What is the name of the newspaper featured in the fifth season?

The newspaper featured in the fifth season of The Wire is The Baltimore Sun.

Season 5, which aired in 2008, shifts much of its attention from the police, docks, politics, and schools to the struggling world of newspaper journalism. Its newsroom is a fictionalized depiction modeled closely on the real Baltimore Sun, one of the city’s major newspapers.

The connection is especially strong because series creator David Simon worked as a reporter at The Baltimore Sun before becoming a television writer. Several newsroom storylines draw on real tensions in metropolitan journalism, including shrinking staffs, pressure to attract readers, sensationalism, newsroom politics, and the conflict between ambitious reporting and commercial demands.

A common mix-up is assuming that the paper is called The Baltimore Gazette or another invented Baltimore newspaper. The series does use fictional characters and fictionalizes some events, but the newspaper at the center of Season 5 is presented as The Baltimore Sun. The season’s journalism plot also includes the fabricated serial-killer story created by Jimmy McNulty, which exposes how institutional incentives can reward attention-grabbing stories over careful reporting.