After his unsuccessful bid to buy The Baltimore Sun, Choice Hotels International chairman Stewart Bainum Jr. next year will launch The Baltimore Banner, an all-digital news outlet with a nonprofit model, The Atlantic first reported.
The Banner will start with about 50 journalists and an annual operating budget of $15 million, Bainum told Atlantic writer McKay Coppins.
Bainum has met with the leaders of local-news start-ups, including The Texas Tribune, the Daily Memphian, and The City in New York. His big takeaway from those meetings was that he would need a large amount of funding to hire the staff it takes to thoroughly cover Baltimore.
“You need real capital to move the needle,” Bainum told Coppins.
Initially, the news outlet will rely on donations, but Bainum hopes to make the news outlet self-sustaining within five years through subscription sales, according to the Atlantic article.
Domain names including thebaltimorebanner.com and baltimorebanner.com currently link to parked pages, but do not have a website attached to them yet.
There are also accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram with the name “The Baltimore Banner,” but none have made any posts.
Baltimore Fishbowl has attempted to reach Bainum through Choice Hotels International, but has not yet received a response.
In November 2019, New York-based hedge fund Alden Global Capital became the largest shareholder in Tribune Publishing, the Baltimore Sun’s parent company at the time.
Alden’s history of buying newspapers, drastically cutting their staff through layoffs and buyouts, and wringing out the profits, earned the hedge fund a reputation as a newsroom “vampire” and the “grim reaper of American newspapers,” as Vanity Fair writer Joe Pompeo described the company.
Faced with the looming threat of Alden, staff at The Baltimore Sun launched their “Save Our Sun” campaign in an effort to attract a local owner to buy the Sun from Tribune. The campaign sparked similar efforts at other Tribune-owned papers.
Bainum emerged as a potential new owner for the Sun. He formed a nonprofit, The Sunlight for All Institute, which made a $65 million bid to buy the newspaper from Alden once the hedge fund acquired the newspaper from Tribune.
Supporters were cautiously hopeful of Bainum’s deal. But a disagreement over how to share fees for services in the time leading up to Alden’s acquisition of the Tribune papers caused the deal to falter.
Bainum then went toe to toe with Alden as he sought to buy all of Tribune Publishing. Bainum and Tribune employees rallied to find potential local owners in each of the newspapers’ markets who would join Bainum’s bid.
Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss joined Bainum’s bid but eventually dropped out after determining it would be difficult to transform The Chicago Tribune into the national publication of Wyss’s dreams.
Tribune shareholders in May approved Alden’s $633 million purchase of the company. The deal, which closed in June, made Alden the second-largest newspaper owner by circulation in the United States behind Gannett.
The Atlantic reported that Bainum emailed Alden’s president, Heath Freeman, three days after the deal went through, with a last-ditch pitch to buy only the Sun from them, but Freeman never responded.
So, if Bainum can’t own Baltimore’s 184-year-old newspaper, he plans to build his own.
“There’s no industry that I can think of more integral to a working democracy than the local-news business,” Bainum said in the Atlantic article.
