When a container ship slammed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, sending 50,000 tons of concrete and steel tumbling into the water, local reporters leapt into action.

The two largest outlets in town — The Baltimore Sun and The Baltimore Banner — raced to investigate the tragedy. What followed was good journalism.

“When you have a disaster like the bridge collapse, the news instincts that reside in the newsroom thicken in a very impressive way,” said Tom Rosenstiel, a professor of the practice at the University of Maryland’s journalism school. “And suddenly, both publications were doing four, five stories about the bridge. A lot of enterprise, a lot of deep sourcing.”

In a country pocked with “news deserts” and grappling with a decadeslong decline in local journalism, Baltimore was experiencing the opposite. The aggressive growth of the startup Banner in the past two years meant that the city had not one, but two powerhouse newsrooms ready to cover that devastating night in March.

But what appeared to be a burgeoning “newspaper war” — offering Baltimorians a new era of in-depth, daily coverage — now faces an uncertain future.

New ownership at the Sun has driven staff and some readers away. Since its former managing editor retired in June, at least 18 journalists have quit. Morale is low in the 56-person newsroom as its billionaire new owner David Smith, the top executive of news chain Sinclair Broadcast Group, transforms the paper.

Sinclair is known for forcing stories with a right-leaning agenda onto its more than 180 television stations across the country. Sinclair-acquired stations increase their coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics, a 2019 study found, and coverage overall undergoes a “significant rightward shift.”

Some of those changes have come to the Sun, where readers are taking notice. “You are now seeing articles from Sinclair and (the Sinclair-owned) Fox45 put into The Baltimore Sun,” said Baltimore Symphony Orchestra oboist Michael Lisicky, a longtime subscriber. “The Sun had a wonderful legacy, and now I’m reading these slanted TV articles in there.”

Meanwhile, the Banner’s growth has been meteoric. In less than two years, it eclipsed the Sun in newsroom size and now has an editorial staff in the mid 80s. It is, in many ways, an online newspaper, covering politics, education, sports, breaking news, culture and even obituaries.

But the online-only Banner faces its own challenges. It lacks the brand awareness of the 187-year-old Sun and must convince readers that local news is worth paying for at a time when audiences are increasingly getting their information from nontraditional sources, not news outlets.

Executives at the Banner are keenly aware they are working on a deadline. When the Banner launched in 2022, hotel magnate Stewart Bainum Jr., who started the nonprofit that owns the outlet, pledged $50 million to the enterprise. The Banner must reach sustainability by 2027. Its ability to do so has implications for the local news crisis both in Baltimore and across the country.

“We have two goals — one is local, the other is national,” said Bainum. “The local goal is to create a source of local storytelling that helps bring communities together, that helps improve the lives of the people that live in our 2.7 million metro area.

“The national goal is to do this in such a way that we create a sustainable business model for local news at scale that can be replicated in communities around the country.”

They are lofty goals, which have gained both urgency and import as some Baltimoreans in the majority Black, politically liberal city recoil from the Sun’s new ownership. Though Baltimore has a strong local news ecosystem, few other outlets like TV or radio have the resources needed to sustain a wide-reaching news operation like the Sun or Banner. A 2024 study by Rosenstiel and other University of Maryland researchers found that the Sun and the Banner, along with The Frederick News-Post, are the highest producers of new stories about Maryland each day of any outlet, including local broadcast stations, in the state.

“It’s hard to overstate the impact of David Smith buying The Baltimore Sun,” said Dayvon Love, the director of public policy at grassroots think tank Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. “For some people, in general, it gives the Banner a special importance because it gives people an alternative. It is a reputable alternative.”

From a failed acquisition, an upstart rival

When the Banner launched, the Sun was in decline.

Like many cities, Baltimore used to have multiple daily newspapers. Tom Hall, a host at public radio station WYPR, recalled that when he first arrived in Baltimore in 1982, there were three major dailies: The Baltimore Sun, The Evening Sun and The News-American.

“It was a very robust scene,” Hall said. “We’re talking about international bureaus — a whole different landscape.”

The News-American shut down in 1986. By 1995, declining circulation caused The Evening Sun to close, leaving just The Baltimore Sun.

The seismic shifts in revenue and readership that affected newspapers across the country hit the Sun hard. The paper that once had a newsroom of more than 400 eventually dwindled to fewer than 100.

“I think, in many ways, that was a result of corporate ownership. The corporations come in, and they’re only concerned about giving stockholders more and more return on the investment,” said DeWayne Wickham, the founding dean of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism and Communication.

The Sun’s most recent corporate owner was Alden Global Capital, the “vulture” firm that has been accused of gutting its newspapers in search of profits. When news broke in 2020 that Alden had submitted a bid to acquire the Sun’s then-owner Tribune Publishing, journalists at the Sun and other Tribune papers ramped up ongoing efforts to find possible buyers to stop the sale.

Bainum, who is from Maryland, emerged as a candidate. He sought to first buy the Sun for $65 million. When that failed, he tried to find other buyers who would join him in acquiring the entire Tribune chain, which included the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News.

Bainum was unsuccessful, and Alden acquired the Sun and Tribune Publishing’s nine other dailies for $633 million. Still concerned for the state of local news in Baltimore, Bainum founded the nonprofit Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism and launched The Baltimore Banner. At the time, he said he was motivated in part by his experience serving in Maryland’s state government, where he saw “all sorts of shenanigans,” only some of which got reported.

“How can a people govern themselves if they don’t know what’s going on in their communities?” Bainum said. “When stories on one side of town aren’t being shared with folks on the other side of town, understanding and empathy go down, and polarization rises.”

Though the Banner’s launch attracted attention, it isn’t the only startup in Baltimore in recent years. A month before the Banner’s official start, the Baltimore Beat reopened after a two-year hiatus “to honor the tradition of the Black press and the spirit of alt-weekly journalism.” Rosenstiel identified at least three other startups — the Baltimore Brew, Baltimore Fishbowl and Baltimore Post-Examiner — and said that the city attracts new outlets that focus on different facets of its vibrant culture.

“You’ve got a thriving cultural life in Baltimore even though the city is challenged from an economic standpoint,” Rosenstiel said.

A ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ experiment

What motivates a top editor at one of the largest newspapers in the country to move 2,300 miles to join a startup? The same thing that drew dozens of other journalists to the Banner — the opportunity to participate in a grand experiment.

“I was drawn to trying to do something experimental and innovative that would help solve the local news crisis,” said Kimi Yoshino, who was managing editor of the Los Angeles Times before becoming the Banner’s editor-in-chief. “It really, truly felt — and still feels — like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It isn’t very often that you are given the runway to start something from scratch.”

News startups taking the nonprofit route are not new, but the Banner’s approach is. Its business model hinges on a large upfront investment in its product, the news report, according to CEO Bob Cohn. Whereas many nonprofit news startups start small, the Banner rapidly grew its newsroom, as well as its product, engineering and marketing teams. The goal: to give people journalism worth paying for from day one.

That approach means the Banner’s biggest challenge is closing the gap between its revenues and expenses, Cohn said. “I don’t want to do that by cutting costs. I want to do that by growing revenue.”

That revenue comes primarily from subscriptions. While many nonprofit outlets provide their journalism for free, the Banner has a paywall. Readers get a limited number of free articles each month and must subscribe to access more. Certain articles and local guides, as well as a newsletter about the Baltimore Orioles, are also only available to subscribers.

The Banner has roughly 57,000 subscribers — 30% of whom are on the outlet’s introductory offer of one dollar for six months. Those subscriptions make up 45% of the Banner’s revenue, just shy of the 50% the outlet is targeting. Executives estimate the Banner needs about 75,000 subscribers to break even.

To attract subscribers, the Banner built a newsroom of more than 80 journalists. That approach differs from other well-funded nonprofit startups that usually start small in cities with longstanding legacy papers. Mirror Indy launched in Indianapolis in 2023 and has built up a newsroom of 19 — a third of the size of the staff at the Gannett-owned IndyStar. Signal Cleveland launched in 2022 after raising $7.5 million in funding. Its full-time staff numbers just 12 (not including three statewide reporters it shares with other Signal newsrooms).

Houston Landing is another exception to this pattern, with a staff that has swelled to nearly 50 since it began in 2023. The Landing consulted the Banner on business strategy before launching, Bainum said.

The Banner’s current revenue mix is 45% subscriptions, 35% advertising and events and 20% philanthropy. The latter does not include Bainum’s startup funding, which gives the Banner two more years of runway.

“Some local news operations — and very good ones that have high-quality journalism — are solely dependent on philanthropic contributions,” Bainum said. “We’re not sure we can build it (the Banner) on scale, just being dependent on the local philanthropic community at scale. We think you need different and multiple sources of revenue.”

‘A traditional newspaper, online’

In a market that includes a legacy newsroom, alt-weeklies, nonprofit startups and broadcast stations, the Banner has tried to distinguish itself — to mixed reception.

The Venetoulis Institute, the nonprofit that owns the Banner, notes on its website that in starting the Banner, it sought to create a news organization that “reinvents what local journalism can be.” But critics say the Banner’s journalism is still susceptible to the same pitfalls that have plagued mainstream coverage of Baltimore.

The Banner’s first journalists envisioned a newsroom focused solely on in-depth, enterprise work — a “ProPublica model,” said Yoshino, referring to the nonprofit investigative outlet that has won seven Pulitzers since its inception in 2007 and generates millions of dollars each year in donations.

“The reality is that kind of work takes a long time, and if we wanted to be sustainable, if we wanted to sell subscriptions, we needed to do those things — we needed to do accountability work and investigative work — but … our reach needed to be much broader,” Yoshino said. “We needed to be more of a general interest news organization.”

As a result, the Banner added breaking news, sports and obituaries — all sections one might find in a traditional newspaper like the Sun.

Its staff members also have largely traditional backgrounds; nearly half worked for the Sun at some point in their careers.

“Frankly, a lot of people came from the Sun. And people don’t trust the Sun,” former Banner arts and culture reporter Imani Spence said.

The Sun has faced criticism for its racist past. In 2022, the paper’s editorial board published a piece apologizing for the Sun’s role in promoting “the structural racism that still subjugates Black Marylanders in our communities today.”

Independent journalist Justine Barron said the Banner initially repeated some of the Sun’s mistakes. In a piece for progressive media watchdog group FAIR, Barron identified a breaking news story in the Banner that uncritically repeated statements from Baltimore police regarding a man who died shortly after being held in custody. (A follow-up story included additional information.)

“The Banner won all of this early good faith just by being an alternative to The Baltimore Sun — which by itself indicates how people saw the Sun — and by being a nonprofit,” Barron said. “There was a lot of hope around it. But in its first year, it really dashed a lot of those hopes, just a whole series of mess ups.”

Another of those “mess ups” included the publication of an op-ed from a conservative columnist that called the transgender pride flag a “flag that denies the basic facts of biology.” Outcry prompted Yoshino to write an editor’s note apologizing for the piece, and the paper hired Wickham to serve as its public editor.

Wickham, a founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists, said he took the job because he saw it as an opportunity to advance the work he’d done in helping Black journalists and to work on a project that could “transform” the local news ecosystem.

But that transformation never came. Wickham said the Banner’s content was largely the same as its local competitor. “It’s an online version of the Sun. It’s different on the edges.

“… It’s hard to get journalists who have been doing journalism for a long time to want to do journalism in a different way.”

Yoshino said she believes her staff includes a “really great mix” of longtime Baltimoreans who understand the city’s history and newcomers who can ask questions and challenge the status quo. But she conceded that the challenge of hiring former newspaper reporters has been getting them to break their habits in coverage.

“We all sort of approach coverage in a similar way, and I think the challenge for us is trying to think outside the box, trying to think about serving a truly digital audience without a print product.”

While some Banner readers notice and appreciate the outlet’s attempt at outside-the-box, community-focused journalism, they argue it could do more.

Litsa Williams, a social worker who co-founded a nonprofit that provides resources for those coping with grief, said she took issue with the Banner’s initial coverage of the opioid epidemic in Baltimore. That series, co-published with The New York Times over the summer, found that Baltimore had nearly 6,000 fatal overdoses in the past six years.

“They completely neglected so much of the good work happening in grassroots organizations all over the city, like all the harm reduction organizations,” Williams said. “It focused so heavily, I think, on wanting to feel like it was this kind of breaking news, data attack.”

Later stories in the series did a better job of humanizing the issue and highlighting harm reduction work, Williams said.

Nonprofit consultant Laurie Bezold recalled reading the Banner’s coverage of a string of armed robberies in her neighborhood. Lacking in that coverage was a deeper exploration of the root causes of the issue, Bezold said.

“There’s a tendency to criminalize that behavior and not talk about why that behavior existed in the history of Baltimore and how it’s connected to redlining and all the things that have happened in the past.”

The Sun under Smith

While the Banner shored up its staff and expanded operations, onlookers nervously watched the Sun, wondering if the paper would go the same way as Alden’s other hollowed-out properties.

The answer, to the pleasant surprise of many, was no. Staff ignored buyout offers, and reporters hired by the Banner were replaced. Media watchers theorized that the Banner’s presence had pressured Alden to keep the Sun staffed so that it could compete.

The result: For two years, Baltimore had the equivalent of not one, but two metro dailies.

The cautious optimism surrounding the situation came crashing down in the summer. In acquiring the Sun and filling its pages with content from Sinclair, Smith brought about the staff exodus that never arrived under Alden.

“I think you probably cannot overstate the depth of misery in the newsroom right now,” said Sun books and features general assignment reporter Mary Carole McCauley.

Smith, along with co-owner and political commentator Armstrong Williams, bought the Sun for an undisclosed amount in January 2024. Soon, the Sun’s editorial pages started including more conservative viewpoints, including a column from Williams.

Smith’s and Williams’ influence spread to the news pages in June, when the Sun began republishing stories from the Sinclair-owned Fox45. These stories sometimes take a conservative bent — a change that some Baltimoreans appreciate. “I used to object to the Sun because the Sun was so left-wing. It’s improved that way,” said Theo Cavacos, a title insurance producer.

Darrell Hershberger, the principal of an elementary and middle school, also welcomed the change. “I’m kind of glad to see a little more conservative control of a news media outlet. That’ll give us some balance in the news.”

But others say the republished stories appearing in the Sun violate basic journalistic standards.

One of the first articles used the phrase “illegal immigrants,” which unionized journalists criticized as being incongruent with the paper’s journalistic standards. The Associated Press Stylebook, whose guidance is widely followed by American journalists, suggests that the word “illegal” should only be used to refer to an action, not a person. The Sun’s story was later edited to eliminate the phrase.

The Sinclair articles have drawn reproach from the Sun’s newsroom union, which has said that the framing in those pieces is often one-sided. At one point, editors added reporting from Fox45 to a Sun story without notifying the Sun reporters involved. They withdrew their bylines in protest.

Despite objections from the union, the Sun has continued to republish stories from Fox45, Sinclair’s national desk and conservative outlet The Center Square. A guild official pointed to at least one such story they said promoted misinformation. In October, the Sun reprinted a Center Square story that said FEMA was running out of disaster relief funds while it had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on migrants. In reality, Congress funds FEMA’s migrant and disaster relief programs separately. The Sun later issued a correction explaining FEMA’s disaster relief funds “are dedicated for disaster relief efforts and cannot be diverted elsewhere,” and published a letter to the editor fact-checking the story. (In an email, Center Square publisher Chris Krug defended the story and said it did not imply that FEMA ran out of disaster relief funding because it had spent the money on migrants. The version on The Center Square’s website does not have a correction or a clarification. Krug also noted that a media bias chart labels The Center Square as more balanced than The New York Times and The Washington Post and said characterizing the outlet as conservative was “unfair” and “unfounded.”)

“It (The Sun) became an outlet that disproportionately writes disinformation,” said Lester Spence, a professor of political science and Africana studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Neither Smith nor Williams responded to requests for an interview.

Sun leaders say that editors review all content that is republished to ensure that it meets the paper’s standards.

“We’ve discussed this as a newsroom and our editors are working to ensure that all content from our staff and our partners meets various publication standards in terms of style, sourcing and necessary context,” Sun managing editor Tricia Bishop said. “When we miss the mark, we readily make adjustments and are transparent about those changes.”

Things came to a head in September when the Sun fired federal courts reporter Madeleine O’Neill after she criticized the paper’s editorial direction in an internal Slack channel. Though other reporters have also spoken out against Sun stories they find concerning, O’Neill was likely vulnerable as a new hire who did not yet have full union protections. The guild has since filed an unfair labor practice charge, arguing that O’Neill was dismissed as retaliation for speaking out about workplace standards.

At least 11 other journalists have left the Sun in recent months. They felt “pushed out” by the paper’s new ownership, said environment reporter and union chair Christine Condon, and some have publicly said as much. Key beats like education and city hall are left unfilled.

“We are burnt out,” said state government and politics reporter Hannah Gaskill. “I’m going to a goodbye happy hour every week at this point.”

Union journalists have not been pressured to adopt a political slant in their work, Condon said. “If you see our names on it, we stand by it. We have the unilateral ability to pull our names.” But the Sun has published other pieces that raise eyebrows.

Starting in August, the Sun ran a series of “report cards,” evaluating the performance of each member of the Baltimore City Council. Meanwhile, Smith was funding a ballot measure to shrink the size of the council from 14 to eight. The report cards included disclosures about Smith’s advocacy on the topic, but the series still felt “odd” to Condon, who said it was not something the Sun would have done under previous ownership.

“This is not a partisan thing,” Condon said. “The very fact that we draw a line — however thin — between our owner, his political activities and changes in our newspaper is a problem. It wouldn’t matter if those changes came from a Democrat or a Republican.”

Newsroom priorities also appear to be shifting. Multiple reporters said there has been a greater emphasis on hard news and shorter stories. In August, the Sun tried to give reporters weekly quotas, making it more difficult for them to pursue stories that require extensive reporting. In October, the paper dissolved its features department and reassigned the reporters on the desk to new editors. (Editor-in-chief and publisher Trif Alatzas denied the department had been dissolved, stating, “Our arts and features coverage continues to be a hallmark of our offerings.”)

Those changes — along with myriad others — have prompted union actions, including an election week byline strike.

Sun leaders say that Smith’s ownership brings new opportunities. The paper’s partnership with Fox45 allows it to take advantage of the station’s multimedia content. Sun reporters and Fox45 reporters may collaborate on stories. (The city council report cards series was a joint project by the two.) In September, Alatzas emailed Sun staff to announce a pilot program that will pay Sun journalists $50 for each Fox45 appearance they make.

“Obviously, they (Fox45) have an incredible amount of video, and we think that gives us great opportunity,” Alatzas said. “We just hope to leverage this relationship so that we can cover more news than anyone else and provide even more to our customers.”

Alatzas added that Smith’s acquisition of the Sun has allowed it to invest in and grow its business under the guidance of two local owners. The Sun has hired new staff and is actively recruiting more journalists, advertising representatives and other staff to fill open roles.

“I think David Smith and Armstrong Williams are very focused on holding — just like the Sun’s DNA — government and institutions accountable,” Alatzas said. “They have many ideas on how we can innovate and make changes to bring in more readers, and they’re willing to make the investments needed.”

But some readers and journalists noted that the reporting Smith wants to do veers toward abject criticism instead of traditional accountability journalism. “There’s a difference between a conservative entity basically writing stories disinforming the public in order to basically decrease the legitimacy with which people hold government and then people doing real investigative reporting designed to make government more transparent,” Lester Spence said.

‘What’s a Banner story?’

Michael Lisicky used to be proud to be a Sun subscriber — a status he’s held for most of the 22 years he’s lived in Baltimore. When a gunman murdered five employees in the Capital Gazette’s offices in 2018, Lisicky reached out to the Sun, which owns the Gazette, and arranged for a group of musicians to appear at the memorial service.

Now, he finds it “almost embarrassing” to be caught with a copy of the Sun.

When people ask Lisicky why he still reads the Sun, he has to clarify that he sticks to the puzzles and occasionally checks out a story by a reporter or columnist he trusts: “I’m a Sun subscriber more because I support the aspect of local news and support the people that are hanging on there, and less about it being a routine news source for me.”

Though Lisicky has kept his subscription to support the Sun’s journalists — a choice he compares to activism — others have given up.

Many of those readers have turned to the Banner. After Smith acquired the Sun in January 2024, the Banner saw a “big surge in new subscribers and new donors,” Yoshino said. Sources are also going to the Banner. Allison Duggan, an artist who works with nonprofits and social justice groups, said people in her circles go to the Banner, not the Sun, to promote their work and share story ideas.

Some are blunt about why they’ve switched news sources. Asked what she likes about the Banner, high school teacher Leigh Caputo didn’t miss a beat: “I like that it’s not owned by Sinclair.”

But others identify a voicy-er, more community-centered approach to the Banner’s journalism. “What’s a Banner story?” is a question the outlet still asks itself, Yoshino said. There isn’t a catchall definition, but there are certain hallmarks.

“It would be interesting. It would be surprising. It would be anger-inducing. It would be helpful and useful to my life,” Yoshino said. “It would tell you something that you didn’t know about the place that you live.”

Asking newsroom outsiders the same question elicits a range of responses: “Alternative.” “Quirky.” “Imaginative.”

“I think imagination is the best term,” Hall said. “They are creative and insightful and imaginative about how they frame issues and who they talk to and the answers they are intent on getting.”

Baltimore City education reporter Liz Bowie, one of the Banner’s first hires, said she approaches stories at the Banner differently than she did at the Sun. When evaluating story ideas at the Sun, she asked herself, “Does this story matter?” or “Is this an important story?” At the Banner, she asks herself, “Who is my audience, first of all, and is there an appetite for this?”

“Kimi has always been pressing the staff to be creative, to write in first person if we want to, to think imaginatively,” Bowie said. “And we try to be a little different, to have more voice, to write authoritatively, to have humor, to write stories that make people laugh and bring them joy.”

Readers have noticed that difference in tone. While Litsa Williams occasionally finds the Banner’s headlines edging on sensationalism or clickbait, she says in some stories, she can hear the journalist’s personal voice.

“It felt a little bit more like it was being reported by people who … were sharing their experience of living in the city,” Williams said.

The Banner’s data journalism team has helped set its coverage apart from other outlets, said E.R. Shipp, an associate professor of multimedia journalism at Morgan State University. She added that the Banner’s reporters have distinguished themselves by focusing deeper on local issues.

“The Banner is also more obviously Black and brown sensitive, focused, aware,” Shipp said. “You get a better sense of Baltimore as a city that’s about 60% Black on an everyday basis than you are getting or have been getting from the Sun.”

Shipp contrasted the Banner’s coverage of Baltimore’s issues with that of Fox45. The latter’s stories tend to carry an undertone of “(look) how screwed up the city is, how it used to be much better when white people ran it. … These Black folks don’t have a clue what they’re doing.”

“The Banner doesn’t shy away from criticizing what needs to be criticized,” Shipp said. “But you get a better mix of stories showing the humanity of people in the city and the challenges that there are that the government needs to be accountable for.”

In his team’s content analysis of Maryland papers, the University of Maryland’s Rosenstiel found that the Banner produced “a notably higher level of enterprise” than both the Sun and the state’s average. A third of the Banner’s stories were enterprise pieces, defined as any story that was a feature, follow-up or not breaking news. The Sun, meanwhile, had “very little” enterprise.

‘A worthy competitor’

There is one clear area where the Sun dominates the Banner: readership numbers.

The Sun has a 185-year head start on the Banner in both audience and brand awareness. The Sun had roughly 230,000 print and online subscribers in early June, according to Alatzas, compared to the Banner’s 57,000 subscribers. The Sun’s numbers predate many of the changes made to the news pages, and the paper would not provide updated numbers.

In conversations with more than 50 Baltimoreans, all were familiar with the Sun, even if few read, much less subscribed, to the paper. But a handful had never heard of the Banner.

The lack of a physical product means that one can’t stumble across the Banner in the way one might find an errant copy of the Sun. Gleaming signage at the Banner’s offices in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor is the closest thing the outlet has to a physical presence in the city.

It’s a problem the Banner is trying to address through advertisements, partnerships and social media outreach.

“The people who know about us know about us, and they may consume us. The people who don’t — we have to figure out how to get into their consciousness,” Yoshino said. “TikTok and Instagram is one way that we’re doing that. Other ways include billboards, signs in malls, television commercials, radio spots and partnerships with WYPR. Our reporters are on WJZ, the CBS affiliate, five times a week.”

Reaching residents is half the battle. The Banner — and the Sun, for that matter — must also engage readers at a time when many consume their news solely from social media, if at all. A 2024 Pew Research Center study found that only 22% of U.S. adults follow local news “very closely” — down from 37% in 2016.

The majority of Baltimoreans interviewed for this story said they get their news primarily from television, radio or social media. Some who did subscribe to a news source only followed national outlets, like The New York Times.

In some ways, Baltimore is a small city, said Terri Steel, a writer who has contributed to several local publications, including the Fishbowl. It’s difficult to make it in the city, she said, noting that she’s watched many chains come and go: “I think Baltimoreans by nature don’t embrace change. They like the old, the tired, the true.”

“It seems new, untested,” Meg Galuardi, an engineer, said of the Banner. “I get the sponsored ads for it, and they sometimes feel kind of clickbait-y. So that has sort of shaped my perception of it. But if I heard from somebody who subscribed to it, who stood by it, then that would probably get me interested.”

At the Sun, unionized journalists continue to fight the changes to their paper. They are currently in contract negotiations and are seeking to preserve the rights to remove their bylines and to be notified if a published story is changed, among other protections.

“I think all of us are fighting this fight partially so that when history looks back on this moment in the story of The Baltimore Sun, it will know that the journalists of the Sun fought hard for what we believed in and for the journalism we care so much about,” Condon said.

While the Sun battles staff attrition, the Banner continues to grow. Since June, it has launched an “Education Hub” and expanded business coverage. The Banner is also working to extend its footprint across the state, hiring a number of regional reporters to cover counties that lack local news sources and starting region-specific newsletters. Ongoing experiments include live blogs, vertical video on the site’s homepage and comment sections on certain stories for subscribers.

The Sun remains a “worthy competitor,” Yoshino said, citing its talented journalists and loyal subscriber base. But she also believes that the changes at the Sun have made the Banner’s mission to serve its community all the more important.

“I believe The Banner is even more important today than it was when we launched, in part because of the ownership changes at The Sun,” Yoshino said. “Baltimore and Maryland deserve a trustworthy news organization that reports fearlessly, honestly and without political agenda.”