Ron Baron made his fortune betting on the long game. Now the 82-year-old billionaire is betting on something stranger: that he can buy up America's dying local newspapers and somehow keep them alive. Since 2021, Baron has spent hundreds of millions acquiring papers like the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune, and a sprawling chain of small-town publications. He calls it philanthropy. Many of the journalists who work for him call it something else.
Here's the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to say out loud: America's local news isn't dying because of the internet. It's dying because we let it. And the men writing the checks to "save" it keep telling us the problem is money—never the thing money can't fix. Trust.
Start with the Baltimore Sun. Baron bought it in 2024, and within months, the paper's opinion section began running columns that read less like journalism and more like a billionaire's diary. One piece, published under the Sun's banner, argued that the January 6th committee was a partisan witch hunt. Another attacked diversity programs with the kind of glee you'd expect from a cable-news segment, not a legacy daily. When the paper's own staffers pushed back, top editors were shown the door. The message was simple: this is Ron's paper now.
Then there's the Chicago Tribune, where Baron installed a publisher who once compared critics of his plans to "the Taliban." Reporters who questioned the direction found themselves reassigned, sidelined, or quietly gone. Turnover at these papers has been brutal—not because of layoffs, but because the people who actually know how to report the news keep walking out the door.
Why does this matter to you? Because if you live in a city where the only daily paper is owned by a man who answers to no one, you don't have a newspaper. You have a newsletter with a masthead.
Baron isn't a cartoon villain. He genuinely seems to believe he's rescuing institutions everyone else abandoned. He grew up in Asbury Park, made his money managing other people's money, and now wants to be remembered as a patron of the press. That's not nothing. Local news needs capital, and capital has to come from somewhere. But the road to a hollowed-out newsroom is paved with good intentions and bad editors.
The deeper problem is what his ownership reveals about us. We've spent two decades refusing to pay for news. We click the free headlines, we share the outrage, and we let subscriptions lapse. So when a billionaire comes along and says "I'll cover the bill," we don't ask what he wants in return. We just hope he's one of the good ones.
Ron Baron might be one of the good ones. But "might be" is not a business model. It's a coin flip with your community's information on the line.
**The takeaway:** A free press isn't saved by a rich man's checkbook—it's saved by readers who care enough to pay. Until we do, every local paper is one billionaire's mood away from becoming a mouthpiece.