The Baltimore Sun is the largest general-circulation daily newspaper based in Maryland and provides coverage of local and regional news, events, issues, people, and industries. Founded in 1837, it is currently owned by Tribune Publishing.
History[]
The Sun was founded on May 17, 1837, by printer/editor/publisher/owner Arunah Shepherdson Abell (often listed as "A. S. Abell") and two associates, William Moseley Swain, and Azariah H. Simmons, recently from Philadelphia, where they had started and published the Public Ledger the year before. Abell was born in Rhode Island, became a journalist with the Providence Patriot and later worked with newspapers in New York City and Boston.
The Abell family and descendants owned The Sun until 1910, when the local Black and Garrett families invested in the paper at the suggestion of former rival owner/publisher of The News, Charles H. Grasty, and they, along with Grasty gained a controlling interest; they retained the name A. S. Abell Company for the parent publishing company. That same year The Evening Sun was established under reporter, editor/columnist H.L. Mencken (1880–1956). From 1947 to 1986, The Sun was the owner of Maryland's first television station, WMAR-TV (Channel 2), founded 1947 and longtime affiliate of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) television network, along with several radio stations.
The newspaper opened its first foreign bureau in London in 1924. Between 1955 and 1961, it added four new foreign offices. As Cold War tensions grew, it set up shop in Bonn, West Germany, in February 1955. (The bureau later moved to Berlin.) Eleven months later, The Sun opened a Moscow bureau, becoming one of the first U.S. newspapers to do so. A Rome office followed in July 1957, and in 1961, The Sun expanded to New Delhi. At its height, The Sun ran eight foreign bureaus, giving rise to its boast in a 1983 advertisement that "The Sun never sets on the world."
The paper was sold by Reg Murphy in 1986 to the Times-Mirror Company of the Los Angeles Times. The same week, a 115 year old rivalry ended. The oldest paper in the city, the News American, a Hearst paper since the 1920s, but with roots to 1773, folded. A decade later in 1997, The Sun acquired the Patuxent Publishing Company, a local suburban newspaper publisher that had a stable of 15 weekly papers and a few magazines in several communities and counties.
In the 1990s and 2000s, The Sun began cutting back its foreign coverage. In 1995 and 1996, the paper closed its Tokyo, Mexico City and Berlin bureaus. Two more—Beijing and London—fell victim to cost-cutting in 2005. The final three foreign bureaus—Moscow, Jerusalem, and Johannesburg, South Africa—fell a couple of years later. All were closed by 2008, as the Tribune Co. streamlined and downsized the newspaper chain's foreign reporting. Some material from The Sun's foreign correspondents is archived at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
In the 21st century, The Sun, like most legacy newspapers in the United States, has suffered a number of setbacks in the competition with Internet and other sources, including a decline in readership and ads, a shrinking newsroom staff, and competition in 2005 from The Baltimore Examiner, a free daily that lasted two years to 2007, along with a similar Washington publication of a small chain recently started by new owners that took over the old Hearst flagship paper, the San Francisco Examiner. In 2000, the Times-Mirror company was purchased by the Tribune Company of Chicago. In 2014, it transferred its newspapers, including The Sun, to Tribune Publishing.
On September 19, 2005, and again on August 24, 2008, The Baltimore Sun as the paper now titled itself, introduced new layout designs. Its circulation as of 2010 was 195,561 for the daily edition and 343,552 on Sundays. On April 29, 2009, the Tribune Company announced that it would lay off 61 of the 205 staff members in the Sun newsroom. On September 23, 2011, it was reported that the Baltimore Sun would be moving its web edition behind a paywall starting October 10, 2011.
The Baltimore Sun is the flagship of the Baltimore Sun Media Group, which also produces the b free daily newspaper and more than 30 other Baltimore metropolitan-area community newspapers, magazines and Web sites. BSMG content reaches more than one million Baltimore-area readers each week and is the region's most widely read source of news.
On February 20, 2014, The Baltimore Sun Media Group announced that they would buy the alternative weekly City Paper. In April, the Sun acquired the Maryland publications of Landmark Media Enterprises.