The Baltimore Sun
The Baltimore Sun is the largest general-circulation daily newspaper based in the U.S. state of Maryland and provides coverage of local, regional, national, and international news.[3]
Founded in 1837, the newspaper was owned by Tribune Publishing until May 2021, when it was acquired by Alden Global Capital, which operates its media properties through Digital First Media.[4][5][6][7][8] David D. Smith, the executive chairman of Sinclair Inc., closed a deal to buy the paper on January 15, 2024.[9]
History[edit]
19th century[edit]
The Sun was founded on May 17, 1837, by Arunah Shepherdson Abell and two associates, William Moseley Swain from Rhode Island, and Azariah H. Simmons from Philadelphia, where they had started and published the Public Ledger the year before.
Abell became a journalist with the Providence Patriot and later worked with newspapers in New York City and Boston.[10]
20th century[edit]
The Abell family and descendants owned The Sun until 1910, when the local Black and Garrett families invested in the paper at the suggestion of former rival owner/publisher of The News, Charles H. Grasty, and they, along with Grasty gained a controlling interest; they retained the name A. S. Abell Company for the parent publishing company. That same year The Evening Sun was established under reporter, editor and columnist H.L. Mencken (1880–1956).
From 1947 to 1986, The Sun was the owner and founder of Maryland's first television station, WMAR-TV (channel 2), which was a longtime affiliate of CBS until 1981, when it switched to NBC. The station was sold off in 1986, and is now owned by the E. W. Scripps Company, and has been an ABC affiliate since 1995. A. S. Abell also owned several radio stations, but not in Baltimore itself (holding construction permits for WMAR sister AM/FM stations, but never bringing them to air).
The newspaper opened its first foreign bureau in London in 1924. Between 1955 and 1961, it added four new foreign offices.
As Cold War tensions grew, it set up shop in Bonn, West Germany, in February 1955; the bureau was later moved to Berlin. Eleven months later, The Sun was one of the first U.S. newspapers to open a bureau in Moscow. A Rome office followed in July 1957, and a New Delhi bureau was opened four years later, in 1961 .[11] At its height, The Sun ran eight foreign bureaus, giving rise to its boast in a 1983 advertisement that "The Sun never sets on the world."[12]
The paper was sold by Reg Murphy in 1986 to the Times-Mirror Company of the Los Angeles Times.[13]
The same week, a 115-year-old rivalry ended when the oldest newspaper in the city, the News American, a Hearst paper since the 1920s with roots dating back to 1773, folded.[14] A decade later in 1997, The Sun acquired the Patuxent Publishing Company, a local suburban newspaper publisher that had a stable of 15 weekly papers and a few magazines in several communities and counties.[15]
In the 1990s and 2000s, The Sun began cutting back its foreign coverage. In 1995 and 1996, the paper closed its Tokyo, Mexico City and Berlin bureaus. Two more—Beijing and London—fell victim to cost-cutting in 2005.[12] The final three foreign bureaus—Moscow, Jerusalem, and Johannesburg, South Africa—fell a couple of years later.[16] All were closed by 2008, as the Tribune Co. streamlined and downsized the newspaper chain's foreign reporting. Some material from The Sun's foreign correspondents is archived at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.[17]
21st century[edit]
In the 21st century, The Sun, like most legacy newspapers in the United States, has suffered a number of setbacks in the competition with Internet and other sources, including a decline in readership and ads, a shrinking newsroom staff,[18] and competition in 2005 from The Baltimore Examiner, a free daily that lasted two years to 2007, along with a similar Washington, D.C.-based publication of a small chain recently started by new owners that took over the San Francisco Examiner, Hearst's flagship newspaper.[19] In 2000, the Times-Mirror company was purchased by the Tribune Company of Chicago. In 2014, it transferred its newspapers, including The Sun, to Tribune Publishing.
On September 19, 2005, and again on August 24, 2008, The Baltimore Sun introduced new layout designs.[20] Its circulation as of 2010 was 195,561 for the daily edition and 343,552 on Sundays. On April 29, 2009, the Tribune Company announced that it would lay off 61 of the 205 staff members in the Sun newsroom.[21] On September 23, 2011, it was reported[22] that the Baltimore Sun would be moving its web edition behind a paywall starting October 10, 2011.
The Baltimore Sun is the flagship of the Baltimore Sun Media Group, which also produces the b free daily newspaper and more than 30 other Baltimore metropolitan-area community newspapers, magazines and Web sites. BSMG content reaches more than one million Baltimore-area readers each week and is the region's most widely read source of news.[23]
On February 20, 2014, The Baltimore Sun Media Group announced that they would buy the alternative weekly City Paper.[24] In April, the Sun acquired the Maryland publications of Landmark Media Enterprises.[25]
In February 2021, as part of the planned merger between Tribune Publishing and Alden Global Capital, Tribune announced that Alden had reached a non-binding agreement to sell The Sun to the Sunlight For All Institute, a nonprofit backed by businessman and philanthropist Stewart W. Bainum Jr. The deal was contingent on the approval of the merger by Tribune shareholders.[26] It fell apart in talks over operating agreements with Tribune for functions including human resources and customer service.[27] Bainum then led a failed bid to acquire all of Tribune Publishing.[28] Bainum subsequently founded The Baltimore Banner, pledging $50 million to the nonprofit outlet.
In February 2022, the editorial board of The Sun published a lengthy apology for its racism over its 185–year history, including specific offenses such as accepting classified ads for selling enslaved people and publishing editorials that promoted racial segregation and disenfranchisement of Black voters.[29][30][31]
In January 2024, David D. Smith, executive chairman of Sinclair Inc., reached an agreement to acquire the paper, with conservative commentator Armstrong Williams holding an undisclosed stake. Though the transaction is independent of Sinclair, Smith said he foresees partnerships between the paper and Sinclair properties like WBFF-TV. Smith said he believed he could grow subscriptions and advertising through a greater focus on community news and integrating technology in ways other print media publishers are not going.[9] In his first visit to the newsroom, he sparred with reporters and said the paper should emulate Sinclair's local flagship, WBFF, including through non-scientific reader polls and aggressive coverage of Baltimore City Public Schools. He dismissed newsroom concerns about the future of public service journalism.[32][33] Since Smith's acquisiton of The Sun, the paper has become more conservative, and has published more stories on Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott and his administration, as well as crime in Baltimore.[34]
Williams said the paper's editorial page would cease endorsements for political candidates and would include more conservative viewpoints, but not at the expense of liberal ones. The Sun may run his syndicated column "on its merits."[35]
Portrayal in The Wire[edit]
The Baltimore Sun was featured in the American crime drama television series The Wire in 2008 (season 5), which was created by former Sun reporter David Simon.[57]
Like all of the institutions featured in The Wire, the Sun is portrayed as having many deeply dysfunctional qualities while also having very dedicated people on its staff. The season focuses on the role of the media in affecting political decisions in City Hall and the priorities of the Baltimore Police Department. Additionally, the show explores the business pressures of modern media through layoffs and buyouts occurring at the Sun, on the orders of the Tribune Company, the Sun's corporate owner.
One storyline involves a troubled Sun reporter named Scott Templeton, and his escalating tendency to sensationalize and falsify stories. The Wire portrays the managing editors of the Sun as turning a blind eye to the protests of a concerned line editor, in the managing editors' zeal to win a Pulitzer Prize. The show insinuates that the motivation for this institutional dysfunction is the business pressures of modern media, and working for a flagship newspaper in a major media market like The New York Times or The Washington Post is seen as the only way to avoid the cutbacks occurring at the Sun.
Season 5 was The Wire's last. The finale episode, "-30-", features a montage at the end portraying the ultimate fate of the major characters. It shows Templeton at Columbia University with the senior editors of the fictional Sun, accepting the Pulitzer Prize, with no mention being made as to the aftermath of Templeton's career. Alma Gutierrez is shown being exiled to the Carroll County bureau past the suburbs.
News partnership[edit]
In September 2008, The Baltimore Sun became the newspaper partner of station WJZ-TV, owned and operated by CBS; the partnership involves sharing content and story leads, and teaming up on stories. WJZ promotes Baltimore Sun stories in its news broadcasts. The Sun promotes WJZ's stories and weather team on its pages.
Media related to The Baltimore Sun at Wikimedia Commons