The Baltimore Sun Is In Trouble

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This is the On the Media Midweek podcast.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Just over a year ago, we reported on the purchase of the Baltimore Sun by David Smith, the executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group.

David Smith is known not only for his right-wing broadcasting network Sinclair, but also for his support of conservative causes and groups, including Project Veritas, Turning Points USA, and Moms for Liberty.

Joshua Benton of Nieman Lab described the sale at the time as, quote, an exploration of whether there can be a worse newspaper owner than Alden Global Capital.

When Smith met with the Sun staff after the acquisition was complete, he told reporters to quote, go make me some money.

Turns out, that's not particularly motivational.

New numbers out this month show that the Sun's readership is way down.

Circulation of the Sunday paper declined by about 44%,

and daily readership fell too by about 37%.

Meanwhile, website traffic has cratered and at least 20 journalists have left the paper.

On the occasion of these bad numbers, we'll revisit a couple of illuminating conversations we had last January with two Baltimore natives.

The first is Milton Kent, professor of practice in the School of Global Journalism and Communication at Morgan State University.

John Oliver did a spectacular takedown a few years ago of how the word sort of came down from Sinclair headquarters, which is here in the Baltimore suburbs.

The word came down that they wanted an editorial to be read verbatim on each of its stations across the country.

Sinclair can sometimes dictate the content of your local newscast.

And in contrast to Fox News, a clearly conservative outlet where you basically know what you're getting, with Sinclair, they are injecting fox-worthy content into the mouths of your local news anchors.

Did the FBI have a personal vendetta in pursuing the Russia investigation of President Trump's former national security advisor, Michael Flynn.

Did the FBI have a personal vendetta in pursuing the Russia investigation of President Trump's former national security advisor Michael Flynn?

Did the FBI have a personal vendetta in pursuing the Russia investigation of President Trump's former national security advisor Michael Flynn?

Whether they're in Baltimore, Phoenix, wherever.

That's concerning.

Kent started his career at the Baltimore Sun.

He even won a full tuition college scholarship from the paper.

You could pretty much say say that I owe my career to the Baltimore Sun.

After graduation, he worked there for over 20 years.

What concerns me is that Sinclair seems to have been in for the city of Baltimore.

One of their pet ideas is a thing called Project Baltimore, where they supposedly expose wrongdoing in the city school system.

Baltimore City is the fifth most funded large school system in America.

But from this investigation, we analyzed state data and we found a lot of that money is going to educate students who are labeled whereabouts unknown, but the school is still getting the money to educate that child.

And it's a lot.

Kent and others found that the project reporting lacked vital context and facts that would have led to a less damning conclusion.

I think every school system can stand a bit of scrutiny.

But in this case, it seems almost personal.

And the alarm bells went off for me when I read that the new owner, David Smith, said to the staff of the Sun that he thought that Project Baltimore was an ideal model

for how the Sun should operate going forward.

A 2018 study by Emery's Gregory J.

Martin and Josh McCrain found that stations newly bought by Sinclair cut their coverage of local politics by roughly 10% and boosted coverage of national politics by roughly 25%.

A 2019 study found that Sinclair's political coverage leaned on dramatic rhetoric and partisan sources, effectively pulling viewers to the right.

Apparently, these new Sinclair stations weren't responding to any pent-up demand for conservative local news.

On average, they lost viewers when they made these changes.

But at no great cost, since national news is so much cheaper to cover than local news, news, because one DC-based talking head can serve 100 markets.

Meanwhile, research shows that when local news declines or disappears, political corruption increases along with voter apathy.

Journalism professor and former Sun reporter Milton Kent fears the dominance of Sinclair's national agenda could create a devastating ripple effect.

In the summertime, when you go pick up a dozen crabs and lay the newspaper on the table to crack the crabs on.

But I think the sun has meant more to the people of this market, of this city, than just a place to lay your crabs on.

And many of us feared that Alden would shrink the paper down to a husk.

I don't think any of us feared that it would be antagonistic to the city that it's supposed to serve.

Well, now they do.

In recent years, there's been mounting interest and investment in non-profit media.

A trend scholar Brandt Houston calls the Alden effect.

Consider the non-profit Baltimore Banner, a digital news outlet launched in 2022 in response to Alden's expected pillaging of the Baltimore Sun.

Banner reporters covered the Sun's newest, potentially even more worrying owner, David Smith.

Among them, Liz Bowie, who before joining the banner worked for some 30 years at the Sun, starting in 1986.

It was a huge bustling newsroom with seven or eight foreign bureaus, a large Washington staff.

We had eight education reporters at the time, and we were considered a national publication.

Later, the Tribune Publishing Chain, once owner of the LA Times and Newsday among others, became the Sun's parent company.

And Bowie watched as the Sun's staff shrank and shrank at the hands of the Tribune chain's new owner, private equity billionaire Sam Zell.

All of the real estate associated with these venerable institutions like the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun and the Hartford Current were sold out from under us.

And we had to then pay rent to the company.

And that money didn't go into supporting the journalism.

By the time 2018 rolled around, there were only about 70 journalists left in the newsroom from about 450.

And so it was a much shrunken enterprise.

Still, the Baltimore Sun produced great reporting.

Bowie was part of the Sun team that won a Pulitzer in 2020, about the same time that Alden came a call-in.

Bowie launched a movement with her union to halt the Sun sale to the hedge fund called Save Our Sun.

I think everybody in the Sun newsroom was terrified when we heard that Alden was buying up the stock.

stock.

And I had been speaking over the years with some of the leaders of local foundations who were interested in buying the sun, as well as Ted Venatoulis, the former politician who had a great deal of interest in the media.

I called them all and I said, this is my 911 call.

If you guys are really serious about trying to save the paper, you have to do it now because this is who's trying to buy us.

And we started to meet in the early morning in a downtown hotel in secret.

We started Save Our Son and by May we had collected about 6,000 signatures and we sent the petition to the Tribune Board and asked them to please vote against Alden.

There was a strong local interest in bringing the ownership of the paper back to the city.

And of course, they ignored us, but it alerted many people in the community to what was happening.

Enter the local hotel entrepreneur and philanthropist who fought for the ownership of the sun.

He tried to purchase the paper as well as the Tribune, the parent company.

Stuart Bainum is a hotelier and former politician.

And he began calling people all over the country and saying, how do you run a newspaper?

How do you make local news sustainable?

And he he then said, okay, I'm in, and began negotiating for the sale of the Baltimore Sun.

They offered too high a price, and he decided that instead of buying the sun, he'd buy the sun's parent company.

Right.

Just for the sun and then sell off the other papers to local owners in those cities who might be interested.

Once he started going after Tribune, then Alden Global Capital came to him and said, oh, wait, maybe we'll sell you the sun.

How about we buy Tribune and we will sell you the sun?

So then there was a tentative deal between Alden and Stuart Bainum.

Bainham should have bought the Tribune because in the end, Alden wanted to squeeze him 12 ways from Sunday.

Alden prevailed.

Then Stuart began to think about starting his own publication and he began hiring people.

He eventually hired Kimi Yoshino, managing editor at the Los Angeles Times, to run the operation in the fall of 2021.

And thus, the Baltimore banner was born, where you are now a reporter.

You've been there since the beginning, as have many of your colleagues from the sun.

But weirdly, something

happened after Alden gained ownership.

Usually hedge funds lay off reporters, But in this case, they offered reasonably generous buyouts, and the layoffs never came.

The day after the sale went through, Alden offered buyouts to almost everybody in the Tribune company.

In the case of the Chicago Tribune and many of the other papers, as many as 10% of the people who were offered buyouts took them.

At the Baltimore Sun, no one took it.

And I think that was because perhaps we'd fought so hard for our newspaper.

Why did Alden not slash and burn?

I think that Heath Freeman, who heads Alden Global Capital, and Stuart Bainham were in a very fierce competition first to get the sun and then to get Tribune.

And I don't think Alden wanted the Baltimore banner to overtake the sun.

There's ego involved here, right?

I mean, I'm guessing.

So you're saying this was a bleep measuring contest.

Yeah.

I don't know that for sure, but about 20% of the current staff of the banner came from the sun.

And every one of them was replaced for a long time.

It didn't cut into the number of journalists in the sun newsroom for a while.

Recently, the sun and the banner were engaged in an old-style competition for a story involving the Catholic Church.

Yes, this spring, when the Attorney General released a report about sexual abuse by priests in the church in Maryland, the two news organizations competed to unmask a number of priests.

Their names had been redacted.

And what happened was the sun did half of them and the banner did the other half.

And so the community benefited from all of this competition, this rise in the number of reporters.

What is really wonderful is the Baltimore Banner has really added a lot of reporters to the media ecosystem in Maryland.

And so what you have now is 76 more reporters who are writing different stories, who are writing the same story as the sun, competing with them.

That means that readers will get their news faster, that the reporters on beats that are competitive will be more aggressive, working way harder because they don't want to get beaten.

That story alone told us what happens when you have good competition and so many more reporters in one city looking at things and looking under rocks.

Now,

The Sun has been purchased from Alden by David Smith, executive chairman of Sinclair.

Tell me what you know about Smith and his company, Sinclair.

You and your colleagues at the Banner have been reporting on this.

We

know that Smith owns 200 television stations,

including a Fox station in our area.

Many of those stations have a very conservative slant.

I think he will insist that there be a more conservative view in his newspaper.

Smith and his stations have been accused of leaning too far and have run afoul of federal regulators.

They once racked up a record-breaking $48 million in FCC fines for deceptive practices during an attempted merger with Tribune.

Jared Kushner said in 2016 that the Trump campaign would provide Sinclair stations with extensive access to Trump in exchange for friendly coverage that did not include fact-checking.

Smith told Trump in a 2016 meeting: We are here to deliver your message.

We don't know what's going to happen yet with the Baltimore Sun.

We don't know how far he will go in interfering in the news gathering.

David Smith has bought the sun independent of Sinclair.

So Sinclair does not own the sun.

That is true, but in the past, haven't they worked together to promote each other's material?

Yes, they have.

And I think we know that he has a record of doing journalism in Baltimore that I believe does not have context.

I've seen journalists working for FACS 45 who leave out very pertinent facts when they report a story.

They often end up being inaccurate in the sense they don't give readers a whole picture of what's actually happening.

If the sun did become more like Fox 45, Sinclair's station, how would that alter the media landscape in Maryland?

How would it affect how reporters at the Banner do their work?

I am very concerned about this.

I worry that there then becomes a sort of a cloud of misinformation that spreads pretty widely, that polarizes our community, that all of the things that have happened with national news start happening on a local level.

So that's very concerning.

And I think as a reporter, I would have to fight that misinformation in my reporting.

That does seem to be part of the job these days.

Is the goodwill of very rich individuals the best hope for local journalism?

To some degree, I think it is.

Stuart Bainham has definitely given us a big runway,

but his philanthropy will end at some point.

So I think you may need a substantial amount of philanthropy to get you off the ground.

What we're trying to prove is that once you get started, you can do it alone, sustainable at scale.

Stuart Bainham said you have to create a large enough organization that the journalism is so compelling that subscribers agree to support it.

So, what we are trying to prove is that if you create a big newsroom and a good product, that there's support out there in communities across the nation to sustain it.

It makes me feel so hopeful.

There's actually still statehouse coverage in the city of Baltimore.

It's missing in so many other cities across the country.

Yeah, I have spent a long time in journalism now.

I've been a newspaper reporter forever, it seems.

And I have never been more excited or committed to what I've been doing.

I poured every ounce of myself into trying to save the Baltimore sun from a hedge fund owner, and it was an emotional roller coaster that I will never forget.

But I am also so hopeful right now.

I go to work really excited every day, thinking that we may actually make this work.

It's been one of the most joyful times in my life.

Liz, thank you so much.

Take care.

Liz Bowie is an education reporter for the Baltimore Banner.

Thanks for listening to the Midweek podcast.

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