The news about newspapers is pretty terrible these days. Now, we learn that The Baltimore Sun, already in trouble but hoping desperately for a miracle, failed to get one last week.
Shareholders at Tribune Publishing, owner of The Sun and a bunch of other newspapers across the country, voted last Friday, May 21, to sell out to Alden Global Capital.
Alden is a hedge fund with about 200 newspapers already in its portfolio and a track record of heartless newsroom gutting and utter disdain for the role of journalism in a free society.
This is an era of awful newspaper mortality, but it’s about to get worse. In its heyday, The Sun had more than 400 people in its newsroom. Now, it’s down to about 80. But Alden hasn’t even begun to do its usual dirty work here of trying to juice finances by committing newsroom mass murder.
As the New York Times reported in its story the other day on the sale of The Sun, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and other papers to Alden, “More than 2,000 American newspapers closed between 2004 and 2019 and about half of the jobs in the industry were lost.
“The [Tribune] vote underscores the growing might of financial firms in a consolidating media industry. Investors, seeing opportunities to buy distressed assets at bargains, have swooped in over the past decade, with plans to make money by drastically cutting costs, laying off workers, combining operations and selling off real estate holdings.”
At The Sun, hope for salvation rested mainly with Stewart Bainum, the hotel executive whose heart was in the right place but whose bid for sanity from Tribune shareholders fell apart.
At week’s end, hope among Sun staffers rested with Bainum, whose plans included turning The Sun into a nonprofit. In a statement last Friday, he said, “While our effort … has fallen short, the journey reaffirmed my belief that a better model for local news is both possible and necessary.”
Maybe those words are a slim reed of hope, maybe not.
Some time back, the great Washington Post feature writer Henry Allen wrote, “A quarter century ago, when I worked there, the newsroom at the New York Daily News was like a museum of lost air – a smell of paste pots, Aqua Velva and cigarettes stamped out on the floor, the essence of 1948 somehow. … Editors shouted, ‘Boy! Copy!’ and sat at the city desk. …
“I used to feel as if I were walking through the Museum of Natural History, looking at dioramas, the Plains Indians in their teepees, that sort of thing, a gone world. …Who were these guys?”
Whoever they were, they’re mostly gone now. Allen was writing about newspapers of his youth, the 1960s, when people were already beginning to say the game was over. How they’ve lasted this long is sometimes perceived as a “daily miracle,” a play on words from the way we used to describe newspapers themselves.
They’re still here today – barely – and what passes as hope for Baltimore rests right now with the intentions, and the heart, of one man.
Because if we think The Sun has tumbled sadly over the past decade, with the arrival of the cutthroats from Alden, it’s likely we ain’t seen nothing yet.
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,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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