The Washington Nationals will soon be covered by The Baltimore Banner. Photo (cc) 2022 by All-Pro Reels / Joe Glorioso.
The gutting of The Washington Post may prove to be an opportunity for The Baltimore Banner. According to an announcement, the Banner, a digital nonprofit startup, will cover Washington teams, including beat coverage of the Nationals baseball team and the Commanders football team. The Banner’s editor-in-chief, Audrey Cooper, is quoted as saying:
This decision is part of our unwavering commitment to serve Maryland with honest, independent journalism. It builds on last week’s announcement that we are expanding our news coverage into Prince George’s County and represents another step in strengthening our statewide reach.
At a time when so much pulls communities apart, sports bring us together. The Washington Post’s decision to eliminate its sports section creates an opportunity for us to serve more Marylanders with The Banner’s distinctive mix of fearless accountability reporting, engaging storytelling and sharp analysis.
Portrait of Jeff Bezos (cc) 2017 by thierry ehrmann.
By Dan Kennedy
If The Washington Post’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, ever decides he wants to take journalism seriously again, then he might take a look at a handful of large regional papers that have charted a route to sustainability against the strong headwinds that continue to buffet the news business.
Perhaps the most important difference between these papers and the Post — and the hundreds of other shrinking media outlets owned by corporate chains and hedge funds — is that they are rooted in the communities they cover. Whether owned by wealthy people or run by nonprofits, they place service to their city and region above extracting the last smidgen of revenue they can squeeze out.
Although I could add a few to this list, I am mentioning five large regional newspapers as examples of how it’s possible to succeed despite the long-term decline in the economics of journalism.
Charles Sennott interviews a Taliban leader while on assignment in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. Photo by Ben Brody. Used with permission.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen and Dan talk with Charles Sennott, a former foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe who left in 2008 to become a serial entrepreneur. He co-founded GlobalPost and The GroundTruth Project. GroundTruth, a nonprofit, was a partner to GBH News, PBS’s “Frontline,” public radio’s “The World,” and the “PBS NewsHour.” It focused on partnerships to amplify international and national news projects.
Now Charlie has turned his attention to local news. He teamed up with Steven Waldman to launch Report for America as an initiative of The GroundTruth Project. Dan and Ellen talked with Waldman on an earlier podcast.
Sennott’s newest creation is GroundTruth Media Partners, LLC based in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he leads a small staff and publishes and writes the GroundTruth newsletter on Substack. The nonprofit that was called The GroundTruth Project has recently rebranded to call itself Report Local, with Report for America and Report for the World as its flagship initiatives. Report Local and the University of Missouri School of Journalism did groundbreaking work on water issues in the Mississippi River Basin.
In a recent post on Substack, Sennott writes about this new branding. He also writes about why he officially stepped aside from the program but remains proud of the movement it has created.
As his own act of community service, Sennott is also serving as the publisher and editor of the Martha’s Vineyard Times. He and his wife, Julie, who has an extended family on the Island, now live there year-round.
Dan and Ellen are also joined by Alexis Algazy, a Northeastern journalism and political science student who has written a compelling story about why politicians need to engage in storytelling on social media.
Dan has a Quick Take about public support for local news. Politico recently published an in-depth story on what’s gone wrong with a program in California that was supposed to provide $250 million to help fund local news over a five-year period, with the money to come from the state and from Google. The deal seems to be coming apart. And yet there are reasons to be optimistic — as you will hear.
Ellen has a Quick Take on the role of video in recording the violent acts of ICE agents in Minneapolis and the protests all over the Twin Cities. Video by bystanders has played an important role in exposing what’s happening on the ground. But video and social media in general also pose a challenge for reporters covering the story for The Minnesota Star Tribune. Editor Kathleen Hennessey spoke about it in a brief interview with Semafor.
