Baltimore Sun staff clash with new owner: ‘Don’t know how to reason with him’

“Literally have not read the newspaper. … I read the paper maybe four times since I started working on trying to buy this place,” Smith said, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by The Washington Post.

Regardless, Smith seemed to have strong opinions — negative ones — about the Sun and the fleet of suburban papers he purchased alongside it, which he laid out in a tense, 2½-hour meeting that left many staffers baffled about the multimillionaire’s intentions for the city’s 186-year-old newspaper.

He suggested that the Sun overlooks the stories readers crave about crime and government dysfunction. (Retorted one journalist: “We’re a Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom,” most recently in 2020, for a fraud investigation that forced the mayor to resign.) He stood by a 2018 interview in which he called print media “meaningless dribble.” And, when pressed, he said he mostly thought the same of the Sun.

“Just look at the data,” he said, citing declining print circulation, though newspapers nationwide have been affected by the same decades-long shift in the public’s reading habits.

In recent years, many journalists have waxed nostalgic for the era of family newspaper dynasties, when owners with deep local roots and deep emotional investments in local news made executive decisions — instead of distant corporations responding to the whims of Wall Street and global economic pressures.

That has certainly been the case in Baltimore, where the Sun suffered years of cutbacks after it was consolidated into the Tribune newspaper chain, even before it was purchased almost three years ago by a financial-management firm with a reputation for slashing jobs and shuttering newsrooms.

But while many Sun reporters yearned to break away from that firm, Alden Global Capital, Monday’s unexpected news that their paper had been sold to an independent local buyer has triggered more concern than joy — especially after meeting with Smith, executive chairman of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, whose nearly 200 local TV stations have shown a marked conservative bent in recent years.

In their meeting — some details of which were previously reported by the Baltimore Banner and NPR — Smith professed to know little about the newspaper business other than that it’s a business. “Your job is to manufacture content,” he said, according to the audio recording, “a product that people want.”

One former top Sun editor said that the drama around Smith’s purchase will make this “one of the most fascinating local news acquisitions in the country to watch” in coming months.

“Generally, research has shown that local ownership is good for regional news organizations,” ushering in greater investment and renewed local coverage, said Tim Franklin, a former Sun executive editor and now a senior associate dean at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. “The concern here is whether he will use the Sun to advance his ideological agenda.”

Smith turned down a request for an interview Tuesday, but his spokesman said that the new owner “looks forward to having the Baltimore Sun cover important, impactful stories to make a difference in the community” and that he “believes one of the primary purposes of the newspaper is to serve the public interest.”

Sinclair has drawn criticism for integrating conservative and right-wing commentary, frequently on hot-button national topics, into its local TV news coverage — a deviation in an industry that has usually aspired to strike a nonpartisan tone. In 2018, it required anchors nationwide to read a script condemning “fake news,” invoking President Donald Trump’s derogatory term for news media.

Smith insisted in his meeting with staffers that he doesn’t care about politics. “I don’t trust any politicians under any circumstances,” he said. “I don’t trust government under any circumstance.”

Records show that he last made campaign contributions in 2018, when he donated to a few Democrats along with a mostly Republican slate.

But tax forms show that his family’s foundation has contributed generously to conservative and right-wing advocacy groups that have inserted themselves into some of the nation’s most polarizing discussions. The David D. Smith Family Foundation gave $275,000 in 2021 and $261,000 in 2019 to Project Veritas, a right-wing organization known for undercover sting operations on journalists, government officials and political activists. It also contributed $121,000 in 2018 to Moms for America, a conservative activist group that says it “empowers moms to raise patriots and promote liberty” and has joined campaigns to remove books it finds controversial from public schools.

The Baltimore Sun Guild, the union representing Sun staffers, said in a statement Wednesday that the editorial direction described by Smith “focused on clicks rather than journalistic value,” which “concerned many of our members.”

“We don’t know how to reason with him,” one Sun staffer told The Post after the meeting, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preserve working relationships. “Because he is so uninformed about print media standards and journalism ethics as a whole.”

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While Smith’s plans for the Sun remained murky, many in Baltimore also puzzled over the reasons Alden decided to sell it — especially just a couple of years after rebuffing an effort from another deep-pocketed Maryland businessman.

In 2021, when the Tribune was in the process of selling its newspaper holdings to Alden, Stewart Bainum Jr. — executive chairman of Choice Hotels and a former Democratic state senator — attempted to buy the Sun for $65 million.

But that deal fell apart over the multimillion-dollar fees Alden would have demanded from a detached Sun to keep providing the business and administrative services that had been consolidated under the Tribune chain.

Bainum instead launched the Banner, a local news nonprofit that now employs more than 100 people, about 15 percent of whom came from the Sun.

Rick Edmonds, a media analyst for the Poynter Institute, said that competition from the Banner may have dissuaded Alden from many of its usual cost-cutting regimens at the Sun, which still employs around 150 people.

Under Alden, the Sun shuttered its printing press and laid off its 100 workers. But the newsroom hasn’t been subjected to the same kind of slashing Alden has done at other newspapers, Edmonds said — which may also explain Alden’s reasons for offloading the Sun.

Usually, he said, Alden “can take the paper down in quality, and people who still really want to have a newspaper won’t like it — but they can still make some money and have some customers.” However, “all those numbers get worse when you have an ambitious competitor.”

Smith’s price for the Sun and its affiliated suburban papers — which include the Capital Gazette of Annapolis, the Carroll County Times and several weekly papers — has not been made public. He mentioned in passing in Tuesday’s staff meeting that he paid “nine figures.” It was unclear whether that sum includes the fees he told the Sun he will pay to Alden’s MediaNews Group for business services.

In a statement about the sale, MediaNews Group’s chief operating officer, Guy Gilmore, said: “We are always open to discussions about local ownership and pleased that our preeminent newspaper operating and technology platform will continue to provide services for The Baltimore Sun.”

Smith repeatedly bashed the Banner in his meeting with Sun staff. “It’s just a matter of time before they’re gone,” he said. “They won’t survive. In fact, if anybody thinks they’ll survive, I’m happy to give you odds and take your money.”

(Bainum, in a note to Banner staff Monday, said, “We welcome more and better coverage in the Sun, and wish the new, local ownership the best of luck” — and assured them that “it doesn’t change our mission, our commitment, and our plans in any way at all.”)

Smith held up one of Sinclair’s Baltimore TV stations, Fox45, as what he sees as an exemplar of successful local news coverage, “despite the fact that people might say it’s a crazy, right-wing [station],” he said. “I’ve been called that by everybody, Democrats and Republicans.”

Franklin, the former Sun executive editor, said that any changes in the paper’s editorial pages will suggest the future Smith has in mind for it. If the newspaper veers into “a rigid, ideological, conservative direction,” he warned, that could hurt the newspaper’s bottom line, given that the Baltimore area is heavily Democratic.

Former Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik, now a professor at Goucher College, said that Fox45’s coverage of Baltimore schools and city hall is considered aggressive but said that it takes a partisan tone. “It fits into a larger pattern of, ‘This is what happens when you let Democrats run your city: It goes to hell.’”

Smith has personally involved himself in local politics. He and his family bankrolled a successful effort to impose term limits on the mayor and city council, as well as a failed effort to allow citizens to recall officials — one that received extensive coverage on Fox45.

During his newsroom meeting, Smith argued with one writer who suggested Fox45’s coverage of whether to recall Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D) — including the station’s promotion of a self-proclaimed “unscientific poll” — was biased.

“This guy bought the Sun, he’s got enough money to wield that kind of power,” said another staffer, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve newsroom confidences. “But how easy will it be for him to bend a newsroom?”

One area on which they did get a specific answer was whether Smith was committed to maintaining a print edition.

“No,” he said bluntly. Smith added that he was, in fact, “committed to getting out of the paper business. I’m a right-wing radical who loves trees,” he said, with a small chuckle. “Reconcile that for me.”

Toward the end of the meeting, Smith went on a tangent about how he believes Baltimore police officers are scared to do their jobs because “they’re terrified of what state government is going to do to them,” noting that the state’s attorney tried to prosecute six officers. “It ruined those people’s lives.”

“I’m sorry, are you talking about the ones who killed Freddie Gray?” a staffer asked, referring to the 2015 death of 25-year-old Gray while in police custody, a galvanizing event that led to widespread protests across the city, some turning violent. Three of the officers involved were acquitted, while charges against the others were dropped.

A tense exchange followed.

“You may believe that they killed somebody,” Smith said. “I’m not here to tell you they did or didn’t.”

The Sun was a Pulitzer finalist for its coverage of Gray’s death.

Monika Mathur and Sarah Ellison contributed to this report.