The appointment of a new inspector general isn’t typically the sexiest local-news topic, but it may have been the hottest story going this summer in Baltimore County. Amid suggestions of political favoritism and backroom deals, the county executive pushed out the incumbent inspector. Intense media coverage ensued.
The Baltimore Sun and its upstart competitor, The Baltimore Banner, published dozens of news stories and editorials. The Baltimore Brew, a scrappy digital news site launched in 2010, scored a few scoops. Local TV stations paid attention. Even the Daily Record, a business and legal publication, weighed in.
Coverage of the IG story – vast, varied, detailed – says a lot about the state of Baltimore’s media landscape: namely, that it’s vibrant, despite years of cutbacks at legacy news sources. The Sun, long the state’s largest daily publication, for decades boasted a mighty newsroom, replete with foreign bureaus and a 400-person staff. Today its newsroom is less than a quarter of that size. But Baltimore retains far more journalistic muscle and vigor than many comparably sized or even larger markets. A 2024 University of Maryland study of the state’s local news ecosystem found that Baltimore and its immediate environs had 33 news outlets of various sizes and types, offering more local coverage than the District of Columbia. That’s remarkable given that D.C. has a larger population (roughly 700,000 to Baltimore’s 570,000) and is home to thousands of journalists (though most cover the federal government, not the city).
Start-up digital operations have become significant media players in Maryland’s largest city. On many days, The Banner, plus smaller outfits such as the Brew and the Baltimore Beat, a Black-led and -focused nonprofit, compete with The Sun and broadcasters for scoops and eyeballs. Part of what’s striking about this fresh generation of local outlets, and the overall variety of media options in Baltimore, is that it has developed at a time when many news organizations are shrinking and closing nationwide.
As the Medill School’s annual State of Local News report has documented, professional news sources have disappeared from hundreds of counties across America over the past two decades – trends that show no signs of slowing. Almost 40 percent of U.S. newspapers have vanished since 2005. In the past year alone 136 newspapers closed, or more than two per week. Amid the patchwork of (mostly rural) news deserts are more than a thousand other counties that retain just a single full-time news source, sometimes staffed by a lone local journalist or even wholly produced by journalists outside the publication’s nominal coverage area.
Like many urban areas Baltimore has retained its legacy daily newspaper (The Sun), though in greatly diminished form from its near-monopolist past. What’s more unusual, however, is a second, citywide, digital-only general interest news site (The Banner), plus the mixture of niche and ethnic news outlets. This raises the question: Is a model for the future of U.S. news and news consumption taking shape in Baltimore?
Baltimore’s news ecosystem is “both healthy and fragile,” says Jerry Zremski, co-author of the University of Maryland media report. Healthy in its competitive froth, but the future remains uncertain. “We all know,” says Zremski, “that no one has found the secret formula to guarantee long-term success in local journalism.”
‘Always a great news town’
Baltimore has a grand heritage of local journalism. Some of America’s most esteemed literary journalists got their start in Charm City or made it their professional home, including H.L. Mencken, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Russell Baker and, more recently, journalist-turned-screenwriter and producer David Simon. Several of the media outfits taking root today were started by local news veterans, such as former Sun reporters Fern Shen and Mark Reutter at the Brew and Lisa Snowden at the Beat. The Baltimore Afro American, founded in 1892, is one of the oldest continuously published Black newspapers in the U.S. These days, the Afro has two direct competitors, the Beat and Baltimore Times, a nonprofit that initially launched in 1986 as a monthly publication.
“Baltimore has always been a great news town,” says Simon, a former Sun reporter who set three of his acclaimed TV dramas (“The Wire,” “Homicide: Life on the Streets” and “The Corner”) in the city. “It really is a distillation of all the problems of America,” he said, ticking off ingrained racial tension, crime and political corruption. “It’s a microcosm.”
However rich the source material, Baltimore’s legacy and niche publications have faced the same declines in advertising and online traffic that have decimated local news operations nationwide. The once-dominant Sun has shrunk to around 85 journalists, according to its publisher, and has been beset by labor turbulence and staff defections amid ownership turnover in recent years. Baltimore’s two other daily papers, the News American and the Evening Sun, closed in 1986 and 1995, respectively. Its alternative weekly, the City Paper, closed in 2017.
The most invigorating recent development – and the one inspiring the most hope – has been the emergence of the nonprofit Banner in 2022. Funded primarily by hotel and nursing-home magnate Stewart Bainum Jr., The Banner has effectively transformed Baltimore into that national rarity: a two-newspaper town. From its newsroom and business offices on historic Pratt Street amid the tourist bustle of the Inner Harbor, The Banner’s daily output includes coverage of politics, education, sports and arts, plus occasional investigations. Among The Banner’s enterprise pieces last year was a series on the city’s opioid-overdose crisis, conducted in conjunction with the New York Times. In May it won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.
At The Banner, scale is the point
Bainum started The Banner after his attempt to buy The Sun from longtime owner Tribune Co. failed in 2020. He pledged $50 million in startup capital – possibly the largest amount ever staked on a local news digital startup in this country. The Banner has yet to break even, but so far it appears to be closing the gap with the Sun and by some metrics has surpassed it. It has amassed about 72,000 subscribers, not only in the city of Baltimore but across all of Maryland’s 23 counties, a 25 percent increase since the end of last year, according to chief executive Bob Cohn. A vet of The Economist, The Atlantic and Conde Nast who joined The Banner at the end of 2023, Cohn projects that revenue will grow 36 percent this year, from $13.4 million in 2024. Subscriptions start at $60 a year and renew at $235, though about one-quarter of Banner subscribers were enticed by $1-for-six-months teaser offers. Maintaining a 95-person newsroom is costly, Cohn says, but scale is the point: “If you’re determined to provide useful and compelling journalism, the kind that people are willing to pay for, you’ve got to build a big newsroom,” he says.
The Banner’s growth trajectory gave its board the confidence to launch an affiliate publication in Montgomery County, a prosperous Washington suburb some 35 miles southwest of Baltimore. (Bainum lives and works in Montgomery County.) Despite its downtown Baltimore location and editorial focus on the city, the outlet engaged in some subtle rebranding in August, dropping Baltimore from its web domain to reflect its expanding coverage. When it announced the Montgomery launch in September, The Banner also revealed partnerships with two Washington TV stations, NBC4 (WRC) and Telemundo 44 (WZDC). Under the agreements, Banner reporters participate in on-air segments; the outlet also has partnerships with Baltimore’s CBS affiliate (WJZ) and public radio station (WYPR).
One cloud on The Banner’s seemingly sunny horizon was the departure in May of founding editor Kimi Yoshino, who left to become a managing editor at The Washington Post. Yoshino built The Banner’s newsroom and oversaw its Pulitzer-winning opioid series and extensive coverage of the 2024 Key Bridge collapse. Other Banner reporting under Yoshino included an investigation of a Baltimore megachurch accused of hiding years of sexual impropriety as well as coverage of allegations of sexual misconduct against former Baltimore Ravens kicker Justin Tucker. “To a certain extent, I felt comfortable leaving The Banner because I knew it was on a solid path to sustainability,” Yoshino said, repeatedly referring to the publication as “we.” She added, “I was no longer worried about its survival.” In September, The Banner named Audrey Cooper, a former editor in chief of the San Francisco Chronicle, as its next editor in chief. She took the helm in October.
Over on Exeter Street, where The Sun’s newsroom has relocated following another move in 2023, things have been less rosy. Alden Global Capital, the investment firm notorious for snapping up ailing newspapers, acquired the 188-year-old Sun in 2021 with its purchase of Tribune Co.’s newspaper division. Alden then flipped the paper early last year to Maryland businessman David D. Smith for a price Smith said exceeded $100 million. Smith, like Bainum, is a wealthy proprietor: His fortune comes from his family’s control of Sinclair Inc., the TV-station giant based in nearby Hunt Valley, Md. His acquisition of the paper restored it to local ownership for the first time in nearly 40 years. But Smith’s activism in city politics and efforts to cross-publish content among his media holdings have caused turbulence.
Over the past 18 months, Smith and his longtime business partner, Sun co-owner Armstrong Williams, have transformed The Sun’s news and opinion pages. Williams, who once managed Ben Carson’s presidential campaign, has become a featured columnist, one of several conservative voices added to the traditionally liberal opinion section. Williams also sits on The Sun’s editorial board and oversees its newsroom. “I’m running the paper every day,” he told an interviewer last year. According to Williams, Smith plays an active role in shaping The Sun’s news agenda. “He’ll say to me, ‘You might want to do more of this…and I’ll say to [editor and publisher Trif Alatzas]…‘Can we look at doing more of this?’”
Among the most controversial changes at The Sun has been a content-sharing partnership with Sinclair and its Baltimore TV station, WBFF, known as Fox45. The Sun routinely publishes stories carrying a byline of “Fox45News” or “Sinclair National Desk.” The latter is the TV company’s bureau located outside Washington. The addition of the Sinclair-produced copy has unsettled some longtime Baltimoreans, including several current and former Sun journalists. The Sinclair stories tend to emphasize crime and civic dysfunction and conservative viewpoints, they say, at the expense of more balanced or nuanced reporting. “I see the influence of Smith in the crisis reporting about the city, as if the city is in some chaotic meltdown state where crime is out of control,” said Dan Rodricks, a beloved Sun columnist who retired in January after nearly 50 years (and now contributes to the Baltimore Brew and Baltimore Fishbowl). “The Sun still does a pretty good job of covering the community. But there’s a slant that suggests a Democratically run city is in the midst of a breakdown.”
Baltimore magazine senior editor Ron Cassie says Smith and Williams have undertaken “the Fox-ification” of The Sun, merging its sensibility with Smith’s TV station. “People don’t care who owns the paper as long as the reporting is great,” said Cassie. “It’s not political. It’s the further dismantling of the paper and the cheapening of it. He’s lowered the writing and editing standards.”
Smith’s involvement in Baltimore politics, including financing ballot initiatives to reduce the size of the city council and impose term limits on its members, has also sparked criticism. (In an interview last year with The Banner, Mayor Brandon Scott asserted that Smith was the face of a group of wealthy White men seeking to roll back Black political power in the city: “This is about, ‘Can they go back to the old days,’ ” Scott told the publication.) With control of The Sun and Fox45, Smith has amassed enormous media power to advance his political agenda, some say. Meanwhile, tensions in the newsroom – fueled by stalled contract talks and the alleged degradation of editorial standards – led to a weeklong byline strike last fall. (At a rally, Sun employees held signs reading “Integrity matters!” and “Don’t Sinclair our Sun.”)
Smith and Armstrong’s tenure has been marked by a precipitous decline in subscribers. The Sun reportedly had 230,000 paid subscribers when Smith took control in early 2024. It had 120,000 in August, according to Alatzas, the publisher and editor in chief.
Despite the readership losses, Alatzas – a veteran of two decades at The Sun – said the news organization intends to expand. It plans to add 50 newsroom staffers, with a bureau chief for every county in the state, Alatzas said, though without specifying a timeframe. In an interview, he described Smith as someone who “cares deeply about Baltimore” and The Sun. “He wants to invest in local journalism,” Alatzas said. “He’s focused on how to make this a sustainable, thriving business for generations.” In meetings with community groups, Smith has said he “bought The Sun to save it.”
Screenwriter Simon, who still lives in Baltimore, laments that his beloved former paper has become “a stalking horse for the Republican Party and the politics of Mr. Smith.” A supporter of The Banner, he offered earlier this year to write an apology for the death of any character from “The Wire” in exchange for a $500 contribution to the publication. Simon calls The Banner “the last, best hope for a quality newspaper” in Baltimore and says it can be a model for local-news operations elsewhere. “I want to see the medicine work because I want it to be prescribed elsewhere,” he said.
Is Baltimore a road map for local news success?
The shifting fortunes of the Sun and Banner raise another existential question about Baltimore and about urban news competition generally: How long can a city sustain two competitive full-service news operations, even with well-heeled proprietors behind them?
While The Banner’s growth is encouraging, all of the runway provided by its backer, Bainum, doesn’t guarantee liftoff. The Messenger, a nationally focused news startup, burned through $50 million in seed money in less than a year before closing in 2024. Another well-funded nonprofit urban startup, the Houston Landing, plowed through $20 million before shutting down in May. “The Banner is really good, has excellent leadership and has hired really well,” Peter Bhatia, the Landing’s former CEO, said by e-mail this summer. “All that contributes to a special situation in Baltimore.”
Trends in local news suggest the battle of Baltimore between The Banner and The Sun may be a fight to the death. “If The Sun starts bleeding cash or The Banner starts bleeding cash, the health of Baltimore’s news ecosystem may well rest on how much patience their wealthy owners have,” said Zremski, the University of Maryland scholar.
In this regard, Baltimore looks like other cities where legacy and start-up news operations uneasily co-exist. In Chicago, the legacy newspaper, The Chicago Tribune, is slipping while digital upstarts such as Block Club Chicago are gaining (it’s notable that The Tribune and The Sun once had the same owners, first Tribune Co. and more recently, Alden, the hedge fund known for its cuts). The emergence of local outlets in Detroit, Denver, Cleveland and Memphis also suggests that growth in local news is surely possible, but often at the expense of the incumbents.
In the near term at least, Baltimore is beating the odds amid the long decline of local news. At the moment, it’s a competitive fight. And that might be as good as it gets.[]
