Local newspapers are withering under destructive owners. We should worry - The Guardian

Paul Moore vividly remembers the Baltimore Sun in its heyday, not so long ago.

“More than 400 newsroom staff, six foreign bureaus and a 12-person Washington bureau,” Moore recalled. He was the Sun’s deputy managing editor (and, for a time, its public editor) until 2009. “We were a full-service newspaper, covering the country, the region and the world.” And winning multiple Pulitzer prizes for the quality of its aggressive, ambitious journalism.

Then came all manner of misfortune – a series of bad owners, the stunning downturn in newspaper economics and – just this week – the paper’s purchase by David D Smith, who runs Sinclair Inc, a Maryland-based media company that made itself infamous a few years ago when it ordered its local journalists in dozens of markets to repeat, word for word, the same rightwing “editorial” about fake news. The identical segments had a hostage-video vibe.

This wasn’t news; it was Trump-inspired propaganda, carried out with all the finesse of a bulldozer blasting into a Waterford crystal factory.

“Everyone I know who cares about the Sun is aghast,” Moore told me by phone this week after the sale became public.

That’s because they all know the answer to the question posed by Joshua Benton in Nieman Lab: “Is there something worse for a newspaper than being owned by Alden Global Capital?”

Alden, reviled in the industry for strip-mining newspapers all over the country, was the Sun’s most recent owner. The once-robust staff has shrunk to well under 100.

But it turns out that Alden has something going for it: its executives don’t care about the content. That’s terrible, on one hand, because they ruthlessly slash the number of journalists in order to maximize profit. But they generally don’t impose their politics on the newsrooms.

Now the even-worse alternative has arrived.

In a demoralizing three-hour meeting this week, Smith told Sun staffers he “has only read the paper four times in the past few months, insulted the quality of their journalism and encouraged them to emulate a TV station owned by his broadcast company”, reported the Baltimore Banner, the digital startup that competes with the Sun.

Several times he told the journalists he had “no idea what you do”.

But they know what he does. For instance, as Benton recalled, Smith met with Donald Trump in 2016 and assured him his reporters stood ready to help: “We are here to deliver your message. Period.” After the election, Sinclair brought in the former Trump aide Boris Epshteyn as its “chief political analyst” and the TV stations were ordered to broadcast Epshteyn’s rightwing commentaries during their local news segments.

As David Simon, the former Sun journalist who created the renowned HBO series The Wire, put it: “The Baltimore Sun is now owned by someone who has delivered a news product with a hard ideological premise and then tailors all coverage and editorializing to fit.”

Simon urged Baltimore residents to support the Banner, founded with funding from the Maryland hotel magnate Stewart Bainum, who unsuccessfully tried to buy the Sun from Alden a few years ago.

Simon called the Banner “the last, best hope” for civic-minded news coverage in the region.

Baltimore is merely a particularly grim point of reference in the depressing trend I wrote about in my 2020 book, Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy.

For me, there’s a personal sadness. I have mourned as the vibrant regional newspaper where I spent three decades, the Buffalo News, has withered under chain ownership after being sold by longtime owner Warren Buffett; the News somehow still manages to do good work, as has the Sun in recent years.

You can see this trend almost everywhere. Newspapers have faded and the growth of digital news outlets – while encouraging – hasn’t kept up with the losses. There are far fewer reporters now than 15 years ago, and they are much more concentrated in places like Washington DC and New York City. Local newspapers go out of business every week.

That turns huge swaths of the US into “news deserts” – places where there is virtually no credible local journalism. Democracy suffers as citizens become less engaged and more polarized, and as government corruption flourishes because the watchdog has gone silent.

The irony is that local and regional journalism is more trusted than national reporting. But the old business model has failed as its lifeblood (print advertising) has dried up; digital advertising and subscriptions haven’t come on strong enough, and hedge funds have swooped in to peck out the end-stage profits.

Amid this nightmare, one often hears the wish for more local ownership because national vulture-capital chains have done so much damage.

But as Baltimore’s situation shows, local ownership can be just as bad. From the early signs – and given Sinclair’s history – it may be even worse.