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• Building a database of sources made up of people of varying backgrounds to diversify the
voices who bring analysis and insight to our stories;
• Nurturing a talent pipeline to broaden the pool of applicants we promote and hire from:
From 2018 to 2021, the percentage of non-white people who make up the newsroom rose
from 20.7% to 26%, and of the 26 people we’ve hired over the past two years, 13 of them
— 50% — have been people of color;
• Partnering with the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, a nonprofit
training organization, to provide diversity and bias education for the staff, and to audit
content across Baltimore Sun Media properties to gauge how well our reporting and
opinion coverage reflects the variety of race, class, gender, generation, geography and
sexual orientation in our communities;
• Forming outreach committees to engage with groups we have inadequately served in the
past to find out how we can do better. Among those contacted were Black funeral home
directors, some of whom told us they didn’t believe we would welcome their input or
feature news obituaries of African American residents;
• Making a point of diversifying the photos we publish to better represent the communities
we cover.

Our approach today, unlike that of the country’s “colorblind” era of the 1980s and ‘90s, is to
actively see the differences among us and work to understand: why they exist, what they mean to
whom and why, whether they’re real or perceived, and whether they should be honored or struck
down. Pretending we were all the same never worked, because it ignored the fact that we’re not
all given the same opportunities to succeed or fail on our merits; some are privileged, others are
oppressed. Refusing to recognize that only prolonged difficult conversations and much-needed
soul-searching, dooming more generations to repeat the cycle.

As journalists, as the Fourth Estate, we at the paper have a public responsibility to confront and
illuminate societal ills so that they can be addressed and eradicated. On race, The Sun’s history is
one we’re not proud to share, and we should warn you that it’s offensive to read. But addressing
one’s wrongs begins by acknowledging them. While we’ve taken great pains to highlight the
paper’s righteous actions through the years, and there have been many, we have yet to shine a
light on our dark corners — until today. This accounting is most certainly incomplete.
Nevertheless, we hope that by revealing some of our institution’s past injustices, we will step
closer to truly providing, as our masthead says, “Light for All.”

— The Baltimore Sun editorial board

‘$300 for the return’ of Matilda

When the first issue of The Sun rolled off a hand-operated press in May 1837, an editor’s note
from founder Arunah S. Abell promised that the penny publication would, “without fear or
partiality,” work toward “the common good.” And it did, in many ways. But in the one way that
arguably counted the most — integrating our population and lifting it as a whole — the paper
failed devastatingly.

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