.

Making local connections

Whitaker’s outreach to county residents began with a search for a good school system for his two sons. When he moved to Howard County, he noticed a disparity between white and minority families. Some parents didn’t necessarily have access to resources or know how to operate within the PTA structure.

So, in partnership with his sons’ school principal, Jason McCoy of Cradlerock Elementary School, Whitaker implemented a volunteer program called “Raising the Bar.” He and other volunteers knocked on doors to share information with parents. (This year, Whitaker is reviving that program as a parenting class led by volunteers.)

The act of delivering news door to door got Whitaker thinking, “This would be a great area to have a newspaper,” he said.

With encouragement from his future spouse, Whitaker launched a hyper-local newspaper called the Guilford Gazette, which focused on Guilford, Savage, North Laurel, Jessup and King’s Contrivance. The Gazette ran from 2011 to 2014, initially as a print newspaper before transitioning to an online publication.

Before the Gazette, which gradually grew to become the Howard Courier, Whitaker said residents had to jump from website to website to gather information about their community. He now wants to offer them a centralized space to access that crucial information.

“We’re looking to be the one-stop shop, and we’re doing that gradually,” he said.

The Howard Courier operates with a small staff of reporters dedicated to covering local news “one piece at a time,” Whitaker said, “building big from small.” He has been surprised by its growth.

“I was really trying to develop a small-town scenario, where you had your local paper in the town, and you covered everything. I never had any dreams to cover an entire city or an entire county or state,” Whitaker said.

Educating readers

The Howard Courier’s mission statement emphasizes its focus on “real journalism” at a time when concerns over AI-generated content, information fluency and “fake news” are on the rise.

Whitaker wants readers to learn how to evaluate the information they encounter, especially online.

“Number one: Find a trusted source,” he said. “Avoid responding to headlines that you see on social media, especially if you don’t know what the source is.”

For instance, it’s important to distinguish between news articles, whose purpose is to share news, and advertisements, which try to sell something.

Whitaker also recommends that readers consider whether an article was written with bias: Is there an alternate view of the topic, or is the writer only giving one side? Opinions, he warned, can be rooted in even the simplest words.

‘We’re about integrity’

At the Howard Courier, Whitaker and his reporters strive to deliver complete, unbiased news and to prioritize investigative reporting, especially on local politics.

“We will zero-in on the politicians with a light on what they do and say prior to legislative votes or executive decisions. We want our readers, who are probably voters, to know their elected officials more intimately,” Whitaker said.

“We’re only interested in policy and what [local politicians] do within office,” Whitaker clarified. “We don’t want to get into salacious reporting. We’re about integrity.”

Like most newspapers, the Courier is supported by advertisement revenue, but it also receives donations. When readers visit the website on a daily basis, it trends higher on search engines, boosting the bottom line.

Whitaker’s publication is thriving in a tough environment for journalism. Small newspapers’ digital and print circulation has dwindled significantly in recent years. From 2015 to 2022, according to Pew Research Centers, the estimated circulation value for weekday publications dropped from 37.7 million to 20.9 million.

“There are so many things that newspapers offer,” Whitaker said. “Folks love it when they have it, but I’m not sure that they appreciate it fully until they’re gone.”

To read the Howard Courier, visit howardcourier.com or download the mobile app. A one-year membership is $45, a monthly membership is $3.99, and a one-week trial costs $1.