Baltimore Sun had “significant drop” in readership in 2024, states Baltimore Banner
Media mogul David Smith shocked the city with the purchase of The Baltimore Sun last year. He promised radical change and exhorted his new staff to “go make me some money.” It’s been a rocky road ever since, reports The Baltimore Banner.
The Baltimore Sun, the city’s largest newspaper, has seen, states The Baltimore Banner, “a significant drop in its readership. Average circulation of its Sunday paper fell by nearly half between 2023 and 2024, according to industry figures. During most months in 2024, The Sun also had fewer unique visitors to its website than in the year before.
“At least 20 journalists have left the paper in the last year — including its best-known columnist and a beloved obituary writer — with several of them citing problems with the political slant of the stories presented under its new ownership.”
Its print newspaper, continues The Baltimore Banner, “had an average Sunday circulation of 76,474, and an average weekday circulation of 27,926 for the year that ended September 2023, according to data from the Alliance for Audited Media.
“A year later, those numbers dropped sharply.
“Its average Sunday circulation was 42,522, a 44% decline. The average weekday circulation fell to 17,594, or 37% lower. (The AAM figures in 2024 are based on the six-month period ending September of that year.)”
Ken Doctor, a news industry analyst and CEO of Lookout Local, said the numbers for The Sun’s print circulation between 2021 and 2023 seem in line with the “industry average,” but that the numbers from 2024 show “a huge drop-off.”
Similarly sized newspapers to The Sun — The Denver Post, the Indianapolis Star, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the San Jose Mercury News — also saw year-over-year declines in their average Sunday print circulation numbers, according to data from the Alliance for Audited Media.
But The Sun was the only paper to see a year-over-year drop of above 40%. (The Sun has not reported to AAM the number of its digital-only subscribers as some other news organizations have, according to the organization.)
Juan Manuel Benítez, a professor of professional practice at Columbia University, said declining numbers at The Sun were part of a larger trend.
“We’re in the attention economy, and local news has not been able to figure out how to play this new game, unfortunately,” Benítez said.
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