Sun Set
The paper of H.L. Mencken, David Simon and Jack Germond goes rogue.
Death by a thousand acquisitions.
Baltimore, MD. January 20, 2024
David A. Smith, who professes to understand print media but fosters a realpolitik about seducing readers with conservative talking points has bought The Baltimore Sun. (1)
AS Abell Company, the Black family, Reg Murphy, Times-Mirror, Tribune Corp., Alden Global Capital, and now Smith and partner Armstrong are among the past and present owners of The Baltimore Sun.
This is a short story of a reputable newspaper that went into a slow but resolute decline.
Once upon a time, news, news carriers and “the street” were linked together, some might say symbiotically. In the aforementioned city, there exists a plaque on a brick building in a harbor side community called Fells Point. “Homicide: Life on the Street” was filmed down the block, what today is a tourist attraction.
The plaque marks the location of the first printed “broadsheet,” a letterpress product which daily was thumbtacked to a wooden frame where the public gathered to read about the issues of the day. The plaque reads something like “site of the first regularly printed newspaper in the US.” That was 1727. (2)
Since then, the physical nature of the newspaper hasn’t changed. Some say it’s been augmented by a computer screen avatar.
The “street” has been replaced by the “information superhighway.” (3)
The news, if one defines as information filtered and borne into words available by our collective experience… well, that has not been replaced.
However, one can argue an appetite for news has changed, brought on in no small degree by the news carrier.
In another career, I put in time at The Baltimore Sun, when it was largely managed by the Murphy’s. When the Tribune Company acquired the LA Times Mirror conglomerate in 2000 whom had bought The Baltimore Sun in 1986 from Reg Murphy, shortly thereafter, I left, or rather the paper left me.
What I didn’t see at the time was how a business model could become an extraction scheme.
I fondly recall my first day at ‘The Sun’: I approved a Sun scoreboard design at Camden Yards (see photo above) and tried to quell a community backlash to the label, “Crazy Classifieds,” a silly media campaign to get folks to buy classified advertising. But ‘The Sun’ was like that, as was my adopted city: quirky, running in place, irascible, curious, grossly mismanaged but underneath, like the comfort of a well-worn loafer. Baltimore wears its social tensions and civil incompetence well: its moniker is “Charm City.”
The following week at ‘The Sun,’ I shared an elevator ride with the ex-publisher and his wife, the new publisher. Yes, ‘The Sun’ is a family-operated and managed newspaper.
Leveraging my ‘newbie-ness’, I brashly asked the former publisher, “Good afternoon, Mr. Murphy, how about this internet thing, what are we doing about it?”
Before I received an answer, the doors opened on the Executive floor and the “family” got off. I never got an answer. I envisioned a network of community and interest-based ‘ListServes.’ Apparently, the Times-Mirror Company thought otherwise.
This was 1990, and if one were to look back, 1990 was a seminal year for The Baltimore Sun. The Times-Mirror Company brought together a new management team which descended on ‘The Sun.’ Gone were the last vestiges of family operation of a major news brand. Soon would develop a retreat from news reporting, first by closing the venerable Sun foreign bureaus (4), next by reducing national reporting staff. Concurrently, ‘The Sun’ was acquiring locally published “wrap sheets” (5)
The ‘cash’ was going into distribution, not into news reporting.
The ‘death by a thousand acquisitions’ continued as each suitor attempted to flip the enterprise with trendy re-packaging and cosmetics. A perfect storm of cost pressure and market competition for eyeballs didn’t help.
Lost in this orchestrated chaos of news delivery and distribution were the readers. Gone were the attempts to reach readers “where they want to be,” trafficking instead “where readers are,” where “being informed” no longer is the key to understanding, but a pot pourri of innuendo, catch-up gotcha’, and closeted suspicion.
Underneath it all, a disdain for the public good.
David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun crime beat reporter (6) has made a career out of documenting a city in decay, better to understand the forces dismantling it.
The stories are there. The “newspapers” simply drove the readers away.
And now the institution is at risk.
“…Mr. Smith delivered a news product that begins with a hard ideological premise and then tailors all coverage and editorializing to fit.” (7)
My uncle, Dr. Shepard Clough, a published historian, (8) once shared that one could write an economic history of the US by examining the formation and evolution of the insurance industry. It’s not a stretch to propose that one could write an intellectual history of the US by examining the formation and evolution — some might say ‘decline’ — of the newspaper industry.
January 24
Notes
1-Katie Robertson, “The Baltimore Sun’s New Owner Has the Newsroom on Edge,” The New York Times, Jan. 20
2-Actually the site was Annapolis. But was the Annapolis broadsheet a daily? Hartford CT is also in there vowing for the title of “first newspaper in the US.” See google.com. Fact checking this, what I can say, is that the Fells Point Chamber of Commerce owes Annapolis an apology.
3-The term coined by Vice President Al Gore, to describe the internet, 1993. See “What did Al Gore call the internet,” google.com
4-“The Baltimore Sun”, Wikipedia
5-A “wrap” is a distribution concept composed of a collection of advertisements targeted to a community or neighborhood. Advertisers pay for the printing and for subscribing to a service which provides general interest sections, “wrapping the advertisements,” such as home owner tips and recipes.
6-David Simon is the creator of “Homicide: Life on the Street,” and “The Wire,” adapted from his beat reporting while at The Baltimore Sun.
7-David Simon, quoted in Katie Robertson, op.cit.
8-Shepard B. Clough, “The Rise and Fall of Civilization,” Columbia University Press, (1951)
