Baltimore — The local news war got in the way of the phone booth as newspapers shrank and reporters’ jobs were reduced. But one has taken shape in Baltimore, bringing a new kind of competition.
Baltimore bannerThe online news site, which went on sale in the last few weeks, is about to face the 185-year-old Baltimore Sun in person. Banner has hired some of Sun’s best reporters and has built a newsroom with more than 40 people so far.And it made a series of exclusive reports including: Feud About the future of the baseball team, among the sons of the Baltimore Orioles owners.
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, the hedge fund that became the second largest newspaper in the country. Now he is competing with them and is wary of Alden’s plans for the sun, known for reducing newsroom costs.
“I sat here in Maryland during Covid and kept thinking about the local news, thinking about the shortage of new things in the area.s ” Bynum, a longtime resident of Takoma Park, Maryland, said in an interview.
“I think we need a way to understand this,” he added.
The banner that charges subscriptions is already the largest of many local news start-ups trying to fill the void left by the closure and shrinkage of thousands of newspapers nationwide since the rise of the Internet. There is one. More than 360 local newspapers were closed in late-May 2019 alone, according to a report released this week by the Northwestern University Journalism School. Bynum also has built The Banner in more than 100 newsrooms, planning to exceed Sun’s size, and promises to donate or raise $ 50 million over the first four years.
Bold entries indicate whether the digital-only local news subscription model is sustainable beyond the first philanthropic capital, and the desire for the second largest news publication in a city where competition was common. It is a test of whether or not. There are also some small digital news stories in the area, such as: Baltimore fishbowl, Baltimore Brew When Baltimore Witnesses.. Axios plans to expand its local newsletter into the city this year. Baltimore beatThe black-owned nonprofit will resume publishing after a pause during the pandemic.
Former Bloomberg Media and Deputy Executive Josh Tairangiel, who grew up in Baltimore and provided informal advice, said: To Mr. Bynam.
“Don’t step on or force yourself. Expect to spend a lot of money on your product and sell it,” says Tyrangiel. “People in Baltimore are now conditioned to have little expectation of newspapers.”
The Sun’s publisher and editor-in-chief, Trif Alatzas, said in a statement that the Baltimore Sun Media, including several other local newspapers, has the largest coverage team in the region with a total of 100 journalists. He said he was proud.
Alatzas did not answer the competition question raised by The Banner, but said the number of subscribers to his paper increased this year.
“We continue to grow and look forward to continuing to provide our readers with the most comprehensive news and information about Baltimore,” said Alazzas.
Baltimore was on the battlefield of the local news crisis more than two years ago when Alden revealed that it had acquired a 32% stake in Sun’s parent company Tribune Publishing and newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News. became. The company’s largest shareholder.
Worried journalists have begun desperately asking local owners to take over the newspaper because of the hedge fund’s reputation for plunging into the newsroom and making a profit. In February 2021, Tribune announced that it had reached an agreement to give Alden full ownership and sell Sun and two small Maryland publications to Mr. Bynum.
However, the deal has stranded. After that, Mr. Bynum bid on all of the tribune. This includes an offer to value the company for about $ 650 million and invest $ 200 million in its own funds. In May 2021, shareholders resolved to approve the sale of Tribune to Alden for approximately $ 630 million.
The failure of the attempt to buy the sun did not discourage Mr. Bynum, who realized that he himself had come to life with the idea of setting up a non-profit news room to serve the city.Bynum Chairman Choice Hotels International Former Maryland Parliamentarians also consulted with other nonprofit leaders and executives from major media companies to find a working model.
He worked with Ted Venetoulis, a former county administrator and publisher in Baltimore, who had long been trying to buy The Sun. They decided that the best shot was to start with a big news room with the best talent you could find, rather than building slowly.
Running The Banner as a nonprofit not only makes it easier to raise money and accept donations, but it also makes it easier to partner with other nonprofits in the community.
Venetoulis died in October at the age of 87. The non-profit organization that runs The Banner Veneturis Regional Journalism Institute In his memory.
Bainum has hired Kimi Yoshino, Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Times, as Editor-in-Chief. Mr. Yoshino moved to Baltimore in January. She said the majority of the journalists she hired were from Baltimore or Maryland or had previously worked there.
Liz Bowie, a longtime educational reporter for The Sun, a member of the winning team Pulitzer Prize In the 2020 field report, he is one of the hires.
“I worked at Sun for 35 years, my husband worked at Sun, and my mother worked at Sun,” Bowie said in an interview. “So I really committed to that institution.”
But when shareholders resolved to sell to Alden, she added, “I’m kind of emotionally left the sun.” Bowie joined The Banner as one of the first reporters this year.
“I think we’ll cover more of the city because we can grow bigger and all the money goes back directly to journalism,” she said.
In addition to Bowie, Banner hired reporters Justin Fenton, Tim Prudente and Pamela Wood from Sun. Fenton, an award-winning investigative journalist who recently turned the book about the corrupt Baltimore police unit “We Own This City” into the HBO series, worked at Sun for 17 years.
He said he was excited to see something new when Sun’s newsroom had a foreign bureau and 300 reporters, seeing it disappear in his former shadow. ..
“Now we will face each other directly,” he said. “Can this town maintain two big news organizations?”
Imtiaz Patel, CEO of The Banner and former Dow Jones executive, said the operating budget for the first year was about $ 15 million. He said paid subscriptions make up about half of the revenue structure, ads make up about a quarter, and the rest come from events, donations, and so on.
Readers can read a certain number of free articles a month before they need a paid subscription. Subscriptions are $ 3.99 a week or $ 155 a year.
Patel said the goal is to bring a break-even point to 100,000 paying subscribers by 2025 and achieve 5 million unique views per month.
Bainum said the goal is to build a prestigious local news site for Baltimore and figure out if it’s a business model that works elsewhere. But he also said he wouldn’t continue the experiment forever.
“If in four or five years this is just a black hole, you know there are other places to invest charitably,” Bynam said. “But I’ll keep doing that for at least four or five years.”