On the latest “What Works” podcast, Dan and Ellen talk with Ron Mitchell, publisher and editor of The Bay State Banner. In 2023, Mitchell and André Stark, both seasoned television news journalists, purchased the Banner, a newspaper covering the Black and brown communities in Boston and beyond.
The Banner was started in 1965 by Melvin Miller. The print weekly is legendary for covering stories that were ignored by other publications, such as stories about the Black and Latino communities in the Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan. Mitchell and Stark are expanding its digital footprint.
During his 27 years at WBZ-TV (Channel 4), Mitchell created news coverage focused on racism in elementary school textbooks in 2014 and a series chronicling an 11-year lawsuit that culminated in an $11 million award to a Black firefighter in Brookline.
Dan and Ellen also talk with Sanjana Mishra, who just received her bachelor’s degree from Northeastern in journalism and criminal justice. She’s worked in local news, communications and social media. In one of Dan’s classes last semester, she wrote a final paper on the role of private equity and corporate-chain ownership in creating and exacerbating the local-news crisis. Her paper, which we’ve published at What Works, focuses on Alden Global Capital and USA Today Co., known as Gannett until recently.
Ellen has a Quick Take on “North Star Stories,” a daily radio broadcast on local news carried by AMPERS, a network of 17 community FM stations across Minnesota. It’s by community, for community, and it’s funded partly by donors and partly by the state.
Dan has a Quick Take about the latest on The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which announced earlier this year that it was shutting down in the face of mounting losses. What’s happened since is mostly good — but it comes with a sour aftertaste.
You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
A summary of our conversation
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In Episode 119 of “What Works: The Future of Local News,” hosts Dan Kennedy and Ellen Clegg sit down with Ron Mitchell, publisher and editor of The Bay State Banner, the Black-owned weekly that has covered Boston and the wider New England Black and Latino diaspora since 1965. Mitchell, who purchased the paper from founder Melvin Miller a little over three years ago, explains that the Banner serves communities from Worcester to Cape Cod, Brockton, New Bedford and into New Hampshire — a regional readership often overlooked by mainstream outlets.
Mitchell describes the Banner as both a continuation of Miller’s civil-rights legacy and a paper meeting a moment of renewed pressure on Black communities. Miller, a Harvard-trained attorney and friend of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., founded the paper when Boston had virtually no Black representation in City Hall, the Statehouse or the police and fire departments. Today, Mitchell says, the Banner still calls out injustice — now amid federal cuts to social services and attacks on equity programs — while publishing the positive, practical stories about wealth-building, health, and opportunity that mainstream media too often miss.
Asked why Black-owned media still matters, Mitchell argues that 19th- and 20th-century newspapers offered Black readers little more than derogatory imagery, and that much of today’s mainstream press traffics in what he calls “influences” rather than journalism — stories engineered to provoke reactions rather than to inform. He contrasts the Banner’s weekly cadence with The Boston Globe’s daily pace, noting that the Banner can talk to seven or 10 community members for a single story and bring 60 years of trust to those conversations. While he credits the Globe for hiring reporters from the community, he says depth and longevity give the Banner a different lens, particularly on stories about safety, civil-rights history and economic life in Black Boston.
Kennedy asks about the Banner Institute for Community News, the nonprofit Mitchell launched roughly a year ago to support Black and brown multimedia outlets across New England through funding, partnerships and education. Its board includes Keith Motley, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Marita Rivera, Denise Kaigler, Charlie Titus, and Glenn Lloyd. Active fundraising began only in the past month after the standard nonprofit setup work; no major grants have landed yet, but momentum is building.
On lessons for fellow news entrepreneurs, Mitchell’s central message is partnership. The Banner has revived its sports section and built content and sponsorship relationships with WCVB-TV (Channel 5), GBH News, Meet Boston and the Boston Ujima Project. University collaborations with Northeastern, Boston University and Roxbury Community College bring student reporting into the paper. He also urges modernization: the Banner moved printing from Canada to an Upstate New York plant for substantial savings and rebuilt its website, with digital now accounting for roughly a quarter of revenue. His biggest surprise on taking the helm? Having to write a 900-word editorial every week.
Turning to local television, where Mitchell spent 27 years as a CBS cameraman and producer, he laments the shift from reporter-driven news meetings to producer- and analytics-driven assignments. His advice: trust reporters who actually know their communities — he name-checks Bill Shields, Sarah-Ann Shaw and Charlie Austin — rather than chasing salacious metrics or hiring “mic holders” who want to be influencers.
For his own media diet, Mitchell declines to list outlets, urging listeners instead to read widely, interrogate the origin of their news, and distinguish journalism from influencers.
