Chicago Sun-Times

Daily newspaper

The Chicago Sun-Times is a nonprofit print daily in Chicago, Illinois. Dating to 1844 (in the form of various antecedent papers) and nominally successful until the news business turmoil of the early 21st century. The organization rebranded to a component of nonprofit Chicago Public Media, Inc in 2022. It is the number two paper in the Chicago market.

Nationally famous for columnists Mike Royko, Ann Landers, and Roger Ebert, the paper earned a reputation in the latter half of the twentieth-century as a committed investigative journal. Its reporters played a significant role in uncovering the corruption that ultimately led to former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich's arrest and conviction.

The Sun-Times has won eight Pulitzers prizes.

The Marshall Field family, whose Field Enterprises had long been in dry goods and retail, founded the Chicago Sun in 1941. By 1947, the Marshalls purchased the Daily Times, merging the two papers into the Chicago Sun-Times.

Marshall Field's heirs lacked his journalistic commitment and his liberal politics. They gradually nudged their newspaper to the right, eventually endorsing Richard Nixon for president after the tumultuous events of the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention.

Field Enterprises’ Daily News ceased publication in 1978. Former Daily News publisher and editor, James F. Hoge, Jr., took that same position at the Sun-Times and brought with him many of its staff—including humorist Mike Royko.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought the paper from Field Enterprises in 1984. The paper's tone quickly changed to mirror Murdoch's New York Post.

Two years later, Murdoch sold the Sun-Times to its managers and an investment partnership as a means of raising money to create Fox News. In 1994 the new owners sold it, along with its chain of community papers to Conrad Black's American Publishing Company.

The 1990s and 2000s saw deep bloodletting as some of the paper’s best-known reporters and columnists were laid off.

In 2007, the newspaper made a distribution deal with its rival, the Tribune. But, shortly after a group of investors acquired the Sun-Times, they filed for bankruptcy. Cost-cutting measures resulted in 400 lost jobs and the closing of their printing plant. The Sun-Times outsourced printing to the Tribune with estimated savings of $10 million a year.

In 2017, a consortium of private investors and the Chicago Federation of Labor acquired the paper. The union, through ST Acquisition Holdings, bought the paper and its parent company, Sun-Times Media Group, in a competition that beat out Tribune Publishing.

In 2019, a new ownership, Sun-Times Investment Holdings LLC, backed by prominent Chicago investors, took control of the paper.

Chicago Public Media announced its acquisition of the newspaper in 2022. It rose to the second largest circulation after the Chicago Tribune at 57,222 for its print edition.

The American news industry witnessed a milestone in 2022 when Chicago Public Media, parent of NPR-affiliate WBEZ, acquired the paper with support from a $61 million public donor campaign. As a member-supported organization, the Sun-Times is accessible to readers without a paywall. Chicago Public Media announced it will continue raising other funds to ensure sustainable financing for the paper. It said WBEZ, which is 60% listener-supported, will continue to rely on community funding for its news operations, David Roeder reported in his history of the paper. New fund-raising efforts will maintain publicly supported publishing and broadcasting operations. Publishers at the paper said philanthropy is planned for the next five years to assist in the paper’s expansion in print and online. This will help the Sun-Times broaden its reporting, expand digitally, and maintain its print product.

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