Three-thousand miles from Baltimore comes a $500 million deal this week whose impact can be felt in the 500 block of North Calvert Street, where reporters and editors still toil in the remains of The Sun.
The Los Angeles Times has been sold to Patrick Soon-Shiong, a billionaire doctor and entrepreneur. The newspaper’s parent company is Tronc, formerly known as the Chicago Tribune chain, whose corporate stable also includes The Sun.
The sale signals a couple of things. It’s a return to local ownership for The Times, which has long been one of the nation’s classiest papers but has gone through rough seas under Chicago’s stifling corporate culture.
And it signals, as the New York Times reports, “a significant retreat for Tronc, which entertained national and international ambitions.”
That’s where the future gets murkier for Baltimore’s remaining daily newspaper. If Tronc is willing to sell arguably its most prestigious paper (and as part of the same deal, its San Diego Union-Tribune), where does it leave its remaining print dailies, such as New York’s Daily News, the Orlando Sentinel, and Baltimore’s Sun?
They’ve already dramatically downsized the staff at The Sun, and those reporters and editors remaining in the Calvert Street newsroom are packing their notebooks for this summer’s move to South Baltimore’s Port Covington.
Thus will end two-thirds of a century in which the very heartbeat of Baltimore journalism came out of Calvert Street. But in an era in which daily print journalism struggles to hold onto readers, what further impact does Tronc’s sale of The L.A. Times signal here?
Over the last several years, Chicago has entertained several offers for The Sun from local business people with foundation connections, but ultimately turned them down. With the passage of time, and the value of newspapers diminishing steadily, the local offers also diminished dramatically, and then dried up entirely.
In Los Angeles, Dr. Soon-Shiong got two newspapers for $500 million – minus the assumption of $90 million in pension liabilities. There was a time when the L.A. Times alone would have fetched far more than a billion dollars.
Dr. Soon-Shiong will become the latest wealthy businessman to take over ownership of a big-city paper. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post and has brought it new vigor, John Henry bought the Boston Globe, and Sheldon Adelson bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Barring similar purchase by a previously-unknown business person with deep pockets, those still working on Calvert Street wonder what all of this means for The Sun.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been re-issued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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