Crossroads at The Sun

The Baltimore Sun now comes to a crossroads moment: all local efforts to buy the newspaper from the Chicago Tribune corporation, quietly conducted over the past dozen years, are now going public.

At stake is the very character of the 173-year-old Sun, whose dwindling circulation and advertising over the past decade have mirrored the decline of print publications across the United States.

“If a city loses its professional sports teams, it loses its spirit,” said Ted Venetoulis, former Baltimore County executive and newspaper and magazine publisher. “If a city loses its newspaper, it loses its soul. We fight to keep our ball clubs. It’s time to fight to keep our newspaper.”

Venetoulis and Abell Foundation President Bob Embry have attempted to buy The Sun for more than a decade. Now, their ongoing efforts are being complemented by a public campaign called Save Our Sun, organized by the Washington-Baltimore News Guild and the NewsGuild-CWA.

“We started Save Our Sun to ensure we have the resources we need to keep doing our jobs, preserve newspapering in Baltimore, and prepare a national model for local communities to buy their newspaper back,” said Liz Bowie, a Guild leader and veteran reporter at The Sun.

Venetoulis is an advisor to the Guild effort. He also authored a 2015 report for the Abell Foundation about the possibility of nonprofit digital newsrooms.

Nonprofit ownership would mean that The Sun’s revenue, instead of going to shareholders in a public company, could be poured back into more newsroom jobs, wider coverage and economic sustainability.

There are similar newspaper efforts already underway at the Texas Tribune, Salt Lake Tribune and MinnPost in Minnesota.

With Embry’s guidance, the Abell Foundation — created by the family that founded and later sold The Sun — anticipates that other local institutions will join the Embry-Venetoulis effort.

Matthew D. Gallagher, president and CEO of the Goldseker Foundation, expressed pride “to be a part of this effort to galvanize support behind our local newspaper. The Baltimore Sun has served as a beacon for our city, and this new ownership model will preserve the daily news source we’ve come to depend on.”

In recent months, a series of letters from Embry and Venetoulis to Tribune executives has been met by “a formal response,” Venetoulis said, “but no indication that they’re ready to sell.”

The new effort by the newspaper union is an attempt to take any negotiations public — and quickly — to encourage response from Chicago, whose various owners over the past decade have shown little interest in negotiating.

Now, there’s a new element to local purchasing desires.

Last year, Alden Global Capital, a New York-based hedge fund, purchased 32 percent of Tribune Publishing stock, making them the largest Tribune shareholder. There are reports of Alden purchasing another 20 percent of the company as early as this summer.

Alden already owns more than 100 newspapers, and has consistently made drastic newsroom cuts to boost profit margins.

Sun staffers are now braced for such cuts and anticipate corporate-enforced furloughs, pay reductions and buyouts.

At its peak, The Sun’s newsroom included about 450 journalists. That figure has already been cut to fewer than 100 people.

At its peak, the paper’s daily circulation approached 200,000 but is now “under 80,000,” according to some sources. There are no available circulation figures for the paper’s online circulation.

“We cannot lose reporting capacity in this critical moment,” said Jon Schleuss, NewsGuild-CWA president. “When a community loses a newspaper, corruption goes up, partisanship goes up, and your taxes go up. The Sun holds the powerful accountable and it does that for the people of Maryland.”

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age” (Johns Hopkins University Press).