About Baltimore News-American

Baltimore News-American

The Baltimore News-American was a broadsheet daily newspaper that was published in downtown Baltimore, Maryland, until May 27, 1986. Under that exact name it existed only from 1964, but the institution it embodied claimed a continuous lineage, in various forms, of more than two hundred years of Baltimore journalism. For much of the middle of the twentieth century it had the largest circulation of any newspaper in the city, and it was especially strong in Baltimore's working-class and blue-collar neighborhoods.

Its closing was abrupt and famous. Its final edition carried a farewell headline addressed to the whole city, and its disappearance left its rival, the Baltimore Sun, as the city's sole broad-circulation daily. Behind that ending stood two centuries of mergers, fires, famous editors, landmark buildings, and a street-corner newspaper war that had defined downtown Baltimore for generations.

A Lineage Claimed From 1773

The News American traditionally traced itself to Baltimore's first newspaper, the Maryland Journal and the Baltimore Advertiser, which William Goddard began on August 20, 1773. Under the leadership of Goddard's sister, Mary Katherine Goddard, that early paper became the first to print the Declaration of Independence with the names of its signatories. Goddard's paper passed through several proprietors and ceased on June 29, 1797, and historians treated the claimed descent with care, but the later paper maintained the connection proudly and carved the date 1773 over its own doorways.

The more secure line ran through the Baltimore American, which could trace its history unbroken to at least 1796. Its titles changed repeatedly across the early republic and the nineteenth century, from the Eagle of Freedom and the Baltimore Intelligencer to the American and Daily Advertiser and then, for half a century, the American and Commercial Daily Advertiser. From 1883 to 1964 it was published simply as the Baltimore American. In 1814 one of its predecessor forms, the American and Commercial Advertiser, became the first publication in the nation to print Francis Scott Key's poem about the defense of Fort McHenry, the text that later became the national anthem.

The News Across the Street

The second ancestor was younger and scrappier. The Baltimore News was founded in 1873, first as the Evening News and then as the Baltimore Daily News, before settling as the Baltimore News from 1892. Its office and printing plant, built in 1873 opposite the Sun's revolutionary cast-iron-front building on East Baltimore Street at South Street, had a mansard roof and a corner clock tower.

For most of the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century the buildings of Baltimore's two main newspapers faced each other across South Street. Editors posted bulletin boards and chalk boards across the second floor fronts, telegraphed election returns drew crowds, and newsboys hawked extras in the street. Longtime owner and editor Charles H. Grasty, who bought the Evening News in 1892, pushed the paper toward advanced presses, ambitious graphics, line drawings, and larger headlines in the years just before photographs became printable on a newspaper page. The intersection became, in contemporary recollection, the hottest place in Victorian downtown Baltimore on a news night.

Fire, Rebuilding, and Mencken's Herald

All of it perished in the Great Baltimore Fire of February 1904, which burned out both newspaper buildings along with most of downtown. Publication was temporarily shifted to other cities, including New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, and copies were shipped back into the ruined city. The American rebuilt quickly. Its new American Building, a tower on the same site with an elaborate green ground floor and gold lettering showing the dates 1773 and 1904 over the doorways, was the first skyscraper completed in the burnt district, a point of great pride for its publisher. A new printing plant followed on East Pratt Street facing the harbor basin.

The fire also consumed the building of the Baltimore Morning Herald at St. Paul and Fayette streets. The Herald had been founded in February 1900, and its young editor, a Baltimore Polytechnic graduate named H. L. Mencken, was displaced from his office and had to arrange printing in another city. In June 1906 the Herald was bought out by its competitors, Grasty's News and General Felix Agnus's American, and its staff and assets were divided between the two older papers. Mencken later described those early reporting years in his memoir Newspaper Days, published in 1941, which became one of the classic American accounts of turn-of-the-century newsrooms.

Agnus, Munsey, and the Coming of Hearst

Felix Agnus had managed the American after the Civil War and became its editor and publisher after marrying into its owning family and succeeding C. C. Fulton. Paris-born, a former French soldier and a breveted Union brigadier general, Agnus became a fixture of Baltimore civic life and headed the commission that rebuilt the city's market after the fire. He died in October 1925 at the age of eighty-six, having sold the paper several years earlier.

The buyer in the chain was Frank A. Munsey, the chain owner known to critics as a dealer in dailies and an undertaker of journalism. Munsey bought the News in 1908 and rebuilt its headquarters on Calvert Street in 1911 as the Munsey Building, briefly the tallest building in Baltimore, with ground-floor windows through which passers-by could watch the presses. In 1923 William Randolph Hearst bought the morning American and the afternoon News from Munsey. The Hearst Company thereby acquired both halves of the future News American, forty years before it combined them.

The News-Post Years

A third ancestor completed the family. The Scripps-Howard Baltimore Post was founded in 1922, a latecomer to the city's newspaper scene. Hearst acquired it and merged it with the News, a combination effected in stages in 1934 and 1936, to create the Baltimore News-Post. The ancient American continued alongside it, published only on Sundays.

Under Hearst management the combined operation became, by the middle of the twentieth century, the largest newspaper in Baltimore by circulation. Scrapbooks preserved in the paper's archive, now held by the University of Maryland, showed commentary from William Randolph Hearst Sr. and his editorial staff running through the paper's 1930s and 1940s files, evidence of how closely the proprietor supervised his Baltimore property. The News-Post competed from a South Street and Pratt Street complex that grew by accretion behind the old American Building.

The Merger of 1964

In 1964 the News-Post and the Sunday American were finally published as a single newspaper, the News American, with a newly designed masthead. The revamped paper appeared seven days a week with a thick Sunday edition of many sections. Its masthead vignette showed the old Phoenix Shot Tower at the center of the city skyline, surmounted by the Hearst eagle, and for the first time the paper's name appeared without the city name as part of the title.

A new printing plant was built in the center of the block between East Pratt and East Lombard streets, joining the existing structures, with loading docks on Commerce Street and a large aluminum name plate visible to traffic on both streets. The paper adopted a South Street postal address. It was, in plant, circulation, and self-presentation, Baltimore's dominant popular daily, rooted in the city's blue-collar districts and delivered as an afternoon paper across the metropolitan area.

Decline in the 1970s

The strengths of the News American became its vulnerabilities. It was an afternoon paper in an era when afternoon papers everywhere were failing. Delivering it through after-work traffic congestion to the outer suburbs grew harder each year, and changing evening leisure habits, above all television, left middle-class readers with less time and inclination to read an evening paper. A series of format changes and staff realignments under a new editing regime in 1977 alienated many loyal readers, and circulation declined gradually from the level that had once made it the largest in the metropolitan area.

The paper's voice in those years still included distinctive local institutions, among them the Day by Day column written by Richard D. Steuart under the pen name Carroll Dulaney. But distinctiveness did not reverse the arithmetic of an afternoon broadsheet losing readers to suburbanization and broadcast news. Hearst sustained the paper through the early 1980s as its economics worsened.

So Long, Baltimore

The News American published its last edition on May 27, 1986. The closing surprised the city. Its demise left the Baltimore Sun, founded in 1837, as the sole broad-circulation daily in Baltimore. In a coincidence that stunned the market further, the Sun's longtime family publisher, the A. S. Abell Company, announced the sale of the Sun to the Times-Mirror Company only days after its competitor folded, a sequence that had not been publicly known when the News American closed.

Baltimore was left with the morning Sun and the Evening Sun, which had been founded in 1910. The two Suns maintained separate staffs and content into the early 1990s, until their editions converged and the evening paper was discontinued in September 1995. The two-paper city that Baltimore had known since the nineteenth century had effectively ended on the day in 1986 when the News American said goodbye.

Buildings, Archive, and Memory

The News American's South Street complex was torn down several years after the closing and the site remained a parking lot, and a subject of redevelopment controversy, before a large office tower rose on the block in 1991. The Munsey Building survived in altered use, passing from bank headquarters to apartments and condominiums. The corner of Baltimore and South streets, once the battleground of the city's newspaper wars, lost all visible trace of the rivalry that had animated it for more than a century.

The paper's institutional memory survived on paper. The University of Maryland's archival collections held the Baltimore News American collection, including its scrapbooks, photographs, and morgue files, and researchers used it to reconstruct the paper's two centuries of predecessors. In Baltimore memory the News American endured as the people's paper of the Hearst years: the afternoon daily of the rowhouse neighborhoods, the paper that had printed Key's anthem in one incarnation and, in its last, had taken leave of its city in three words on its front page.