By Adam Pagnucco.
On Monday morning, Maryland Matters founder Josh Kurtz announced that he was retiring from full-time journalism. Josh wrote:
After planning Maryland Matters, and promoting the concept, and launching the website, and raising money for it, and running it, and assembling a team and a board of directors, and sustaining the operation, and helping navigate a few different internal administrative regimes, and, for a time, simultaneously working a full-time job in Washington, D.C. — not to mention producing endless miles of copy for this website — I need a break. I’ll be 63 years old in a couple of months, but there are days when, professionally, I feel like I’m 75 or 80.
Josh won’t be entirely gone. He wrote, “I do have ideas for in-depth articles that I’d like to write, which I’d never get around to on the daily hamster wheel.” But he won’t be writing on a daily basis.
This was inevitable since time conquers us all. But Josh’s retirement is a colossal event in Maryland’s interrelated worlds of politics, government and media. It may not be apparent yet, but those worlds are going to change.
Josh Kurtz. Photo credit: Maryland Matters.
Take it from me – Josh Kurtz is the number one political writer in Maryland. It’s not close – he has no rival. When I started writing back in 2006, Josh had already left his role as the lead political writer at the late and lamented Gazette. But I found out about him because his name kept popping up in the articles I would read as backup research for my posts. Over and over again, it was “Josh Kurtz.” And as I buried myself in his material, I thought, “Who is this guy? I really need to meet him!”
What makes Josh the best? I could list a number of reasons. First, there is his vast experience. He has worked in journalism since the late 1980s in his native New York, New Mexico, on Capitol Hill and of course here in Maryland. Second, he has an incredible source network. Almost everyone who is anyone in Maryland politics talks to Josh, whether they admit it or not. And Josh is a great guy with whom to have a conversation – he’s pleasant, low-key and doesn’t try to impress you with his intelligence. (He is smarter than 99% of the people he talks to but he would never say that.) Third, he has a great memory. If I need to find out something that Parris Glendening or Cas Taylor did back in the 1990s, Josh is the first person I would call.
But here is the real reason why Josh is the best: he knows how to write a story. That’s what all of us writers are supposed to do, yeah? Josh takes us inside Annapolis, a place where most of us don’t go regularly, and walks us through the back rooms and bar rooms of politicians, insiders, staffers, lobbyists, operatives and power brokers. For years, he has told us what really goes on there in ways we could never see on our own.
Good stories demand good characters, and for all of us Maryland political folks, we had the great fortune of seeing the careers of Josh and former Senate President Mike Miller overlap. Nobody, I mean nobody, has ever been a more compelling political character than Mike Miller, and nobody got better copy out of him than Josh Kurtz. In fact, the two of them will be forever intertwined in creating and chronicling Maryland’s history over the past 30 years or so.
Josh isn’t leaving us empty handed. In fact, he has bequeathed his greatest creation to us as his legacy: the indispensable Maryland Matters. With the decline of formerly dominant outlets like the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun and the disappearance of smaller outlets like the Gazette, Maryland Matters is an indispensable resource. Boy, do we need it more than ever.
But this is what bothers me. It takes a looooooong time to create a journalist like Josh Kurtz. Think about the time and effort to assemble the writing skills, source network, institutional knowledge and perspective of someone like Josh. It takes many, many years and thousands of hours on top of possessing the natural talent for that work.
Who will be the next Josh Kurtz? What media outlet is building that person? And what happens if there is no other Josh? That’s why his retirement matters so much. It’s not just about losing him – it’s also about whether he will have a true successor. We could use one. Actually, we could use a bunch of them. I hope that five years from now, I will be calling someone else “the new Josh Kurtz.”
But that’s for another day. For now, let’s celebrate the legacy of Maryland’s greatest political writer. Godspeed, Josh.