by A few years ago, desperate to avoid being acquired by a hedge fund, staff members at The Baltimore Sun made public pleas to a local businessman to buy their publication.
That request recently became a reality: A Maryland businessman, David D. Smith, purchased the historic newspaper, returning the 186-year-old paper to local hands for the first time in nearly 40 years.
But Smith may not be exactly what The Sun journalists expected. According to interviews with current and former employees of the newspaper, Smith’s purchase has already raised alarm among many inside and outside the newsroom, who fear he will impose his political interests on the organization as a final coda to a once-proud newspaper. and which has faced a long decline.
Mr. Smith is the chief executive of the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of the largest local television station operators in the country with nearly 200 stations, including Fox45 in Baltimore. Sinclair has been a trusted ally to former President Donald J. Trump; Mr. Smith he supposedly told him Mr. Trump in 2016: “We are here to deliver your message.” In 2018, the company required its stations to movie promotions echoing some of Trump’s attacks on the media.
Mr. Smith has regularly supported conservative causes. According to tax records, his family foundation has donated more than $500,000 in recent years to Project Veritas, a right-wing group that has attempted to covertly register political opponents and journalists.
The Sun’s new owner did little to calm internal concerns during a three-hour meeting with staff members on Tuesday. According to two people at the meeting, Mr. Smith told the newsroom that he had read the newspaper only a few times in recent months and had not read it at all in the previous 40 years, urging them to increase profits. and said he wanted the publication to emulate the local Sinclair station, Fox45. He also told the meeting that he wanted the newspaper to cover corruption. (The Sun won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for doing precisely that.)
“I think it will spell disaster,” John E. McIntyre, editor of The Sun for 34 years, said of Smith’s ownership. McIntyre accepted a buyout in 2021 and now freelances occasionally for the city’s new rival, The Baltimore Banner.
“What I hope is that he follows through on what he said and turns the Baltimore Sun into what his television station Fox45 is: a megaphone for right-wing misinformation and disdain for the city of Baltimore,” McIntyre said. aggregate.
The Sun, Maryland’s largest newspaper, has struggled in recent years with declining advertising revenue and print circulation, the same headwinds that plague nearly all newspapers. The newspaper once had around 500 journalists and numerous foreign offices. Now The Sun and its sister newspapers employ around 150 people, including those in the business sector.
In 2021, Alden Global Capital, an investment firm whose strategy is to buy local newspapers before cutting costs, bought The Sun. Newspaper employees and others in the community tried to prevent Alden’s purchase. In February 2021, Stewart Bainum Jr., a Maryland hotel magnate and lifelong Democrat, reached a deal to buy The Sun and two of its sister newspapers for $65 million, with a plan to run them through a non-profit organization.
But that deal fell through, and Bainum ended up founding the local rival news organization, The Baltimore Banner, which hired some of The Sun’s best reporters and nearly doubled its newsroom to 70 in less than two years, about the same size as Sun. Ad reported earlier this week about the staff meeting with Mr. Smith.
Smith bought The Sun and several other newspapers from Alden on January 12 with a partner, Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator. The new owners said they had used personal funds independent of Sinclair. The price of the deal was not disclosed, but Smith said in the newsroom at the meeting that the deal was in the “nine figures,” or at least $100 million.
Guy Gilmore, chief operating officer of Alden’s MediaNews Group, said in a statement: “We are always open to discussions about local ownership and are pleased that our preeminent newspaper operating and technology platform will continue to serve The Baltimore Sun.”
Smith declined to comment for this article through a representative. He told The Sun in an interview Monday that he had bought the paper because “we have an absolute responsibility to serve the public interest” and that he thought the paper could be “hugely profitable.”
Williams, his business partner, said in a telephone interview Friday that employees had misinterpreted Smith’s comments at the staff meeting.
“What matters is what we do, that’s what we will be judged by, not what someone says in the first meeting, but what we do day to day in that newsroom,” Williams said.
He added: “Why would we spend a fortune buying this to destroy it? That makes no sense”.
Mr. Williams owns a Sinclair-affiliated media company and has had a long career as a radio and television talk show host and columnist. In 2005, Mr. Williams admitted that the George W. Bush administration had paid him $240,000 to promote the government’s “No Child Left Behind” law in his columns and elsewhere.
Williams said personal politics would “absolutely not” affect The Sun’s journalism and he wanted rigorous and objective reporting. “More than anything, we need balance in news coverage,” she said.
Trif Alatzas, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Sun, would continue in those roles, Williams said.
The Baltimore Sun Guild, which represents the newspaper’s journalists, said in a statement after staff meeting: “The editorial direction he described (focused on clicks rather than news value) worried many of our members, as did his attitude toward vulnerable communities in the city we love.”
Sun journalists have not heard from or seen Mr. Smith since the meeting, said two staffers who spoke on condition of anonymity. Nothing has immediately changed in his daily work, the people said.
The Sun has continued to cover its new owner. An article published on Wednesday reported that Mr. Smith contributed $100,000 to a PAC supporting Sheila Dixon, a Democrat and former mayor of Baltimore who is challenging the city’s current mayor. On Thursday, the newspaper published an article about Mr. Smith’s involvement in funding a ballot petition calling for Baltimore City Council to be reduced by half.
Bainum said in an interview Friday that The Baltimore Banner had seen a big increase in new subscriptions since announcing the sale of The Sun.
“We launched Banner 19 months ago to bring more high-quality journalism to Baltimore and Maryland,” he said. “If this sale of The Sun achieves even more of that, it will certainly be a boost for the region. The more local news, the better.”
Outside critics have been pessimistic about The Sun’s new ownership. The Guardian media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote: “You often hear the desire for more local ownership because the national vulture capital chains have done a lot of damage. But as Baltimore’s situation shows, local ownership can be just as bad.”
David Simon, creator of the television show “The Wire” and former Sun reporter, said in a thread on the social media platform
Josh Tyrangiel, a media executive and filmmaker who serves on The Baltimore Banner’s board of directors, said of Mr. Smith in an interview: “He is the Grim Reaper. And since he clearly knows nothing about journalism, he will be a sloppy Grim Reaper.”
“A miserable and undignified death awaits the Sun,” he added.
