With our son preparing to go to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore this fall we have begun subscribing to the digital edition of the The Baltimore Sun. I like to practice “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” so The Sun is emailed to me each morning. (We are longtime digital subscribers to The Washington Post — a good read in the Trump era). Ha!
I am familiar with the Sun going back to the ’80s, when I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle. The Baltimore newspaper has long been home to famous writers, including HL Mencken in the ’40s.
Reg Murphy was the longtime publisher of the Sun. At its height, The Sun ran eight foreign bureaus and it had a separate edition, the Evening Sun, with a separate staff. Reg was a journalism legend.
Times have changed in the digital era (the Sun’s foreign bureaus were unraveled), but the Sun is still a good read for local news. As it turns out, the former opinion editor at the Sun, Andrew Green, is now Johns Hopkins’ first VP for communications as of last fall. He’s been doing a good job.
As for the Sun, Trump’s recent attacks against the late Baltimore Congressman Elijah Cummings sparked have some tart editorials. One was titled “Better to have a few rats than to be one.” It was well done.
Here’s a 1977 documentary about The Baltimore Sun that was a finalist in the Academy Awards’ short subject category: