BALTIMORE — Local news wars have largely gone the way of the pay phone as newspapers have shrunk and journalist jobs have been cut. But one is taking shape in Baltimore, bringing with it a new kind of rivalry.
The Baltimore Banner, an online news site that began publishing in recent weeks, is trying to take on the 185-year-old Baltimore Sun. The Banner has hired some of The Sun’s top reporters and has built a newsroom of over 40 people to date. And it has had a series of exclusive reports, including a feud between the sons of the Baltimore Orioles owner over the future of the baseball team.
This was not the original plan of Stewart W. Bainum Jr., the hotel mogul behind The Banner. He tried to buy The Sun last year but lost to Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that has become the country’s second largest newspaper operator. Now he competes with them, wary of Alden’s plans for The Sun, known for cutting editing costs.
“I kept thinking about local news during Covid, while sitting here in Maryland thinking about the lack of local newss,” Mr. Bainum, a longtime resident of Chevy Chase, Maryland, said in an interview.
“I just think there has to be a way to figure this out,” he added.
The Banner, which is asking for a subscription, is already one of the largest in a string of local news start-ups trying to fill the void left by the closure and downsizing of thousands of newspapers across the country since the internet’s rise. . More than 360 local newspapers were closed between late 2019 and May alone, according to a report released this week by Northwestern University’s school of journalism. And Mr. Bainum has plans to grow The Banner into a newsroom of more than 100, larger than The Sun, and has pledged to contribute or raise $50 million over the first four years.
The entry in bold is a test of whether a digital-only local news subscription model can be sustainable beyond the original philanthropic capital, and whether there is a need for a second major news release in cities where competition was common. There are also several smaller digital news channels in the region, including Baltimore Fishbowl, Baltimore Brew, and Baltimore Witness. Axios plans to expand its local newsletters to the city this year, and Baltimore Beat, a Black-run nonprofit, plans to resume publishing after a hiatus during the pandemic.
“If you’re really going to take on an established media entity in this kind of economic climate, you’d better go in like a samurai,” said Josh Tyrangiel, a former Bloomberg Media and Vice executive who grew up in Baltimore and gave informal advice. to Mr Bainum.
“Don’t be too soft, go in strong and expect that you will have to spend a lot of money on the product and marketing the product,” said Mr. Tyrangiel. “The Baltimore people are now conditioned to expect very little from their newspaper.”
Trif Alatzas, the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Sun, said in a statement that Baltimore Sun Media, which also includes several other local newspapers, prides itself on having the largest news-gathering team in the region, with a total of 100 journalists.
Although Mr Alatzas did not respond to a question about The Banner’s competition, he said his newspaper’s subscriber base had increased this year.
“We continue to see growth and we look forward to continuing to provide our readers with Baltimore’s most comprehensive news and information,” said Mr. Alatzas.
Baltimore became a battleground in the local news crisis more than two years ago when Alden revealed it had acquired a 32 percent stake in Tribune Publishing, the parent company of The Sun and newspapers like The Chicago Tribune and The New York Daily News. the largest shareholder of the company.
Concerned journalists began desperately looking for local owners to take over the papers because of the hedge fund’s reputation for making a profit by stripping newsrooms. In February 2021, Tribune announced it had reached a deal to give Alden full ownership and sell The Sun and two smaller Maryland publications to Mr. Bainum.
But the deal failed. Mr. Bainum then made bids for all of Tribune, including an offer valuing the company at approximately $650 million, in which he would invest $200 million of his own money. In May 2021, shareholders voted to approve the sale of Tribune to Alden for approximately $630 million.
The failed attempt to buy The Sun didn’t stop Mr. Bainum, who was energized by the thought of setting up a non-profit newsroom to serve the city. Mr. Bainum, the chairman of Choice Hotels International and a former state legislator in the state of Maryland, consulted with other nonprofit leaders and executives at major media companies to find a model that might work.
He teamed up with Ted Venetoulis, a former Baltimore county executive and publisher who had long been trying to buy The Sun. They decided the best chance was to start with a large newsroom with the best talent they could find, rather than build up slowly.
Running The Banner as a nonprofit would make it easier to fund and accept contributions, as well as easier to partner with other nonprofits in the community.
Mr. Venetoulis died in October at the age of 87. The non-profit organization that runs The Banner was named the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism in his memory.
Mr. Bainum hired Kimi Yoshino, a top editor at The Los Angeles Times, as editor-in-chief. Ms. Yoshino moved to Baltimore in January. She said the vast majority of the journalists she hired were from Baltimore or Maryland, or had worked there before.
Liz Bowie, a longtime education reporter for The Sun who was part of the team that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for local coverage, is one of the contributors.
“I worked at The Sun for 35 years, my husband worked at The Sun, my mother worked at The Sun,” Ms Bowie said in an interview. “So I was really committed to that institution.”
But, she added, “I left The Sun a little emotional” when shareholders voted to sell to Alden. Ms Bowie joined The Banner this year as one of the first reporters.
“I think we can be bigger and cover more of the city because all the money goes straight back to journalism,” she said.
In addition to Ms. Bowie, The Banner has hired The Sun’s reporters Justin Fenton, Tim Prudente and Pamela Wood. Mr. Fenton, an award-winning investigative reporter whose book about a corrupt Baltimore police unit, “We Own This City,” was recently turned into an HBO series, had spent 17 years at The Sun.
He said he’d watched The Sun’s newsroom disappear into a shadow of its former self, when it had foreign offices and 300 reporters, and that he was excited by the thought of building something new.
“Now we’re going to compete,” he said. “Can this city support two major news organizations?”
Imtiaz Patel, a former Dow Jones executive and the chief executive of The Banner, said the operating budget for the first year was about $15 million. He said paid subscriptions would make up about half of the revenue mix, with ads making up about a quarter and the rest coming from events and donations.
Readers can read a certain number of free articles per month before a paid subscription is required. A subscription costs $3.99 per week, or $155 for the whole year.
Mr. Patel said the goal was to reach 100,000 paying subscribers by 2025 and get five million unique views per month on the website. He said that after a few years he no longer wanted to be dependent on funding from Mr. Bainum.
Mr. Bainum said the goal was to build a top-notch local news site for Baltimore and find out if it was a business model that would work elsewhere. But he also said he wouldn’t let the experiment last forever.
“If this is just a black hole after four or five years, then you know there are other places to invest philanthropically,” Bainum said. “But I’ll keep it up for at least four or five years.”
