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.
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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.
