Baltimore Sun Giving Up Building This Month

Baltimore Sun reporters and editors must clear out their desks by Nov. 30 as the newspaper publisher is moving out of its Port Covington location completely by the end of the month.

The Batimore Business Journal reports Maryland's largest daily is moving on — again — to an uncertain future. For now, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Trif Alatzas told his staff in an email this week to work remotely as negotiations for a new headquarters remain in the works. That announcement came two months after the developers behind the Port Covington project — which was recently renamed Baltimore Peninsula — said the paper had rejected a lease extension there.

It is the latest blow to The Sun since May 2021 when Tribune Publishing sold it and several other newspapers in the chain for $633 million to hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Local papers also owned by Alden in Annapolis and Carroll County have been working remotely since 2020 when their newsrooms shuttered for good.

Many Sun workers are already working remotely outside the newsroom as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper has been at its location in Port Covington since 2018 after its former owner sold the previous offices at 501 N. Calvert St. to a developer who then leased much of it to the Baltimore Police Department.

Plans now are to raze The Sun's South Baltimore building, which previously also held its printing operations, within five years, according to MaryAnne Gilmartin, CEO of MAG Partners, which is overseeing the massive redevelopment of the peninsula. The presses were shut down for good this year and have already been dismantled. A new tenant is in negotiation for a short-term lease deal for the 60-acre Sun Park and its 250,000-square-foot warehouse-like plant.

Until the end of the month, Sun reporters and editors can work in common areas in the newsroom and its conference rooms to take advantage of the paper's Wi-Fi and printers as desks, computers and a bank of television sets are dismantled before Dec. 9, marking the end of the Sun Park era in the city.