Baltimore Sun’s New Co-Owner Says Paper Will Focus on Local, Investigative Coverage

The Baltimore Sun building is seen in Baltimore, Md., on March 11, 2021. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Commentator and entrepreneur Armstrong Williams told The Epoch Times that he intends to boost the appeal of The Baltimore Sun, which he recently acquired, by focusing on hyper-local coverage and investigative reporting that informs readers about issues close to home.

“People want to know what’s going on in their local community,” Mr. Williams said during an interview on Feb. 1.

He suggested that residents wanted to hear less about President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump and more about Maryland’s state legislature.

Mr. Williams, whose company Howard Stirk Holdings owns multiple television stations, said the reason his T.V. ventures have been so successful is because of “localism.”

Mr. Williams is part-owner of the Sun with David D. Smith, who owns Sinclair stations and acquired the Baltimore paper on Jan. 12. According to The Sun, the acquisition returned the paper “to local ownership for the first time in nearly four decades.”

He told The Epoch Times that he intends to leverage his prior experience but clarified that television and print were distinct mediums.

“Since the 1980s ... the print news industry has tried to compete with television by ... dumbing down their papers with big color pictures ... and lots of columnists, and it has been a colossal failure,” he said.

“There’s a difference between readers and viewers,” he added.

“A lot of people, depending on their economic status, just don’t read newspapers. If people want to look at charts, they can watch them in motion on TV and the internet. Some of the best reporters I’ve known haven’t been the most photogenic people. The Baltimore Sun can attract readers by providing original source news that is important to their daily lives. When you attract those readers, advertisers will follow.”

At the same time, he intends to utilize multimedia for both The Sun’s digital version and print. For example, he raised the idea of using QR codes in print so that readers could watch videos associated with a particular story.

Bumpy Transition

Mr. Williams’s and Mr. Smith’s takeover comes after years of print media struggling as an industry—raising questions over whether it’s a dying medium.

Mr. Smith himself caught attention for describing print media as “so left wing as to be meaningless dribble, which accounts for why the industry is and will fade away.”

He reportedly caused some concern when he addressed staff the day after the purchase was announced. According to The Baltimore Banner and Scripps News, Mr. Smith told staff he hadn’t read the paper in decades and urged the staff to follow the example of Fox45, a Sinclair station that focuses on the school system in Baltimore.

“If you knew the corruption and the designed failure of what goes on in the Baltimore City school system, you would shoot somebody,“ Mr. Smith reportedly said. ”Unfortunately, you can’t do that.”

The Banner added: “Reporters repeatedly pressed Smith for answers about whether they would continue public service journalism that didn’t necessarily translate to page views or subscriptions. Smith maintained he was focused on money.”

According to The Banner, Mr. Smith said his purchase of The Sun from Alden Global Capital amounted to “nine figures” or at least $100 million.

Responding to the meeting, the Baltimore Sun Guild, which represents employees, suggested that Mr. Smith was “focused on clicks rather than journalistic value.”

Mr. Williams told The New York Times that employees had misinterpreted his business partner’s comments.

“What matters is what we do — that’s what we’ll be judged by — not what someone says in the first meeting, but what we do day-to-day in that newsroom,” he reportedly said.

Armstrong Williams listens while Dr. Ben Carson talks about the 2016 Presidential Race during a taping of the Armstrong Williams Show on SiriusXM at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 18, 2016. Kirk Irwin/Getty Images for SiriusXM

Mr. Williams previously came under fire for taking money from former President George W. Bush’s administration to promote No Child Left Behind—something for which he has expressed regret.

Mr. Smith declined to comment to the Times, but Mr. Williams reportedly added: “Why would we spend a fortune to buy this to destroy it? That doesn’t make sense.”

Investigative Focus

Both he and Mr. Smith have expressed an interest in investing in investigative reporting.

“Print media can work if you go back to making it work—if you’re willing to make the investments and the investigative reporters and empower them to do their jobs without bias, which is tell the story ... down the middle.”

He added that “the best stories are not what you’re assigned to do. The best stories are when you are out there, and you’re not expecting these stories when they’re unfolding.”

Mr. Williams has also indicated he will bring diverse views to the paper. He was a surrogate for former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson’s presidential campaign and worked for now-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas when he ran the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, according to The Daily Signal.

“It could be a story about fixing the potholes ... It could be a story about trash removal,” he told The Epoch Times. “Somebody has a concept and a perspective on it.”