Of all the things written about newspapers, a favorite of many reporters is Thomas Jefferson’s remark that if he had to choose between having newspapers or government, one or the other, he’d take the press. We are professionally inclined to overlook Jefferson’s complete change of mind once he became president. But let’s take him at his earlier word and suppose he had had the chance to follow the long history of the Baltimore Sun as an independent newspaper. May we further suppose he might have been pleased with its generally vigorous, wide-reaching, thorough, and often intelligent operation? We think so—up to a point.
There were lapses, the worst during the Civil War when the paper’s ink-stained founder sympathized with the rebellion, privately. Otherwise, he might have ended up in a lockup at Fort McHenry. In later years the paper was slow to get on the right side of civil rights.
But whatever its occasional shortcomings, the Sun had persistent strengths, and overall it did pretty well. It was diligent in covering Baltimore and the state of Maryland. For that reason, and because it was seen systematically to hold public officials accountable, its influence in those precincts remained consistently strong over time. In fact, as Sandy Banisky observes in her chapter, the Sun “guided the community conversation.”
The Life of Kings is not a history of the Sun, but a little of its storied past is worth recalling here to frame the accounts of the reporters and editors in this volume about a recent time when newspapers were still thriving as agents of civic virtue and sources of wealth.
From the outset, the Sun had large ambitions: it wanted a voice in the national conversation.
Arunah S. Abell, the printer who launched the Sun in 1837, saw the possibilities of a presence in Washington, only thirty-eight miles away, an hour or so by the newly built railroad. (Chicago, a village at the time, was weeks away from Washington by Conestoga wagon. Los Angeles was still part of Mexico.) Abell almost immediately hired a Washington correspondent, whose first dispatch, it must be said, was a little soft on news. He reported on the postponement of a court case and expressed satisfaction that the new president (van Buren) was buying American-made furniture for “the palace” (the White House), a welcome change from “the late Mr. Monroe [who] raised a breeze by importing his chairs from England.” As for the chief executive, “The President is well, and, for aught I know, is happy. Yours truly.”
Things got better. The paper’s biggest coup in the early years sealed a connection with the White House. In 1847, thanks to a pony express courier system that Abell set up to bring news of the Mexican War quickly from the U.S. Gulf Coast, President Polk was first informed by the Sun of the decisive American victory at Vera Cruz. The Sun not only beat other papers; it was ahead of the War Department with the information. Polk expressed his gratitude in a letter to Abell. Not bad for a paper that sold for a penny.
Before long the Sun was a factor in Washington, whose own papers were weak or far too partisan. It could be delivered to homes and government offices in the capital with a fairly complete Washington news report at the same time as it was circulated in Baltimore—and hours ahead of the big New York papers. Sometime in the 1850s, Joseph Gales Jr., publisher of the National Intelligencer, Washington’s oldest newspaper, was asked by someone he passed on the street, “What’s the news?” “I don’t know,” Gales replied. “I haven’t yet seen the Sun.”
Later, Grover Cleveland as president would have a special affection for the Sun. As would Woodrow Wilson, whose nomination in 1912 at the Democratic Convention in Baltimore had a good deal to do with the Sun’s exertions on his behalf. The president’s inner circle chose the paper’s chief Washington correspondent, J. Fred Essary, to tell the world that Wilson had had a stroke. In his diary on April 27, 1920, Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels noted of Wilson, “Only reads the Balti. Sun in the morning & rarely sees other papers.”
The Sun was one of three out-of-town papers Franklin D. Roosevelt read every day when he had breakfast in bed at 8:30. Harry Truman made it a habitual morning read along with the New York Times and the Post. Lyndon B. Johnson was a close reader of the Sun, especially where it concerned him. Jimmy Carter wrote an essay for the inauguration of the Sun’s Op-Ed page in 1977. With its large Washington bureau, the Sun was a serious player. More important, the paper’s readers were favored with a full report of reliable news from the capital.
Through the 1920s and 1930s, the Sun was a force in the national culture wars. A good example was the Monkey Trial in the summer of 1925. At H. L. Mencken’s initiative, the Sun loudly took up the cause of John Scopes, the Tennessee high school teacher who defied a state ban on teaching evolution in the classroom (figure I.1). Mencken recruited Clarence Darrow, the country’s leading trial lawyer, to defend Scopes. To cover the trial, the Sun sent Mencken, two reporters, and the editorial cartoonist Edmund Duffy. When Scopes was convicted, the Evening Sun paid his fine.
During World War II, the Sun fielded an impressive team of war correspondents whose work was revived in the 2009 book by Joseph R. L. Sterne, Combat Correspondents: The Baltimore Sun in World War II. In the postwar period, as the United States deepened its involvement overseas, the Sun expanded its foreign operation to as many as nine bureaus at one time. No American newspaper of comparable size had such a long foreign reach.
Baltimore and its surroundings retained most of the Sun’s interest and resources. The paper’s coverage of the city and state was dense, from the proceedings of the state legislature in Annapolis down to regular meetings of the city liquor board in Baltimore, where a politician’s fingerprints might be found on the transfer of a liquor license.
The Sun newsroom typically had beat reporters covering the State House, City Hall, Baltimore County, Anne Arundel County, Howard County, Harford County, the Eastern Shore, city courts, state courts, federal court, labor, poverty/social services, state politics, housing, transportation, aviation, the police districts, zoning/planning, regulatory agencies, the environment, medicine, science, education (lower), education (higher), investigative, the black community, religion, and obituaries. Moreover (not counting the sports, business, and features sections), there were several general assignment reporters and rewrite men (and eventually women). Most reporters (except the investigative team, or anybody on a project) filed daily. It didn’t always make for a very lively read, but it sure was thorough. The Sun was the paper of record.
The strength of the Sun was organically connected to the way it trained its reporters. New hires, no matter what their previous experience, were required to go through what amounted to an apprenticeship in the police districts. The period covering cops could be a matter of months, or a couple of years. (By the time the reporters in this volume began at the Sun, these routines had long been in place.)
The immediate advantage of this arrangement was that the new reporter learned the city in its grim and sometimes comical particulars. For the longer term, the reporter was expected to form good habits under the close supervision of the city desk: an appetite for news, eye for detail, ear for patterns of speech (easy in Baltimore), and strict attention to accuracy. (For more on how the system worked, see Russell Baker’s chapter, “Getting Started.”) The intention was to produce not just a good reporter, but a good Sun reporter.
The foundation of everything was trust.
Figure I.1. When science teacher John Scopes went on trial in Tennessee in 1925 for teaching evolution, the Sun sent H. L. Mencken and cartoonist Edmund Duffy to cover the proceedings.
Edmund Duffy, courtesy of Baltimore Sun Media Group, all rights reserved.
As the reporter demonstrated that he was getting things right without too much prodding, he would be brought inside periodically for general assignment, doing small-bore stories such as a dinner meeting of the Eastern Shore Society with its exotic fare of Maryland beaten biscuits and muskrat (or “marsh rabbit,” as the more fastidious called it). Then after a couple of weeks back out to the districts.
At some point, when the districts reporter had won the absolute confidence of the desk, he (or she) was brought inside for good, at the start to do obits or a low-pressure beat pretty far down the hierarchy—and hope, eventually, for City Hall, Annapolis, Washington, or London with the confidence that nobody would be brought in from outside to jump the queue.
It depended on the work. The more the reporter showed he could do it, the more independence he accumulated until, at some undefined point, he was practically a free agent on his beat. For good reason, the Sun was widely known in the trade as a reporter’s newspaper.
Mencken got it right. The paper opened up a domain no other enterprise could match, and gave reporters the authority to explore its subjects. We were able to visit fabulous or dangerous places on somebody else’s dollar and write about it. We could ask questions of anybody. With a little digging, we might find out things nobody had known before, even important things. We could go places no civilian could go. For the energetically curious, there was no better realm.
Along with the freedom, so rare in the universe of work, now and then there was the perfect enjoyment of what we got to do. Some of us have had assignments—I know I have—that we would have paid to do, in theory, at least. And in the lore, there was much talk about long dinners at grand watering holes at the end of the day. (As a friend of mine, the AP correspondent Hugh Mulligan, was fond of saying, “There’s only two things you need to be able to say in any foreign language: ‘What’s the best restaurant in town?’ and ‘My friend will pay.’”) There was also a lot of standing around in the rain waiting for something to happen, or weeks going through dusty records—not such heroic memories.
This collection is by men and women who worked at the Sun before it became the kind of corporate newspaper where the overriding aim is profit. Their stories combine for a picture of what it was like to write and report in what may have been the last golden age of American newspapers—when journalism sometimes seemed like “the life of kings.” The moment may never come again. The newspaper industry has been shaken by disruptive technologies and stifled by the rule of accountants. More and more independent dailies are being driven into the corporate fold; at latest count, about 80 percent of daily newspapers in the United States were owned by corporate chains. We can’t do much against the powerful economic forces at work. But we can recall the standards that made the Sun and other fine independent newspapers a bulwark of civic life for so long. Our hope is that what comes through in our work here is a realization that the core principles guiding us then are no less valid for the new forms of journalism that are replacing the ones we practiced. While most of us may have operated a little short of chivalry, we still kept close a strong sense of the public interest in whose name we were acting, a reverence for accuracy, and an obligation to keep faith with the reader.
This book is not a lament. Yet it is hard to forget what has been lost.
The Sun was a paper controlled for most of its history by a few families who valued their property as an indispensable tool of citizenship no less than as a source of sometimes modest profits. The proprietors did not bend to the vicissitudes of the economic cycle by ordering staff cuts in bad times to maintain income. They took the long view, knowing that the basis of financial success was the maintenance of public trust that came from consistently good journalism.
The owners hired the publisher who hired the news executives, giving them liberty to run things. Shortly after he was named publisher in 1951, William F. Schmick Sr. told his top men: “You’re the editors. I want you to keep running the paper as you have been.” His son, William F. Schmick Jr., who succeeded him, had the same attitude (adding to a strong protective barrier between the newsroom and advertisers). And so on down the line. When Charles H. Dorsey Jr., the managing editor, sent Peter Kumpa out on his first foreign assignment, Kumpa asked Dorsey what stories he should go for first. The managing editor replied, “If I didn’t think you were a good reporter, I wouldn’t send you abroad. I’m the editor, you’re the reporter. . . . You find out where the news is.” So, too, it went in the city room.
The owners didn’t scrimp. To make sure their readers got a first-rate daily report on the national government, they underwrote a staff of up to fifteen full-time reporters in Washington, as large as the bureau of the Chicago Tribune, which had a circulation four times as great, and double the Boston Globe’s, whose circulation was two and a half times as large. The same held true for foreign reporting, which gave Sun readers a unique account of the world outside the United States.
For local coverage, the heart of the operation, the outlays were much greater. At one point the Sun’s news staff totaled 423 people, according to Michael E. Waller, who was publisher from 1997 to 2002. The Sun created a community, connecting a couple hundred thousand people a day with a sense of shared experience.
One measure used by journalism academics is capacity, a metric that is supposed to predict the quality of newspapers based on the resources the paper devotes to newsgathering. Capacity is the ratio of staff to circulation. The rule of thumb is that a good newspaper employs one staffer for each thousand of circulation. The average for good papers comes in at about 0.98. The Sun’s average capacity in the decades before the Chicago Tribune conglomerate bought the newspaper in 2000 was about 1.6—far higher than the industry standard.
Here’s what has changed under Tribune ownership. From nine foreign bureaus, today there are none. The Sun’s Washington bureau, one of the oldest continuous news outposts in the capital, was shut down. The newspaper’s circulation, which stood at 314,819 in 1999, on the eve of Tribune’s purchase, shrank to less than half that in the intervening years—to 247,193 in 2005, 186,639 in 2009, 170,510 in 2011, 152,397 in 2012, 139,094 in 2013, and average weekly circulation of 99,765 in 2014. The newsroom staff was cut to about eighty people, one-fifth of its previous peak, reducing the Sun’s capacity number to 0.52. On a typical weekday in the late 1970s, the morning Sun published sixty-four pages with about sixty articles, most of them staff written. These days, the paper has maybe thirty-six pages with about twenty news spreads. These are the results of a deliberate corporate policy to protect the balance sheet by cutting expenses. There is no longer any pretense of national prominence.
The first important break with the past, the preliminary cause of the present circumstances, was the decision in 1986 by the Sun’s owners to sell to Times Mirror, the rich and highly regarded group of papers with the Los Angeles Times at its center. Times Mirror was an indulgent patron, with respect for the Sun and for good journalism. Things held steady for a while as Baltimore retained a great deal of autonomy and made, as it turned out, a nice profit. Times Mirror’s touch was so light that editors and reporters operated pretty much as they had before. The calculus changed altogether when Times Mirror sold itself to Tribune and the Sun became what Chicago primarily saw as a profit center. Basically unprepared for the Internet, Tribune was blindsided by it, as were many others who mistook it for a mere appliance. The present-day paper is trying to recover.
It has a lively local news report, limited by the budget restrictions Chicago imposes. The Sun has shown a strong pulse, especially evident during the Baltimore race riots of 2015, when editors and reporters worked practically without rest and produced excellent reporting on the disturbances and their causes. Parallel to the print coverage, reporters filed online around the clock, resulting in awards for breaking news and explanatory reporting from the Online News Association.
As the Internet upended the old newspaper culture, so the Tribune overran the old Sun’s with barely a backward glance. An unfortunate example of this led to James Bready’s accidental discovery in the spring of 2002.
Retired from a long career as an editorial writer, Bready still wrote a books column, which allowed him regular visits to the paper. On one of these visits, he noticed something unusual near the back door in the basement: stacks of what looked like old ledgers on two pallets that were headed for the dumpster. Bready investigated and found in the stacks the original cash ledger of Arunah S. Abell from the Sun’s first day of publication on May 17, 1837, along with all the other handwritten financial registers of the paper through 1979.
Here, in one place, was the secret financial story of one of the country’s oldest and most venerable newspapers, whose owners never, ever disclosed the details of their operation.
What did Abell pay his printers? 0.02 cents an em. Who were Abell’s biggest advertisers in those early days? Dr. Benjamin Brandreth for his Brandreth Vegetable Pills Good for Asthma, Costiveness, Dyspepsia, Bile &c., and Dr. William Evans for his Evans’s Camomile Tonic Pills for Ladies Especially Who Suffer from Nausea and Lassitude Incidental to Interesting Changes of Health.
What was Abell’s cash take on the first day? $149.16. How many extra papers did Abell print on April 10, 1847, the day of his Vera Cruz exclusive? 5,458. What was the Sunpapers’ net profit in 1951? $1,430,686.58. What was the dividend paid on July 31, 1974? $3 a share. What did the morning Sun spend on news gathering and editorial in 1979? $7,920,701. How much cash was on hand going into 1980? $47,731,326 in bank deposits, stocks, and bonds.
Contained in the ledgers was a case history of an important newspaper’s finances growing in parallel with the expanding republic. A historian’s dream—headed for the trash heap.
I can quote from the ledgers only because Jim Bready rescued them. He arranged for their safekeeping with Thomas Beck, the chief curator of Special Collections at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where they reside today.
Stephens Broening
November 2015