The Sun's Move Reflects the Newspaper Industry's Tough Times

Sixty-eight years ago, while preparing to turn out The Baltimore Sun’s office lights at downtown’s Baltimore and Charles streets, the newspaper lamented the end of an era in language now echoed in our own time.

“This newspaper’s departure from its birthplace,” an editorial declared, “from the scenes of its childhood, the place where it came of age, arouses a sentimental pang in the hearts of all who work [here].”

Back then, the newspaper was so central to the life of Baltimore that its location was known as Sun Square, and its reason for moving was implicitly triumphant. They needed larger quarters, and they needed quicker highway outlets.

In crowded downtown Baltimore, post-war traffic made it difficult to get all those newspaper trucks out to all those hungry readers, many of whom were moving to suburbia, which made it even tougher to reach them.

The Baltimore Sun Building — The Baltimore Sun building on Calvert Street (Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

That was the year, 1950, that The Sun (and its sister, the now-departed Evening Sun) moved to 501 N. Calvert St., the big building they’ve begun abandoning now, for reasons completely unlike those of 68 years ago.

The building’s too big, and too expensive, for the poignant and ongoing downsizing of the 21st century version of The Sun.

A lengthy front-page story in Sunday’s paper – “Farewell Calvert Street, Hello Port Covington” — told much of the story, though it seemed a little coy about the reasoning behind the move.

“With the lease expiring …” the story notes in its third paragraph, as though that’s the main impulse for relocating. It goes into no further explicit depth, as though readers hadn’t been paying attention over the past decade as the paper lost thousands of readers, millions in advertising revenues, and hundreds of employees, including most its newsroom staff.

All of this is a reflection of the newspaper business all over the country. In 1950, when the paper was moving from Sun Square to Calvert Street, a study by the American Newspaper Publishers Association said there were 100 million newspaper readers – in a nation of 150 million people.

Today, in a nation with more than twice that population, a 2017 Pew Research Center study reported a 31 million weekday circulation for U.S. daily newspapers. A Pew Center analysis of a Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Statistics survey recently found that newsroom employment has dropped by 45 percent over the past decade.

A handful of the best newspapers – The New York Times, The Washington Post, which are also the papers with the deepest pockets — are moving with measured success to the digital age. The Sun has “a website that reaches a larger audience” than the print edition, Sunday’s story notes.

But it does not note specific website figures, nor has the paper made such figures public since the paper put in an electronic paywall a few years ago.

The move to South Baltimore’s Port Covington area marks a symbolic shift as well as a geographical move. Just as newspapers were once central to the life of a community, The Sun’s Calvert Street offices were located a quick walk to City Hall and the downtown courthouses and bustling business districts, all of which were covered by the paper’s reporters.

Now, they’ll need cars to get there. Port Covington’s down there on the other side of people’s consciousness – as are, sadly, a lot of newspapers themselves.

The Calvert Street offices were sold to Atapco Properties, which reportedly will consider mixed-use development that might include a hotel, restaurant, grocery store and performance space.

Maybe they’ll even find room to stack a few newspapers there.

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.