Someone is preying on homeless men in Baltimore. A few of the city's most vulnerable citizens have been found strangled, with a red ribbon tied around their wrist.

Editors and reporters at the city's newspaper are all over the story. They decide to report deeply on the problems of the homeless — in hopes of earning journalism's most coveted accolade: the Pulitzer Prize.

ANGELA TUCK PUBLIC EDITOR • E-mail Tuck Recent columns: [an error occurred while processing this directive]

In the fifth and final season of HBO's acclaimed crime drama "The Wire," series creator and former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon has turned his critical lens on an institution he knows well: the newspaper industry. The portrait is spot-on in some ways and way off the mark in others. It is not a flattering one.

To be sure, the newspaper industry is facing tough economic challenges, as reflected in Simon's series. In response to declining advertising revenues and circulation, newspapers are re-creating their business models, with an increasing emphasis on delivering content and advertising on the Internet. The AJC has one of the most aggressive Internet strategies in the industry, as evidenced by the growing number of people who turn to ajc.com for breaking news, photo galleries, video and a chance to interact with other users on the issues of the day.

Like many television shows based on professions, "The Wire" highlights the extreme and egregious behavior of a few bad apples.

Jimmy McNulty is a police detective so frustrated by budget cuts that have halted the investigation into a string of drug-related murders that he manufactures a serial killer of homeless people to get his bosses and the mayor to give police the manpower needed to solve the homeless killings. He uses the extra resources to initiate an illegal wiretap and resumes the investigation into 22 people murdered by drug dealers, their bodies left in vacant houses in a decaying neighborhood. These victims, says another character on the show, are "dead where it don't count."

Meanwhile, a tale of two very different reporters is emerging on "The Wire," which ends Sunday. Scott Templeton is an ambitious, unethical reporter who would kill his own mother for a great story. Templeton is manufacturing stories and people who don't exist to make the newspaper's front page. Mike Fletcher is an earnest, hardworking reporter who can sniff out a good story. Fletcher and city editor Gus Haynes are still idealistic enough to believe that good journalism, at its core, is about afflicting the comforted and comforting the afflicted.

In the midst of covering the homeless murders, Fletcher meets a recovering heroin addict working in the kitchen of a homeless shelter. Haynes allows Fletcher to pursue a detailed profile of "Bubbles," while growing more suspicious of Templeton's "stories."

Here is where "The Wire" takes its most unrealistic detour. Reporters like Templeton are mercifully rare. In recent years, the public has witnessed the disgrace and job loss brought on when New York Times reporter Jayson Blair and USA Today's Jack Kelley made up events and copied the work of other journalists.

There are too many checks and balances for this to happen in most newsrooms. Anonymous sources are rarely used in the AJC. When unnamed sources are used, their credibility and motives are vetted by skeptical editors at the highest level.

Journalists don't need to make up stories — truth is often stranger than fiction. Who would have dreamed that Michael Vick, the NFL's highest-paid player, would be involved in a dogfighting ring? Or that former Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell would now be in a halfway house in Florida?

Simon is on point with his theory that newspapers seldom write deeply about the problems facing people in poor communities. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, some people seemed genuinely surprised at how extreme the poverty was in New Orleans. Newspaper reporters don't often venture into these communities until the unthinkable happens, such as the shooting death of Kathryn Johnston, an elderly woman killed by Atlanta police in a botched drug raid.

Telling the stories of these neighborhoods, and the people who live in them, is something newspaper reporters are uniquely qualified to do. Well-told stories about issues people care about will keep people reading newspapers.