After Baltimore Sun sale to David Smith, part-owner Armstrong Williams offers vision

A week after The Baltimore Sun was purchased in a private deal by David D. Smith, his partner Armstrong Williams offered his vision for the future of Maryland’s largest newspaper, promising to preserve and build on its 187-year-old legacy amid industry challenges.

Smith, executive chairman of the Hunt Valley-based television station owner Sinclair Inc., acquired Baltimore Sun Media from investment firm Alden Global Capital on Jan. 12, returning The Sun to local ownership for the first time in nearly four decades. Smith personally purchased the newspaper for what he said was at least $100 million along with the Capital Gazette papers in Annapolis, Carroll County Times, Towson Times and several other Baltimore-area publications.

Williams, a well-known conservative talk show host, syndicated columnist and author who founded one of the nation’s largest minority-owned television broadcasting firms, said in his first extensive interview about the sale that he sees himself and Smith as “the next caretakers of this paper.”

“A caretaker is not really about the money but who will preserve it, who will appreciate what it really means,” Williams said. “I’ve owned many things in my life. This, to me, being in the print [business] with one of the top newspapers in the country, one of the top 10 cities in the country, it just swells my heart with such responsibility.”

Williams, 61, said he envisions the publications as vehicles for expanding — not limiting — viewpoints and coverage that’s important to the community, strives to be fair and objective, avoids bias and builds on trust with readers. He described the ownership as ambitious, aggressive and open to hiring.

“We want to do what’s best for the community, what’s best for the paper, the continued legacy. We have no agenda,” he said, other than “making The Baltimore Sun the prize of this region.”

“We’ve seen what right wing and left wing has done to this country,” Williams said. “People turn off the media. They don’t trust us. They don’t watch us. They turn us off and they go to social media. Our lack of trust has empowered social media, and so in order for people to have faith in broadcast and print media, the cornerstone of your realm must be trust.”

Smith, 73, known for giving to conservative causes, said in an interview Monday that he decided to personally buy the newspaper to focus on local news that serves the public interest with the belief he can make the business “hugely profitable.”

He said he believes he can increase subscriptions and advertising for The Sun and its other publications by focusing on local and community news and investigations, boosting the use of video and social media, and integrating technology in better ways than other print media companies.

Smith praised Baltimore’s Fox 45, the WBFF-TV station started in 1971 by Smith’s father as a UHF channel, and other Sinclair stations’ news reporting as balanced and apolitical and something for The Sun to emulate. The company added news programming in 1991 and is now one of Baltimore’s top television stations, among Sinclair’s more than 180 stations that produce thousands of hours of local news each week.

In a meeting with staff members this week, Smith said The Sun needs to better focus on topics relevant to readers so more people subscribe and read its products. He added The Sun needs to attract a larger share of the region’s audience to secure a sustainable future.

But his comments also raised alarm among some journalists worried about Smith’s intentions and how he plans to run The Sun.

“The editorial direction that he described — focused on clicks rather than journalistic value — concerned many of our members, as did his attitude toward vulnerable communities in the city that we love,” said the Baltimore Sun Guild, the union that represents newsroom staffers and others at The Sun, in a statement issued after Smith met with staff and said he rarely read the newspaper.

The guild said it hopes the ownership will work with employees to address concerns and asked for community support “while we navigate this as a union.”

The Nieman Foundation’s Journalism Lab published an article the day after the sale was announced with the headline: “The Baltimore Sun explores the question of whether there can be a worse newspaper owner than Alden Global Capital.” The article went on to describe Sinclair’s track record of promoting what critics label conservative views in its news programming and cited a Smith quote to New York magazine in which he described print media as “so left wing as to be meaningless dribble.”

Williams said he and Smith expected that kind of reaction, which is why they kept the deal under wraps until it was done.

Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst for the Poynter Institute, said Friday that it remains to be seen whether Smith will look to put a “right-wing spin” on The Sun.

“I’m not real sure what Mr. Smith and his associates may have planned for The Sun,” Edmonds said. “The degree to which he lets the professionals run it and stay independent … that’s one to watch.”

He noted that Alden, which bought The Sun as part of its $633 million acquisition of the Chicago-based Tribune Publishing newspaper chain in May 2021, never made the anticipated deep cuts it had a reputation for at chains elsewhere.

Under the latest ownership change, Edmonds said, “there seems to be an assumption that he will bring a lot of conservative views and pet causes he personally believes into the paper. Maybe, maybe not.”

And he added, the new owners may find that the structure and culture of TV broadcasts won’t translate as expected to a newspaper’s print and online platforms.

Regardless, he said, the owners can expect to face the same challenges facing today’s news media industries at a time when advertising and print subscriptions have been declining.

Those challenges flared in recent weeks as The Washington Post completed extensive news staff buyouts, Sports Illustrated laid off most of its editorial staff and significant layoffs loomed at the Los Angeles Times.

On Thursday, seated near a large desk monitor in a Washington, D.C., office filled with photographs, sculptures and other collected art, Williams said he has long wanted to own a newspaper. Copies of The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times, which Williams reads daily, fanned out on a table near his desk.

From his base in a three-story corner building just blocks from Union Station, he runs Howard Stirk Holdings, which operates seven television stations in markets such as Birmingham, Alabama; Flint, Michigan; Las Vegas and Marion, South Carolina, where he grew up. Though Sinclair and Howard Stirk are separate companies, they have shared services agreements in which Howard Stirk uses Sinclair’s studios for production.

“I’m a newspaper guy, unlike my brother,” said Williams, referring to Smith, who he said he has known for more than 20 years and considers family, and who had said in an interview Monday that he does not read newspapers. “I like investigative journalists. I like seeing journalists out in the community covering stories, stories that nobody is talking about.”

Williams came close to buying Washington’s City Paper in 2017, but said he believes an outcry against the deal caused it to fall apart, prompting a new buyer to emerge in the 11th hour.

“They created such a drumbeat,” he said. “And I think what happened is that they saw me as a conservative only and nothing else. … There was an outcry, ‘Save us, save us,’ and so I lost it.”

For a couple of years, he published a weekly print magazine, Unique, with Ben Carson, a 2016 presidential candidate and former U.S. secretary of Housing and Urban Development for the Trump administration.

He said he has been an online subscriber of The Sun, which he said has a “stellar reputation” and which he has read to better understand the landscape of Baltimore to inform his company’s TV broadcasts and town halls from the city.

The Sun and its seven community publications employ more than 150 people and have more than 230,000 print and digital subscribers. Baltimore Sun Media has earned 16 Pulitzer Prizes during the years, most recently in 2020 for its investigation of former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh and the University of Maryland Medical System.

Williams, who grew up in an affluent family with nine siblings on a 200-acre cattle ranch in South Carolina, said he first met Smith at a reception when they were both guests of The Washington Times before a White House Correspondents dinner around 2001. Williams, who had handled public relations for Justice Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination, often made TV appearances. During that decade, he also wrote a syndicated column for USA Today, contributed to The Washington Post, The Washington Times and Newsweek and offered commentary on Sinclair stations.

Williams bought his first TV stations in 2012 at Smith’s urging and had been looking to buy another TV station in the Baltimore-Washington market. He asked Smith whether Sinclair would be selling a station in Baltimore.

“We were just talking one day,” and ownership of The Sun came up, Williams said. “David has always had a desire to own The Baltimore Sun, for many years. He just felt that the paper had so much more to offer, not only to the community but for the state of Maryland.”

Last summer, Smith and Williams began inquiring privately after hearing that Alden might be more open to selling The Sun. By fall, the pair, and an attorney for Smith, the only other person privy to the potential deal, met with Alden.

Smith and Williams, whose families often travel together, were touring glaciers in Alaska soon after when Smith told Williams: ‘I think this can happen. Get your money ready.'”

Williams declined to say how much of a stake he owns in Baltimore Sun Media or how much he paid.

Under their ownership, Williams said, The Sun’s readers can expect to see “a more balanced editorial page, not by removing, but adding. … You must have competing voices.”

In one big change, he said, the paper will no longer endorse political candidates, a practice he called unnecessary. Besides the importance of covering crime, education and government, he highlighted areas such as arts and entertainment, sports, guest editorials and stories that spotlight successes as well as neglected communities.

Balance, Williams insisted, is necessary for The Sun’s survival, regardless of his own views and those of Smith.

Smith has been an active political backer of Republicans, but he said he’s not interested in politics and more focused on good government. He’s the primary financial backer behind a Baltimore City organization that bills itself as grassroots and pushes for a more accountable and transparent city government. In 2022, People for Elected Accountability and Civic Engagement successfully passed a ballot measure requiring term limits for the city’s mayor, comptroller and City Council. It’s pushing a ballot measure this year that would cut the size of the Baltimore City Council in half and another that would allow voters to petition for a recall vote for those officials.

“People need the fourth estate, and we need to unify and be together and tell these stories. Media is more needed now than ever in this country.” – Armstrong Williams

Williams, host of “The Armstrong Williams Show,”, said he aims for balance in his own programming, aired on his company’s stations and on Sinclair’s. Baltimore mayoral candidate and former mayor Sheila Dixon has appeared often on his show, and, he said, he continues to ask Mayor Brandon Scott, facing Dixon in the primary, to appear too, but the mayor has declined. Williams said upcoming guests include Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Baltimore City State’s Attorney Ivan Bates and Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Aisha N. Braveboy.

Williams said he expects his syndicated column, through Creators Syndicate, to appear in The Sun “on its merits,” and that he may write an occasional feature article, but that he does not expect to be a presence or have a title within the news organization.

“It tells the newsroom you don’t trust them,” he said. “I’ve got to work with the newsroom. I’ve got to earn the trust.”

Speaking to the importance of the news media, Williams said: “People need the fourth estate, and we need to unify and be together and tell these stories. Media is more needed now than ever in this country.”

Though he and Smith are aligned in their partnership, he said, “don’t think just because you’re business partners, you don’t push back on each other on things you’re trying to do. You have to make each other better.”

He said he counts himself among the critics of a practice that Sinclair has now discontinued, of requiring “must-run segments” on its newscasts.

In 2018, when it was proposing a takeover of Tribune Media, Sinclair defended a controversial on-air promotion in which its TV anchors across the country read identical scripts decrying “fake” news.

Williams is quick to say he has learned from his past and much-publicized mistakes, including a 2004 incident that proved costly. His weekly newspaper column was dropped in early 2005 by Tribune Media Services, then a subsidiary of Tribune Co., after he accepted a $240,000 payment from the U.S. Department of Education during President George W. Bush’s administration to promote the No Child Left Behind law.

Williams said now that he used bad judgment and is not the same person.

“I lost everything,” he said, including being let go from a commentator role on Sinclair stations as well. “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. … When you’ve been at the apex and you find yourself in the valley, it humbles you. The thing that I’ve learned is you can never compromise your integrity.”