Stewart Bainum, the Takoma Park philanthropist behind the soon-to-be launched The Baltimore Banner, the new city digital newspaper, has shared this story before, but it bears repeating.

When he served in the General Assembly from 1979 to 1986, reporters from big-city papers like The Baltimore Sun, The Evening Sun, The Baltimore News-American, The Washington Post, and The Washington Star—as well as The Capital and smaller Maryland newspapers–swarmed the General Assembly like bees to a honeypot.

And for good reason. The state had been infamous for its corruption and drama long before the convictions of former governors Spiro Agnew and Marvin Mandel just prior to Bainum’s arrival. Several of the reporters covering Annapolis while he held elected office went on to big careers, including future PBS NewsHour host Gwen Ifill–who covered Bainum’s bill to get rid of a lucrative tax break for a politically connected all-male club in suburban Washington–and future Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd.

As for Bainum, he left politics and took over as CEO of his father’s nursing-home business, which he helped turn into one of the largest in the country. He never forgot, however, the important work of those journalists covering the halls of the Maryland State House, even as The Evening Sun and The Washington Star, where Ifill and Dowd were employed, respectively, fell by the wayside–and newspapers across the board began slashing staffs in the wake of falling print revenues.

Fast-forward to May 2020. Sitting out the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic at his family’s second home on the Eastern Shore, Bainum, who turned 76 last month, began brainstorming his next philanthropic endeavor. He’d made several successful early philanthropic investments in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years, including in a Liberian case-management system that improved infant mortality rates.

Plainspoken, earnest, and still curious-minded–with admittedly enough of an ego that he cares about his legacy–Bainum sought another high-risk, high-public reward venture where others were not yet willing to open their wallets. Ideally, a project with the potential to establish a model that could be replicated and have a broad impact. Ideally, closer to home.

“I started thinking about local news again,” says Bainum, recalling the loss of advertising and subsequent staff cuts plaguing not just The Sun, but institutional newspapers across the country. “How can people govern themselves if they don’t know what is going on in their community? There is no industry more critical to democracy.”

The Sun popped up on Bainum’s radar immediately when he began looking for a legacy paper to save, or at least rebuild. He’d started subscribing 40 years ago as a legislator. The Sun was always a great paper, he says, until about 20 years ago when it began heading in the wrong direction as the industry’s consolidation and digital trends merged into a two-headed existential threat.

In Baltimore, the industry dynamics first shifted when Los Angeles’ Times Mirror Company bought The Sun from its historic A.S. Abell Co. owners in 1986–just 30 hours after Baltimore’s once-beloved News-American, an afternoon paper with a 200-year lineage, folded. They worsened when the Tribune Publishing Company purchased Times Mirror in 2000, The Sun included, on the cusp of the digital revolution. (The internet stripped advertising and subscriptions, as newspapers for too long gave away their content online for free, which proved a boon for Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but sped their own decline.)

Consider that as recently as 2002, The Sun employed some 400 journalists. Today, it’s about 70. The situation went from bad to hellish just before COVID arrived in Maryland, when the hedge fund and well-known newspaper dismantler Alden Global Capital started buying up Tribune stock in a takeover move. Long story short, Bainum’s bid last spring to pry The Sun from Tribune before it sold the 185-year-old paper to Alden didn’t work out. Neither did his subsequent scramble to buy all of Tribune. (Bainum has a lot of money, but not that kind of cash. “I’m not a billionaire,” he says.) Both efforts were rolls of the dice, but he had a back-up plan in his pocket all along–the creation of a nonprofit, digital-only metro newspaper.

“WE’RE PUSHING ALL OUR CHIPS TO THE MIDDLE OF THE TABLE.”

ProPublica, the Pulitzer-Prize winning nonprofit, and The Texas Tribune, a statewide nonprofit specializing in politics and explanatory journalism–each founded more than a decade ago–are two examples of successful online-only news sites. So is the Baltimore Brew, which has been breaking City Hall stories since 2010, and Maryland Matters, which covers state politics and recently celebrated its fifth anniversary.

But what Bainum and his team at the The Baltimore Banner have in mind would break new ground. It’s a thus-far illusive sweet spot somewhere between the national online journalism outlets, which generally focus on an area of expertise, such The Marshall Project and its focus on criminal justice, or more narrowly focused local outlets, like the Brew and Maryland Matters. The best current template is the Daily Memphian, an ambitious metro news site that launched in 2018 with $7 million in funding and a staff of 25, and has since added 10 more journalists. Its founder has been explicit about challenging that city’s Gannett legacy newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, stating that chain ownership inevitably leads to “massive cuts and loss of local focus.”

Bainum’s gamble is of a different scale altogether. He’s pledged to raise, or personally contribute if necessary, $50 million over the next three and a half years in start-up funding. The plan is to launch with 50 journalists–“we’re hiring like mad,” says managing editor Andrea McDaniels, who spent two decades at The Sun–and grow to 70 journalists, a newsroom that would essentially match The Sun.

“We could’ve decided to spread the $50 million over 10 years, but people who have done this tell us, and everything we’ve learned tells us, it’s better to go big early and be competitive from the start,” says Bainum. “We’re pushing all our chips to the middle of the table.”

The first question about The Baltimore Banner–whether or not it will produce content that rivals The Sun–was answered months ago. But not before some initial controversy. In October, The Banner announced in a Washington Post story it had hired Kimi Yoshino, then managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, to serve as as editor in chief. The hire was initially met with a less than enthusiastic response, given Yoshino is from out of town–Baltimoreans are nothing if not parochial–as are Bainum and Banner CEO Imtiaz Patel.

And that, along with high-profile supporters Michael Bloomberg and David Simon, as well as several other white philanthropic consultants, the paper appeared to lack significant Black leadership in what has long been a majority-Black city. A city that has long felt the consequences of racially biased reporting, as The Sun noted in a lengthy apology to its readers in February. Yoshino acknowledges The Post rollout was a mistake, that it was too soon and not well-considered, given her and The Banner’s intentions.

“David Simon emailed me and said you can’t make those kinds of unforced errors, and he put me in touch with [Baltimore native and New York Times best-selling author] D. Watkins,” who is Black, Yoshino recalled recently from The Banner’s temporary downtown co-working space. “D. introduced me to some other Black writers and journalists.”

The Banner then made its first real splash early in the new year with a follow-up announcement: It had hired not just McDaniels, who is Black and a well-respected journalist with leadership experience at The Sun, but also that it had stolen veteran reporters Justin Fenton, Liz Bowie, and Tim Prudente from The Sun, and hired Washington Post music and culture contributor Lawrence Burney, whom Watkins had recommended.

Fenton is the author of the Gun Trace Task Force chronicle, We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption, which David Simon made into his latest HBO project and is set to air this month. He also has nearly quadruple the number of Twitter followers as the next-highest Sun journalist and seven or eight times that of most of the prominent journalists in the city. Bowie is an award-winning education reporter with unparalleled experience on that critical beat. Prudente, who covered the courts and cops at The Sun, has already broken one major story for The Banner–that a city parking garage had been turned into a makeshift morgue to cope with a backlog of autopsies, resulting in the resignation of the state’s chief medical examiner. Burney is the founder of the award-winning Baltimore and Black-centered arts magazine, True Laurels, and brings city music and arts knowledge and relationships that few, if any, other journalists in Baltimore possess.

For his part, Fenton says his move was borne out of the increasing realization that Alden had no intention to retool and rebuild The Sun. “We’ve weathered a lot at the paper over the years and had some departures over the summer that felt like we crossed a plane,” he says, noting the resignations of experienced editors Anne Tallent and Eileen Canzian. “All of a sudden, I went from thinking we’ve been doing good work in spite of our circumstances, [to where] I was worried that we finally actually hit the bone and it was going to be real bad.”

Since that announcement, The Banner has lured away several other key Sun journalists, including Pam Wood, its top state government reporter, and Taylor DeVille, its top Baltimore County reporter, and business and health reporter Hallie Miller. Yoshino also convinced former Sun editor and former L.A. Times colleague Richard Martin to return to Baltimore, and he will serve as deputy editor under McDaniels.

In late April, The Banner also hired two more Black journalists with Baltimore roots, and overall, it seems to be doing better than The Sun in building a diverse staff, which, even after its formal apology, has hired overwhelmingly white replacements to fill the shoes of the journalists who left for The Banner. Leslie Gray Streeter, an accomplished journalist who spent two decades at The Palm Beach Post, will write a regular column for The Banner, and Jasmine Vaughn-Hall, who previously worked at the York Daily Record, will work as a community reporter.

Having established it will produce content that rivals The Sun, two other questions emerge: 1) How will it be different and more interesting than The Sun, if it’s hiring largely former Sun staff and traditional legacy publication journalists at the outset? To date, Burney seems to be the only out-of-the-box editorial hire. And: 2) Can it raise the $15-million annual budget that Bainum and CEO Patel’s research tells them it will need to be sustainable once the initial seed money–which is substantial, make no mistake–runs out?

In terms of offering something unique in comparison to The Sun, Yoshino, McDaniels, Fenton, and Bowie say that there is discussion in their newsroom every day about what defines a “Banner story.” First and foremost, it means a Baltimore and metro-area focus. Readers shouldn’t expect posts on the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the president’s State of the Union on the homepage, for example, not even with an Associated Press byline, unless there is a significant Baltimore angle.

That said, the intention is not to cover every breaking news story, homicide, or fire, the way The Sun does as a matter of practice as the city’s paper of record. There won’t be daily game coverage of the Orioles. Going in, the plan is to do more enterprising, explanatory, and investigative journalism. The kind of work that probes past the “who, what, where” of journalism to the “why and how” questions. To that end, the start-up staff is getting months to dig into, and bank, compelling pieces intended to get The Banner off to a flying start. In-depth local journalism, in other words, that takes time, resources, and commitment that was increasingly in shorter supply at The Sun. It’s work that the City Paper, which Tribune purchased and then shuttered, was known for as well.

In fact, Yoshino, who is cautious about invoking the City Paper because she doesn’t want to alienate its loyal former readership, says The Banner will have a substantial freelance budget like the City Paper, which is a contrast to The Sun and other traditional legacy papers, which are almost entirely staff-written. That should help bring new voices into the city’s journalistic ecosystem.

A formative “creatives in residence” initiative was announced in March. The initial cohort includes D. Watkins, poet and essayist Kondwani Fidel, E.R. Shipp, who won a Pulitzer when she was at the New York Daily News, and Charm City Table blogger Simone Phillips, who has one of the largest social media profiles in Baltimore. Yoshino also said award-winning Baltimore-based photographer Shan Wallace, who should add some striking visual pop, has been hired. Podcasts and more video-oriented journalism are likely just down the road.

As far as revenue, Bainum and Patel envision a mix that is ultimately 50 percent subscriptions, 25 percent ads, 15 percent philanthropic contributions, 5 percent from events, and 5 percent miscellaneous. Subscription prices will be comparable to The Sun, giving Baltimoreans a real choice.

Whether The Banner can become more than the sum of its posts and feel like an integral part of the fabric of Baltimore life the way The Sun, still colloquially referred to by older Baltimoreans as The Sunpapers, and City Paper did remains to be seen. In the battle for pageviews, The Sun certainly hasn’t been so stripped that it’s without familiar bylines. Columnist Dan Rodricks, neighborhood historian Jacques Kelly, obituary writer Fred Rasmussen, enterprise reporter Jean Marbella, and Ravens beat writer Mike Preston, to name a few, all still bring institutional knowledge and journalistic bona fides, which remain in increasingly short supply for newspapers everywhere in the country.

“It was sad to leave The Sun, it’s an institution I love, and I love the people I worked with at The Sun,” says Bowie. “But I also spent 18 months trying to find new ownership and came to see the sustainability of local news coverage is a national problem. I don’t know how to solve this sustainability problem, but Stewart Bainum is committed to finding an answer. This is an opportunity to experiment and create something new that might last. Who knows? Maybe it’ll last 185 years.”

The best possible outcome is that Baltimore becomes a two-newspaper town.

In his 48 years with The Baltimore Sun—29 on the newspaper’s necrology team—Fred Rasmussen has written tens of thousands of obituaries. And ever since COVID-19 struck Maryland, the lifelong journalist, like writers on his beat around the world, has had even more subjects to memorialize.

“Since March of last year, we’ve been totally clobbered,” says Rasmussen. “The submissions outstrip our ability to provide.”

Obituary writing was once considered a backwater of the newspaper business, but for the likes of Rasmussen, commemorating the dead—in his words, those who’ve gone to “bliss eternal”—has become a lively, lasting form of art. For him, writing an obituary is a chance to celebrate a person’s life, no matter who they were.

“We have a saying around here,” he says. “There are no boring lives. There are only dull obits.”

Luckily, there’s no chance of that happening here. The genial, 73-year-old journalist was at one time an aspiring character actor. Instead, he’s just a character—and a local institution in his own right.

“A successful obit should evoke a sense of humanity and never feel like a marble statue,” says obituary writer Adam Bernstein of The Washington Post. “In that spirit, a Fred Rasmussen obit has the feel of a celebration of the best of the community. You get through him a sense of a big city like Baltimore that feels more like a tight-knit village of fascinating characters who each have their important role to play.”

Despite writing what’s known around the halls of the Sun as the “mort du jour” (that is, the longer obituary profiles) for almost three decades, he has never changed his reporting process. He doesn’t like Zoom and prefers a good old-fashioned phone call for his reporting. He’s prone to use words like “skid-doo” and “excelsior!”

“I’m the last person at The Baltimore Sun who uses a pencil to take notes,” he says. “I use pencils and legal pads. And I don’t use a tape recorder, I remember quotes in my head—I’ve been lucky that way.”

Once Rasmussen decides on his subject—through the years that’s everyone from Robert Klein, a retired insurance executive and WWII veteran who helped liberate the Landsberg concentration camp, to Betty Bertaux, who founded the Children’s Chorus of Maryland—he culls “clips” from the newspaper’s extensive archives to gather what’s been written before, interviews the loved ones of the deceased, and then “flies into his dance.”

If his interview subject is too distraught, he might suggest that the subject call him back over a cup of coffee. (Though sometimes, he says, he’s the one who is overcome and needs to put a pause on the process.) He encourages everyone he speaks to—no matter how short a life their loved one has lived or how tragically they’ve died—to honor the deceased by talking about their achievements. (He’s even been known to include crab-cake recipes and lines of poetry in his obits.)

It’s that very folksiness and warmth (“his expansive personality,” is how former Sun managing editor Bill Marimow describes it) that enables him to capture the essence of the deceased, even when it means having to call a parent after the loss of a child or a grieving spouse.

“I think of myself as a kind and understanding person,” he says. “And while I’m looking at the clock, I listen as if I have all the time in the world.”

Former Sun editor Dave Ettlin, who edited Rasmussen in his tenure as the night metro editor for 17 years, is quick to sing his praises. “Fred is a storyteller at heart, and he’s in the right place because he’s telling the stories of people,” says Ettlin. “It takes an art to draw people out, to tell their stories, and he does it—he’s one of the greats.”

While he has always been an empathetic soul, lately, as he grapples with his own grief, Rasmussen can relate to his subjects even more. Two years ago, he lost the love of his life, Judy Nall, whom he met at a Christmas party in 2004. It was a second marriage for both—intense and deep. “My God, she was wonderful,” he says, simply.

“Miss N,” as he affectionately calls her, didn’t want to tie the knot—he did. After some relentless pleading (“I just kept bringing it up until I wore her down, and with a great heave one night, she agreed,” he says), they were married on New Year’s Eve in 2007. “We never had an argument, never slammed the door or threw a frying pan,” he says wistfully.

Tragically, on February 21, 2019, their life together came to a halt when Nall died from complications of an infection. “I couldn’t handle it,” he says. “The first day, my therapist said, ‘There’s no magic switch. I can’t make it go away. You’re going to have to walk down this road through the forest and out the other side. And you’re going to have good days, and then something will happen, and you will fall back.’”

“I’M THE LAST PERSON AT THE BALTIMORE SUN  TO USE PENCILS TO TAKE NOTES.”

A warm spring Monday just after Easter was one of those days, as he sits on the deck of the West Towson Center Hall home he shared with Nall.

“I pulled out a cookbook and a note from her fell out,” he says. “What I’ve learned about grief is that it’s endless. When you lose a child or a spouse, they are irreplaceable.”

Given that he asks others to be candid, Rasmussen is willing to be open about his own love and loss, and he never takes the stories people share for granted.

“You get to meet a lot of great people at the worst moment of their life, after they’ve lost a loved one,” he says. “It’s an honor to have that privilege.”

Ask Rasmussen to name a favorite obit and he’s quick to say, “I like them all in some way,” pointing out that it’s not always someone’s profession that makes them interesting, as was highlighted in the May 2002 obit he wrote on Mt. Vernon dentist Hugh Hicks.

“He collected lightbulbs from all over the world, including lightbulbs from the Empire State Building,” Rasmussen recalls. “The obit hadn’t cooled off before the Smithsonian was at the door wanting to acquire the collection.”

His November 2019 reflections on The Prime Rib owner “Buzz” Beler, for example, are just one example of his pithy prose. “C. Peter ‘Buzz’ Beler, whose out-of-the-way East Chase Street restaurant, The Prime Rib, came to define a certain 1930s sophistication and was known for generous slabs of its namesake dish, signature fried Greenberg potato skins, steak au poivre prepared ‘bleu,’ as the French say, and precisely chilled bluepoints so large they ought to be renamed Titanics, died Oct. 23 in Charlottesville, Virginia,” Rasmussen wrote. “He was 90.”

When asked about his own trajectory from suburban Plainfield, New Jersey, to the hallowed halls of a Pulitzer Prize-winning paper, it’s clear that Rasmussen, an avid reader and history buff at an early age, was destined for a life in journalism. As a teenager, he subbed for his friend Jimmy Maude on his newspaper route, delivering The Plainfield Courier-News on foot.

“That bag was like carrying an 800-pound baby on your side,” he recalls. “And then it was raining or snowing, and people would bitch about the paper because it went in a bush or on the roof. I gave the route back to Jimmy.”

Despite his first failed newspaper job, “printer’s ink was in my blood,” says Rasmussen, whose father worked in production on Fortune magazine, and whose grandfather, Frederick M. Rasmussen, was superintendent of the Jersey City Printing Co. and a close confidante of Time founder Henry Luce.

Rasmussen also grew up in a household where the written word was revered. “My father came home with 18 newspapers because he commuted on the train,” he says, “so we always had piles of newspapers. The New York Herald Tribune, The New York Daily News, with its great pictures of a railroad wreck or a car upside down on the highway. The World Telegram and Sun. All the papers were there, and we’d go on the floor and pore through them—that’s how I was raised.”

After high school, in 1966, Rasmussen attended Boston’s Emerson College in hopes of pursuing an acting career.

“I wanted to be a character actor, but in those days, you had to sing, dance, do comedy, and the straight stuff,” he says. “By my junior year, I thought, ‘Well, I have nothing to give to the American theater, and I really like eating three meals a day, so I know what I’ll do. I’ll do the next best thing. I’ll be a writer!’”

Along the way, he entertained the idea of other careers. “I was interviewed for a job selling insurance at John Hancock in Boston, but I didn’t get the job,” he muses. “One night, I was out drinking with friends at the Copley Plaza, and the man who interviewed me appeared. I went over to him and said, ‘I’m Fred Rasmussen. I’d like to ask a question. Why didn’t I get the job?’ And he said, ‘You wore a bowtie…people who wear bowties are independent—you can’t control them.’”

Ever since, he wears them as a reminder. “The bowtie saved me from a miserable life as an insurance man,” he says with a laugh.

Instead, Rasmussen pursued journalism, working as a freelancer for Boston magazine before setting his sights on the Sun. His then-mother-in-law had worked at the paper and knew legendary columnist H.L. Mencken.

“I always loved the Sun and was a Mencken nut,” he says. Having worked in his college library, he was first hired as a photo librarian in 1973, a position he held for 19 years, overseeing the vast collection’s seven million photographs, while also writing on the side.

“I clawed my way onto the paper and wrote features, book reviews, food and travel stories, and stories about Maryland history,” says Rasmussen, who also wrote the Sun’s long-running “Back Story” column, which looked at historical events and their link to Baltimore.

In the early ’90s, when the paper expanded its coverage and started producing local sections, he was made an editorial assistant for the county editions.

“I covered the boilerplate government stuff and did features,” he says. “They made me a Charles Kuralt-type. I’d go all over the county and write about the people.”

On weekends, he penned the occasional obituary. One day, he wrote an obituary on a businessman who had done a stint in jail for tax evasion. He mentioned the subject’s jail time in the obit—“this is news, not a love letter,” he says—but focused on the fact that the man had redeemed himself.

Shortly after the piece went to press, Rasmussen, who’d received threatening calls from the subject’s friends and acquaintances, was summoned to the Sun offices on Calvert Street by his then-editor Gil Watson. “I got a message, ‘Please come to Baltimore immediately,’” he recalls. He was told to go to the conference room.

“I’m thinking, ‘I must have really done something wrong. This is the end of my life.’ Then [editor] John Carroll and Bill Marimow walked in. Carroll said, ‘We’re going to redo the obit page. We want to open it up to all kinds of people, not just people from Guilford, not just society swells and doctors and lawyers and bankers. We want people from all walks of life, because Baltimore is a city with all kinds of people who live here.’”

Marimow recalls thinking that Rasmussen was the perfect person to put on the obit beat. “I thought, ‘This is a guy who is intelligent, steeped in history and culture, very likeable, and a good writer,” Marimow says.

“The quality, the variety, and the depth of his obituaries really were A-plus journalism,” he continues. “I thought Fred was doing Pulitzer Prize-caliber work. I gave him one mandate, and that was to bring [his subjects] to life. I’d say, ‘Bring ’em back alive’—we joked about that for years to come.”

“PEOPLE LOVE OBITS—WE ARE INNATELY CURIOUS ABOUT EACH OTHER’S LIVES.”

Decades later, Rasmussen is still doing just that. “I really like this job,” he says. “It allows me to combine my love of Maryland and Maryland history. This is an interesting town with lots of great stories, and I like knowing what makes people tick.”

And despite dealing with death on a daily basis—or maybe because of it—Rasmussen retains a sort of gallows humor about the job, including making the occasional gaffe, from the accidental curse word (a typo when referencing the Duda-Ruck Funeral Home once proved unfortunate) to mixing up high-school alma-maters (almost a criminal offense in Baltimore, he notes).

But knowing that his pieces are often framed or scrapbooked as the final word on a person’s life, he always takes great pains to get the facts right.

“Once a piece is published, you sweat watermelons over it,” he says. “You open the page carefully like a door to a haunted cellar. Did I forget to mention Uncle Walter?”

When he’s not at The Sun, the father of two and grandfather to eight reads books—John O’Hara is a favorite writer—and listens to opera. On weekdays, after work, he enjoys the company of a circle of friends, dubbed “The Merry Pranksters,” a rotating gang that includes Sun journalists past and present, WYPR’s Tom Hall, former Governor Martin O’Malley, and retired and working teachers, lawyers, and social workers with whom he happily meets for drinks at Zen West before heading home.

Still working through his grief, he welcomes the distraction. “In the evenings and on weekends, oh, boy, does time hang heavy,” says Rasmussen, whose friends call him “The Razz.” While the pandemic, which hit a year after Nall’s death, has been a “double whammy,” he takes comfort in nature and early mornings, rising before 5 a.m. on weekdays to get to the Sun by 7.

“I’ve had a really fulfilling career,” he says. “The thing is that people love obits—we are innately curious about each other’s lives. They call obits the ‘Irish sporting pages.’”

Rasmussen was ready to retire in the summer of 2018, when the Sun moved from Calvert Street in downtown Baltimore to Port Covington, adding an additional 20 minutes to his commute, but Nall stopped him.

“I wanted to quit, but I think Judy had a premonition that she wasn’t going to make it,” he says. “She said, ‘You’re going to Port Covington’—it was her last great gift.”

As for his own mortality, he says that when the time comes, like Nall, he wants to be cremated.

“When I go to cemeteries, there are people there and no one even knows them,” he says. “All they are is a flicker on a genealogy chart. They died a hundred years ago, and no one can say even one sentence about them—with cremation, you’re free.”

And though the Sun has a strict nepotism rule when it comes to writing obits, how would Rasmussen wax rhapsodic about his own life?

“My obit wouldn’t need much space,” he says. “It’s six words. ‘He came. He saw. He went.’ That’s it. Over and out.”

If you take the profit motive out of a newspaper, would that make covering local news a more sustainable operation? Would it lead to better journalism?

That’s the idea behind a proposed new Baltimore Sun ownership group spearheaded by members of The Sun’s news guilds and made up of the Abell Foundation, the Goldseker Foundation, and other local investors.

The proposal comes at a time when The Baltimore Sun, which was bought by Tribune Publishing in 2000, is enduring furloughs, layoffs, and permanent pay cuts as a result of the coronavirus.

But this is hardly a new phenomenon. Thanks to corporate ownership and an increasing focus on profits, the paper—like many around the country—has been whittling down its staff for years. Last year, seeking a pay scale increase for the first time since 2013, Baltimore Sun reporters and photographers launched a byline strike amid contract negotiations with the Tribune.

“As a nonprofit, any profits The Sun makes could be put back into making sure that it becomes a better newspaper,” says reporter Liz Bowie, co-chair of the local unit of the Washington-Baltimore Press Guild. “We could have more reporters, more photographers, more editors.”

“We want better job security,” adds reporter Scott Dance, The Sun’s unit chair. “And we want to make sure the journalism is sustainable and invested in. As a nonprofit, it would eliminate some of those demands for a huge profit margin.”

The idea of making a newspaper a nonprofit is not without precedent. The Sun proposal is reportedly modeled after a similar deal cut by the Salt Lake Tribune, which went nonprofit last year. Two other legacy print newspapers, the Tampa Bay Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, are controlled by nonprofit owners.

Abell Foundation president Robert Embry—along with former Baltimore County executive Ted Venetoulis, who also previously owned and published a string of area community newspapers—has led previous efforts to return The Sun to local ownership. The Abell Foundation was created by the family that founded and sold The Sun, first published in 1837.

“If a city loses its professional sports teams, it loses its spirit. If a city loses its newspapers, it loses its soul,” Venetoulis said in a press release formally announcing the current effort. “We fight to keep our ball clubs. It’s time to fight to keep our newspaper.”

Longtime Sun staffers have witnessed and weathered enormous cuts over the past two decades.

“I’ve lived through so much downsizing of the newspaper for so long now,” says Sun columnist Dan Rodricks. “I got sick of eating sheet cake. Every time we said goodbye to someone in the newsroom we got a new sheet cake. It’s depressing to see the paper downsize with this incessant bean counting and cutting of the staff.”

Despite these cutbacks, Rodricks, who fully supports the proposal, has been heartened by the great journalism his colleagues have done in recent years (the most recent example being the paper’s uncovering of the Healthy Holly scandal that took down the mayor and shined a light on government corruption, which just won a Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting.)

“We have a lot of young, talented, energetic reporters who come up with news every day,” he says. “The Sun is still generating a lot of the news in this community. I’m encouraged by that. But you can’t keep doing it if you’re going to keep downsizing. The community deserves something better.”

Tribune Publishing, which operates several other newspapers including the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, has been under fire for its relationship with notorious vulture-capital firm Alden Global Capital, which purchased a 32 percent stake in the company last fall—a signal of likely takeover intent. Alden has put increasing pressure on the Tribune to cut costs.

“Hedgefund guys think the only way to make profits for newspapers is to cut staff,” says Rodricks.

Tribune Publishing is holding a shareholders meeting on May 21, which is when the guild members hope it will seriously engage with the proposal. (Thus far, the company has not made any public statements about the ownership bid.)

If the proposal has any chance of going through, it will need to demonstrable community support, which is why Guild members have launched the “Save Our Sun” website and publicity campaign, with emphasis on the word “our.”

This campaign will likely include social media posts, strategically placed op-eds by prominent supporters of the deal, and a petition to be signed by Maryland residents.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Rodricks says, “and I hope the Tribune goes for it.”

Three Maryland newspaper groups have decided to take the fate of local journalism into their own hands.

Yesterday, the Capital Gazette, and Carroll County Times, and Baltimore Sun Media Group released a statement saying they are banding together in hopes to form the Chesapeake News Guild. In the process, they are asking that Tribune, their parent company, recognize the guild as a unit of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild (WBNG), giving employees proper union compensation, benefits, and working conditions.

“Local journalism is unique,” the statement reads. “Whether the sun shines or disaster strikes, we are right there with you. As local news outlets dwindle, we know now more than ever that quality community news is a gift too precious to lose. But that important work grows more difficult each day because of decisions made by distant corporate owners on behalf of shareholders. Decisions that have led to smaller newsrooms, stagnant wages, and limited resources.”

The newly formed guild covers a large swath of Central Maryland including Baltimore City and County, Harford County, Howard County, Carroll County, and Anne Arundel County—in total reaching an audience of two million people.

“After years of our company underinvesting in our newsrooms, we are tired,” the statement continues, “We are tired of bearing a workload that requires a newsroom four times the size. We are tired of not receiving reasonable cost of living raises, despite the fact we bear the additional responsibilities of our former co-workers. We are tired of having staffs too small to cover all the stories our readers care about.”

The members of the Chesapeake News Guild is asking its parent company to recognize them as a member of WBNG, which traces its roots back to 1934, when the local union was organized during the Great Depression to improve the economic conditions of Washington-area journalists.

This moves come at a time when many other newsrooms around the country are forming similar unions to earn better pay and benefits. After a series of management shake-ups, the Los Angeles Times made a historic move in its newsroom when its staff voted 248-44 to unionize in January.

“The situation in the [journalism] industry is very dire,” Sally Davidow, communications director at the NewsGuild-CWA, told Editor & Publisher. “People feel they can’t earn a decent living and they have no control over their work schedules.”

Many local journalists acknowledge that as the suburban bureaus of The Baltimore Sun have weakened, these non-unionized newspapers have picked up the slack, but have not yet received the same benefits.

“The Baltimore Sun, whose roots as a union shop date to 1934, once competed against these community papers,” wrote The Sun’s union chair Scott Dance. “But its suburban bureaus have disappeared as it instead leans on these papers, which it purchased in 1997 and 2014, for hyperlocal coverage. The Sun’s Guild employees stand in solidarity with these colleagues—it is long past time for them to earn the same rights and benefits Sun staff have defended for decades.”

We encounter the protagonist, Willa, as a child, a college student, married with kids, and then a senior citizen. Could you have written this book when you were in your 30s?
No, come to think of it, I don’t suppose I could have. There are some advantages to getting old! Well, a lot, actually. For instance, in her 60s, Willa’s attitude toward her mother is much kinder than it was in her youth. A certain sense of acceptance creeps in with age, and I wouldn’t have known that if I’d tried to write about a 61-year-old when I was a young woman.

Did you start with the idea of breaking the novel into these pivotal moments of her life, or did the characters come first and reveal this format?
Initially I thought the book would begin when Denise gets shot and would refer just in retrospect to those pivotal moments. Which shows you how a story can take over the reins from the writer: it had its own ideas. Then I decided to present those moments as widely separated episodes, leaping across great spans of time, because as a reader, I always feel a sense of relief when the author trusts me to imagine the intervening years for myself.

Why was it important to include gun violence in Clock Dance’s Baltimore?
Shortly before I started writing Clock Dance, I read in The Baltimore Sun about yet another random shooting victim—this one a toddler who was just sitting in her father’s lap on their front porch. The police did ask around, but nothing came of their inquiries, and eventually the whole subject disappeared from the news. I was struck by how we all moved on from it—not that we didn’t care, but that we’d grown accustomed to such things, in the same way that we’re no longer shocked by school shootings. Once you give that any thought, it seems almost surreal.

The saguaros seem symbolic of a woman’s natural versus domesticated nature. Why did you choose this recurring image?
I had never seen a saguaro till I made a trip to Arizona in my 50s. I was struck by them in the same way Willa was; I didn’t know why, but they gave me a kind of physical ache. Even now I can’t put into words why Willa has that reaction, but I think it has something to do with their power and their reserve and their dignity—qualities that Willa, so conventional and so compliant, would instinctively long for.

A lot of people talk about writing a novel but never do, much less more than 20 of them. How do you stay disciplined to continue writing books?
It would take more discipline not to write a book. I don’t seem to feel that my life is properly filled unless I’m living some other, imaginary life at the same time. Not that it isn’t a chore, often, to plod through the practicalities—getting my characters from room to room and remembering that they have to eat lunch. But their conversations, the moments when they start talking to each other and I feel like merely their scribe: I love that part.

Are you working on, or planning for, another?
Yes, I’m in the early stages of another.

Is there a particular place you go to write?
I have an upstairs writing room at the front of my house, overlooking the street, and I sit at a desk in front of a window where I can be in touch with ordinary life. I like to hear people talking while I work, and I especially like to hear children playing. There is a scarcity of children on my street, but I’m always hopeful.

What writers are you reading these days who inspire you?
I was bowled over by Rachel Kushner’s new novel, The Mars Room. Its subject—women in prison—is hard reading, but every word of it was brilliant. And I loved Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place for Us, a novel about a family from India living in the U.S. Families and immigration: two of my favorite topics.

Five people were fatally shot and two others were injured at the Annapolis offices of the Capital Gazette Thursday afternoon. Jarrod Ramos, a 38-year-old Laurel man, who had long carried a resentment for the publication, was charged with five counts of first-degree murder.

Many journalists in the state are reeling with the loss of colleagues and the attack on their industry as a whole.

“I just read the news with tears in my eyes because these people are family,” said Adrianne Flynn, career development director and ethics professor at University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. “We instill in our students that in times of tragedy, it’s a journalist’s duty to tell the public what is happening. We buckle up and mourn later.”

That was exactly the response of Capital reporters, who, within hours of gunfire in their newsroom, released the Friday edition of the paper. The opinion section stated “Today we are speechless” and was dedicated to the five victims who lost their lives: Rob Hiaasen, Wendi Winters, Gerald Fischman, Rebecca Smith,­ and John McNamara.

“I worked with Rob and I knew John for 37 years,” said Milton Kent, a lecturer at Morgan State University, former Baltimore Sun reporter, and head of the MSU Spokesman. “We all, even in our worst moments, have to put aside whatever there is and get the job done. I can speak for John and Rob, they wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”

Several regional reporters have weighed in on the tragedy and how it speaks to the journalism landscape as a whole. Maryland Matters editor Josh Kurtz wrote a poignant essay about hearing the news while standing in the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

“There’s a towering artifact dedicated to journalists who have been killed in the line of duty,” he says about the museum. “But usually you’re a foreign correspondent covering a war, not sitting at your desk. Journalism is a noble profession and it always will be.”

The Capital Gazette, which incredibly traces its origins back to 1727, has been owned by the Baltimore Sun Media Group since May 2014. Many Sun reporters assisted with getting the paper out today. University of Maryland’s Capital News Service has offered its newsroom up to Capital employees.

“We have sent so many kids to work there,” says Flynn, who has been at University of Maryland since 1999. “Rob has been an adjunct here for the past year and always said he wanted to help young journalists. He wanted to instill good values.”

In July 2011, columnist Eric Hartley wrote a story about a criminal harassment case against Ramos, who then brought a defamation case against Hartley and the Capital publisher at the time Thomas Marquardt. The court ruled in favor of the newspaper.

“The randomness of it is so shocking,” Kent said. “This guy had a beef and a gun. I’m starting to call these American days. Because this is uniquely American. There has been a mass shooting almost every day this year. No other civilized country on the planet lives this way.”

The 154th mass shooting this year comes at a time when the political landscape centers around a particular vitriol against journalism. As recently as June 18, President Trump tweeted that the media is “the enemy of the people” and “truth doesn’t matter to them.”

“As far back as ancient times, it’s been about ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ and that holds today even more powerfully,” Flynn said. “The climate in the country right now is so anti-information. Our community is under attack.”

More than 30 years ago, veteran journalist McKay Jenkins got his start in the Capital Gazette newsroom. He considered McNamara a “close personal friend.”

“What makes the newsroom shooting so unsettling is the grotesque fact that we live at a time when political voices in our country are openly calling for repression, harassment, and even outright violence against journalists,” Jenkins said in an email. “Strong, unfettered journalism is a fundamental structure undergirding the very possibility of democracy.”

The shooting feels reminiscent of the January 2015 terrorist attack on satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. As a small staff of about 20, the Capital Gazette lost a quarter of its newsroom to the violence yesterday.

Bloomberg government reporter, Madi Alexander, started a GoFundMe campaign for the journalists and it has already reached nearly $120,000. Gov. Larry Hogan ordered that the flag above the State House be flown at half-staff and two vigils are planned for Friday night in Annapolis.

“A fool doesn’t seek out danger, but in the course of our lives as journalists you can’t live your life in those terms,” Kent says. “The challenge for the staff moving forward is to do justice by the people who were killed. In the end, it’s going to be really hard, but they are professionals.”

Additional reporting was provided by senior editor Lydia Woolever.

You moved to The Sun after it was announced they were closing the City Paper. Then you jumped back into the alt-weekly world with the Beat?
Brandon Soderberg (former City Paper editor and new Beat managing editor) hustled for months to find a purchaser for the City Paper or start something similar. When he finally found one, he said he wanted to turn it over to me. I didn’t jump. I had to think about it. The Sun was a stable job, I liked my co-workers—who do an amazing job—but we need more outlets in the city. It’s a gamble, but journalism is a gamble everywhere these days. 

You’ve said the Beat will not be City Paper 2.0.
There was really nothing wrong with the City Paper. Other than the behind-the-scenes business decisions. People still loved the product. What is a priority to me, is to keep pushing to get new voices into the paper, and give people a platform for stories that aren’t being told anywhere else. 

Ultimately, Baltimore resident Kevin Naff and Brown Naff Pitts Omnimedia, which publishes the Washington Blade, the oldest LGBT newspaper in the country, stepped up as publisher.
The Blade runs like clockwork. The fact that Kevin believes we can make money—he wouldn’t invest his money otherwise—is important. The Blade, in D.C., got ad calls the first day the launch of the Beat was announced. We’ll share resources—printing, circulation, sales, marketing—as well as some edit and photography coverage. The Blade has been breaking LGBT stories in Baltimore for years. 

You’re starting with a full-time edit team of three—City Paper had 10. That’s tough.
It’s daunting, but not new. Ever since I’ve been a journalist, we’ve had to learn how to do more with the less. Brandon [Soderberg], arts and culture editor/deputy Maura Callahan, and myself will be doing a lot of writing, initially. [Former City Paper editor] Baynard Woods and the Real News Network, whose downtown building we use, will contribute. We also have a small freelance budget.

What about your online presence?
We will put everything on our website Tuesday night before the print issue comes out. And we’re planning to partner with some local podcasts and Dr. Kaye Whitehead [Loyola University professor of communications and African-American studies], who has a daily show working with WEAA. We will try a lot of different things. The way I operate is that I try to steal from everybody, figure it out, and make it my own. 

Where do you see the Beat fitting in the city’s news landscape?
We can’t compete with The Sun in breaking daily news. But I think there are a lot of smaller places such as the Baltimore Brew, the Afro, Baltimore magazine—though not small as those others—that make up the journalism ecology in the city. I think there is room for us in that ecology. The fact that we are getting press releases and story pitches already shows me there is space for us. 

What City Paper items are migrating to the Beat, in terms of content? You mentioned Baynard Woods—I’m assuming you were referencing his “Democracy in Crisis” column?
Yes. His column. Also [UMBC professor] Kate Drabinski’s “Field Tripping” column. We won’t have the “Power Rankings,” but something similar. Baynard and Brandon will continue to do weed reviews. Our arts and events calendar was really important to readers and Maura will continue to produce a comprehensive, diverse music and arts calendar, but it will be more curated. We intend to do long-form, investigative cover stories. I wish we could bring [former City Paper photo editor] Joe Giordano over to the Beat, but we can’t afford a full-time photo editor to start.

Where can we find the Beat? The Sun has repurposed the old City Paper news boxes for its new weekend entertainment paper.
I do want to say that we feel it is important to have a print issue because not everyone in this city has a smartphone with an unlimited data plan or regular WiFi access. And we do want to push into parts of West and East Baltimore that traditionally have been left out in the past. Boxes are very expensive, so you can find us in small businesses, convenience stores, libraries, gyms—anywhere else they’ll let us [distribute], basically—across the city. 

Flickering Treasures

Amy Davis (Johns Hopkins University Press) 

In Baltimore, we don’t have to look far to find vestiges of cinema’s golden age—venues like the sparkling Senator or the majestic Parkway that remind us of a time when all our problems vanished with a night by the big screen. What we might not realize is how many more of these cinemas once existed in Baltimore, and that’s where Davis comes in. She photographs old movie houses—both those that are decayed or have been repurposed and the ones that remain grand and glorious. Juxtaposing current conditions with historical photos, Davis shows how much time has altered the face of our city. Her book is a comment on this transition, and a reminder that change is the only constant.

A Saturnalia of Bunk

H.L. Mencken, edited by S.T. Joshi
(Ohio University Press)

There’s a reason Henry Louis Mencken is called the Sage of Baltimore. His sardonic wit, explosive exuberance, and wry critical eye shaped the spunky attitude of our city. But while many in Baltimore know Mencken for his newspaper column “The Free Lance”—which he wrote six days a week for The Baltimore Evening Sun from 1911 to 1915—few have actually read them. In this collection of those columns, we get a sense of the issues that defined Mencken’s voice—freedom from censorship and battling against temperance and other moral reform movements among them—and the passion behind a man hellbent on ridding his community of, as he writes, “stupidity, flapdoodle, and buncombe.” 

The Boys of Dunbar

Alejandro Danois (Simon & Schuster)

The 1981-82 Dunbar High School Poets hold a remarkable achievement—four of the legendary basketball team’s stars went on to the NBA. Teammates including Reggie Williams and Muggsy Bogues displayed resilience and drive, along with undeniable talent, as they were from some of Baltimore’s poorest neighborhoods. Danois, who is editor-in-chief of the sports website The Shadow League, struggles with a consistent narrative, but does an excellent job bringing us behind the scenes with fabulous insight from the Poets themselves and their coach Bob Wade. Ultimately, they show us what true strength and gumption look like.

The Life of Kings

Edited by Frederic B. Hill and Stephens Broening (Rowman & Littlefield)

The Baltimore Sun has weathered much during its nearly 180-year history—including its 1986 sale to the Times Mirror company, and the shuttering of The Evening Sun in 1995. Through good times and bad, it produced excellent journalism, and this collection of personal essays takes us back to some of those times. Read how TV producer David Simon still can’t forget phone numbers he called on the night cops shift, or how Jerelyn Eddings became the Johannesburg bureau chief just as Nelson Mandela was freed from prison. This collection reminds us of the importance of journalism, whether it’s to keep watch, make us laugh, or remind us of where we come from.

John S. Carroll, who was the editor of The Baltimore Sun for 10 years, passed away at his home in Lexington, KY, on Sunday from a rare neurological disorder, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. He was 73.

Carroll is also credited with restoring the reputation at the Los Angeles Times, where he worked after his position in Baltimore, even helping to earn the paper 13 Pulitzer Prizes in his five year tenure (including five in 2004).

“He was a remarkable person, as well as an exceptional journalist,” says newspaper veteran Fred Hill, who came up with Carroll as a young reporter at The Sun. “He had the highest integrity, status, and determination to excel and report news as clearly and concisely as possible.”

The two colleagues became friends during Carroll’s first stint as a reporter at The Sun in 1966—when they both shared a bachelor pad in Roland Park. Carroll stayed in Baltimore until the paper sent him to cover Vietnam. After a storied career that took him to The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Lexington Herald-Leader, he then returned to The Sun as its editor in 1991, where he stayed until 2000. During that period, he helped the paper earned a Pulitzer for a series on the environmental dangers posed by dismantling ships in the Inner Harbor.

Hill, with co-editor Steve Broening, is editing a book on The Sun, to be published by Rowman Littlefield next year. The book, which Hill was planning on having Carroll contribute to, will be a series of essays about the period at the newspaper between the 1960s and the mid-1990s, when The Sun was considered one of the best papers in the country. Hill says now he will likely use an excerpt from one of Carroll’s articles instead.

“He was a remarkable journalist, extraordinary leader, and extremely dedicated to public service,” Hill says. “It’s a tragedy that he’s gone.”

Besides his groundbreaking work, Carroll’s legacy also includes his contributions as a founding board member of the News Literacy Project, whose mission is to educate students in middle school and high school about journalistic integrity in the digital age. The project has set up a fund in his name.

Fittingly, many journalists have been sharing their admiration for Carroll, including Pulitzer-winning columnist Connie Schultz, who wrote on Twitter: “John Carroll was an outstanding journalist and a fine man. I knew him as a rare editor who talked less, listened more.”

Robert Timberg was less than two weeks away from shipping out of Vietnam when a vehicle he was riding in hit a land mine. The explosion left the Marine with severe burns over much of his body and disfigured his face. His memoir, Blue-Eyed Boy, recounts Timberg’s recovery from the physical wounds, as well as the trauma of losing his identity. He eventually became a journalist and covered events like the Iran-Contra scandal for The Baltimore Sun. 

Your candid and unflinching appraisal of everything from draft dodging to the dissolution of your marriages is rare. What had you reaching for the delete key? What stopped you?
There’s nothing in the book that I wanted to delete that I didn’t. There were some sections I didn’t want to delete but did because friends whose judgment I trusted recommended I do so. Those sections related mostly to material that they said slowed down the story. So, reluctantly, I cut a short, comical tale of watching the porn classic Deep Throat with the now defunct Maryland Motion Picture Censor Board when I was The Evening Sun’s City Hall reporter. Some people nearly cried when I told them it was on the cutting room floor.

You did not accept the finality of a “permanent disability” and “highly repugnant” wounds. Why not?
To do so would have been to consign myself to a life of bitterness and self-pity. I hated that prospect but it wasn’t until a series of events resulted in my studying journalism at Stanford that I had a sense that life might have more than that in store for me.

And I wanted more. I wanted to matter and for my life to count for something. It was a struggle, but I found those things as a newspaperman. Yes, I was disfigured, but that had to take a back seat to getting whatever story I was chasing. And that made all the difference in the world.

There was also this. I was—and am—a Marine. I also was part of a ragtag, though damn near invincible, football team called the Lynvets that played on the sandlots of Brooklyn and Queens before I headed off to the Naval Academy in 1960. Neither organization has much use for guys who give in to misfortune. Remember that great scene in the movie Chinatown where Jack Nicholson slaps around Faye Dunaway to get her to explain her relationship to a young girl hiding upstairs?

“She’s my daughter.” WHACK! “She’s my sister.” WHACK! “My daughter.” WHACK! “My sister.” WHACK!

In my case, it was like I had both a Marine and a Lynvet taking turns whacking me around as I stood there like a sad sack.

“Say it, Bob!”

“Say what?” WHACK!

“You know.” WHACK!

“What?” WHACK!

“I don’t know what you want me to say.” WHACK!

I finally said it.

“I’m a Marine and a Lynvet!”

In what ways might journalism benefit from having more veterans in the profession?
Let me say first that my regard for the courage and professionalism of today’s war correspondents, both men and women, could not be greater. Would more veterans help? Sure. There would be fewer rhetorical lapses, like calling one soldier the “colleague” of another. And veterans would more easily see through military blather. But I felt more strongly about this issue before I observed the superb work of our current crew of correspondents in the Middle East.

From your days as a Sun reporter and/or recent experience, what’s the most under-appreciated aspect of life in Baltimore?
There is an authenticity about Baltimore that I think is under-appreciated though I think that’s changing. When you’re in Baltimore you know you can’t be anywhere else. Of course there’s the Baltimore accent. And the sports teams, now that they’re winning, contribute to the flavor of the city. So do crabs and oysters and Fells Point. Then there’s the ethnic flavor of East and West Baltimore. Maybe the most underappreciated aspect of Baltimore is recognition of how much William Donald Schaefer did to reshape the city and build its pride in itself.