"When our city knows more, we can become more" - What do you know about the Baltimore Banner?

“It is hard to overstate the vitally important role that a strong newspaper can play in improving the quality of life for residents of the communities they serve. A good editor can see the big picture better than just about anyone else in the community – tying together the reality of the present with the possibility of the future." Penelope Muse Abernathy, "Saving Community Journalism")

IIt shouldn't surprise anyone, that there isn't all that much information out there about Baltimore's latest news outlet start-up. The existing media are frequently struggling and likely not too keen on another kid on the block, even when the official line is that competition is always welcome. Curious to learn more about The Baltimore Banner, I combed through various articles, reports and and online sources and present my findings here to all those who care about solid Baltimore journalism. By golly, this city needs every ounce of critical and investigative journalism it can get.

The Baltimore Banner, a online news start-up soon to go public

The Baltimore Banner is a brainchild of Stewart Bainum and represents plan B after a failed attempt by Bainum to rescue the Baltimore SUN from the vultures of the Alden Global Capital hedge fund. 

If anyone wonders why such strong words about the SUN's new owner,  read the gruesome story by McCay Coppins in The Atlantic from last October. ("The Men Who Are Killing America's Newspapers"). 

“They call Alden a vulture hedge fund, and I think that’s honestly a misnomer. A vulture doesn’t hold a wounded animal’s head underwater. This is predatory.” (Charlie Johnson, former Chicago Tribune reporter as quoted in the Atlantic article) 

Sun readers were informed about an early step towards gutting towards gutting Baltimore's 185 year old flagship news outlet: The SUN won't be printed any longer in Charm City but in Delaware.  It went largely unnoticed,  but the last copies of the SUN were printed in Baltimore on January 30! Since then the SUN, The Capital of Annapolis, the Carroll County Times and other affiliated publications are printed at facilities of  The News Journal, a Wilmington paper owned by Gannett. This major slap in the face of Baltimore went down with little or no fanfare. There was no outcry, no effort to save the loss of 139 jobs, no heroic act of City leaders to prevent this move, no matter how drastically the gory details had been described in The Atlantic. 

SUN reporters watch the last edition being printed in
Baltimore on Jan 30, 2022 (From reporter tweets)

The only time The Baltimore Sun hasn’t been printed in house was for 2 months after the great fire in 1904. That streak ends after tonight. The paper will now be printed in Wilmington, DE. (Tweet of McKenna Oxenden, SUN reporter)

Given the SUN's storied history, the Sun Park facility in Port Covington is relatively new and state of the art when it was opened in 1992 to allow the SUN to print color.  Originally the newsroom remained in the large Calvert Street facility but in an effort to save money it was moved to Sun Park in 2018. The Sun Park building sits on land purchased by Sagamore/Weller Development in 2014 and was assumed to be eventually removed in Sagamore's masterplans. 

The SUN has seen a steady bleed of its talented reporters which fled even before Alden bought the paper. Cost cutting and staff gutting has been going on for more than a decade.  Famed investigative reporter Luke Broadwater who helped bring down Mayor Pugh is now thriving at the New York Times. How much so is illustrated by him being interviewed about the January 6 investigations by Terry Gross on NPR's national broadcast show Fresh Air. More recently his SUN colleague Justin Fenton went to the Baltimore Banner together with Sun reporters Liz Bowie and Tim Prudente. Many SUN readers have a hard time imagining a future of the paper without these high caliber reporters.

After 17 years, I'm leaving the Baltimore Sun this month to join the new Baltimore Banner and help create a new non profit model for local news here (Justin Fenton tweet)

Which brings us back to the question, what The Banner is and how is it different than other Baltimore strictly online news media such as the Baltimore Fishbowl (former SUN architecture critic Ed Gunts writes there and former SUN reporter David Nitkin is executive editor) or the Baltimore Brew (Former Washington Post staff writer Fern Shen founded it and edits/writes together with Mark Reutter, a

Baltimore Brew

former SUN reporter). How does the Banner fit into a news media landscape with increasingly blurred lines between traditional TV and online print media? On the one side the alternative Real News Network as well as the traditional Baltimore TV outlets now all have online news updates, on the other the SUN, the WP or the NYT all feature online videos which in many ways resemble TV reporting. The online publication Maryland Matters reported in January about the drain that the SUN suffered from journalists moving to the Banner.

“They’re telling the public: ‘We are not going to be second-rate. We have big ambitions. And we are beginning to put together a team with reporters who know how to cover this region,’” (Sandy Banisky, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland and a former Sun deputy managing editor quoted in Maryland Matters).

Can the Banner stake out territory in this crowded field? On the bloody battlefield of the traditional print media local journalism is seen as a public service by philanthropically minded private investors. The Baltimore Brew has financial support from the Abel Foundation. Bainums funding of the The Banner is of a different order: The former Maryland businessman and

Business paper Daily Record

philanthropist intends to give or raise $50 million over 3.5 years to get the Banner going as an innovative but professional online news organization. A leadership team has been put in place and has been have been working for some months. Justin Fenton told me the Banner will go public in May of this year. Other than Fenton, Bowie and Prudente, the Banner has hired 7 other editors and reporters with a goal of 60 in two years according to an article in a current edition of Poynter, a publication of the The Poynter Institute in St Pete, Fla), which was founded in 1975 as an institute for media studies that supports journalism. 

Apparently the Banner wants to leave the gate with a stable of heavy hitters, long before there is a subscriber base or any type of revenue. The new operation will have a physical location with an actual newsroom at the Inner Harbor on Pier VI, but it won't have a physical print newspaper. It won't look like one either, but likely use the strategy that even traditional print media now use, a steady flow of news and headlines, as they occur, interspersed with deeper background stories that are not "breaking news". 

The Banner recently published a test article by former SUN reporter Tim Prudente of the kind they intend to produce (200 bodies awaiting autopsy in a parking garage). Prudente's research already found the usual path from its birthplace  to the TV evening news that ride on the coattails of the original investigation. This process of news proliferation proves that detailed and careful persistent investigations must be the foundation of original reporting, something the TV stations usually don't do, no matter how much they claim to be investigative.

The online news model has been tried in other cities, such as Denver, Memphis and Philadelphia. In Denver eight journalists who defected from the traditional print paper Denver Post founded the Colorado Sun. It appears that the 2018 start-up is a success.

Stewart Bainum

 The Poynter journalist Rick Edmonds has followed Bainum's  attempts to save the SUN for some time and chronicles the Banner endeavor and was also able to speak at length with the somewhat reclusive Bainum about his new project. Edmonds writes:

At 75, Bainum belongs to a growing segment of the very rich, equally interested in distributing their fortune to worthwhile causes while still tending to business. He and his wife have signed the Giving Pledge, committing to donating half their net worth. Bainum expects to have an office at the Banner, but does not plan to move from his lifelong home base in Washington, D.C.’s Maryland suburbs. “I still have a day job here,” he said.

Meanwhile, the storied SUN is not dead yet and it remains to be seen if the Alden group will, in fact, milk it to death as many predict and as is evident at the Chicago Tribune. So far, other than the printing move to Delaware and the loss of some stellar journalists, the paper hasn't changed much since Alden took over.  New journalists have been hired to replace the losses. It remains to be seen how the SUN, the Afro, the BBJ, the Daily Record, the Brew, the Fishbowl and the Banner can coexist. All issue daily online local and regional news updates. As the Banner slogan says: Baltimore can become more with a strong media landscape devoted to thorough, independent local journalism.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA