Stewart Bainum, the Takoma Park philanthropist behind the soon-to-be launched The Baltimore Banner, the new city digital newspaper, has shared this story before, but it bears repeating.

When he served in the General Assembly from 1979 to 1986, reporters from big-city papers like The Baltimore Sun, The Evening Sun, The Baltimore News-American, The Washington Post, and The Washington Star—as well as The Capital and smaller Maryland newspapers–swarmed the General Assembly like bees to a honeypot.

And for good reason. The state had been infamous for its corruption and drama long before the convictions of former governors Spiro Agnew and Marvin Mandel just prior to Bainum’s arrival. Several of the reporters covering Annapolis while he held elected office went on to big careers, including future PBS NewsHour host Gwen Ifill–who covered Bainum’s bill to get rid of a lucrative tax break for a politically connected all-male club in suburban Washington–and future Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd.

As for Bainum, he left politics and took over as CEO of his father’s nursing-home business, which he helped turn into one of the largest in the country. He never forgot, however, the important work of those journalists covering the halls of the Maryland State House, even as The Evening Sun and The Washington Star, where Ifill and Dowd were employed, respectively, fell by the wayside–and newspapers across the board began slashing staffs in the wake of falling print revenues.

Fast-forward to May 2020. Sitting out the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic at his family’s second home on the Eastern Shore, Bainum, who turned 76 last month, began brainstorming his next philanthropic endeavor. He’d made several successful early philanthropic investments in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years, including in a Liberian case-management system that improved infant mortality rates.

Plainspoken, earnest, and still curious-minded–with admittedly enough of an ego that he cares about his legacy–Bainum sought another high-risk, high-public reward venture where others were not yet willing to open their wallets. Ideally, a project with the potential to establish a model that could be replicated and have a broad impact. Ideally, closer to home.

“I started thinking about local news again,” says Bainum, recalling the loss of advertising and subsequent staff cuts plaguing not just The Sun, but institutional newspapers across the country. “How can people govern themselves if they don’t know what is going on in their community? There is no industry more critical to democracy.”

The Sun popped up on Bainum’s radar immediately when he began looking for a legacy paper to save, or at least rebuild. He’d started subscribing 40 years ago as a legislator. The Sun was always a great paper, he says, until about 20 years ago when it began heading in the wrong direction as the industry’s consolidation and digital trends merged into a two-headed existential threat.

In Baltimore, the industry dynamics first shifted when Los Angeles’ Times Mirror Company bought The Sun from its historic A.S. Abell Co. owners in 1986–just 30 hours after Baltimore’s once-beloved News-American, an afternoon paper with a 200-year lineage, folded. They worsened when the Tribune Publishing Company purchased Times Mirror in 2000, The Sun included, on the cusp of the digital revolution. (The internet stripped advertising and subscriptions, as newspapers for too long gave away their content online for free, which proved a boon for Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but sped their own decline.)

Consider that as recently as 2002, The Sun employed some 400 journalists. Today, it’s about 70. The situation went from bad to hellish just before COVID arrived in Maryland, when the hedge fund and well-known newspaper dismantler Alden Global Capital started buying up Tribune stock in a takeover move. Long story short, Bainum’s bid last spring to pry The Sun from Tribune before it sold the 185-year-old paper to Alden didn’t work out. Neither did his subsequent scramble to buy all of Tribune. (Bainum has a lot of money, but not that kind of cash. “I’m not a billionaire,” he says.) Both efforts were rolls of the dice, but he had a back-up plan in his pocket all along–the creation of a nonprofit, digital-only metro newspaper.

“WE’RE PUSHING ALL OUR CHIPS TO THE MIDDLE OF THE TABLE.”

ProPublica, the Pulitzer-Prize winning nonprofit, and The Texas Tribune, a statewide nonprofit specializing in politics and explanatory journalism–each founded more than a decade ago–are two examples of successful online-only news sites. So is the Baltimore Brew, which has been breaking City Hall stories since 2010, and Maryland Matters, which covers state politics and recently celebrated its fifth anniversary.

But what Bainum and his team at the The Baltimore Banner have in mind would break new ground. It’s a thus-far illusive sweet spot somewhere between the national online journalism outlets, which generally focus on an area of expertise, such The Marshall Project and its focus on criminal justice, or more narrowly focused local outlets, like the Brew and Maryland Matters. The best current template is the Daily Memphian, an ambitious metro news site that launched in 2018 with $7 million in funding and a staff of 25, and has since added 10 more journalists. Its founder has been explicit about challenging that city’s Gannett legacy newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, stating that chain ownership inevitably leads to “massive cuts and loss of local focus.”

Bainum’s gamble is of a different scale altogether. He’s pledged to raise, or personally contribute if necessary, $50 million over the next three and a half years in start-up funding. The plan is to launch with 50 journalists–“we’re hiring like mad,” says managing editor Andrea McDaniels, who spent two decades at The Sun–and grow to 70 journalists, a newsroom that would essentially match The Sun.

“We could’ve decided to spread the $50 million over 10 years, but people who have done this tell us, and everything we’ve learned tells us, it’s better to go big early and be competitive from the start,” says Bainum. “We’re pushing all our chips to the middle of the table.”

The first question about The Baltimore Banner–whether or not it will produce content that rivals The Sun–was answered months ago. But not before some initial controversy. In October, The Banner announced in a Washington Post story it had hired Kimi Yoshino, then managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, to serve as as editor in chief. The hire was initially met with a less than enthusiastic response, given Yoshino is from out of town–Baltimoreans are nothing if not parochial–as are Bainum and Banner CEO Imtiaz Patel.

And that, along with high-profile supporters Michael Bloomberg and David Simon, as well as several other white philanthropic consultants, the paper appeared to lack significant Black leadership in what has long been a majority-Black city. A city that has long felt the consequences of racially biased reporting, as The Sun noted in a lengthy apology to its readers in February. Yoshino acknowledges The Post rollout was a mistake, that it was too soon and not well-considered, given her and The Banner’s intentions.

“David Simon emailed me and said you can’t make those kinds of unforced errors, and he put me in touch with [Baltimore native and New York Times best-selling author] D. Watkins,” who is Black, Yoshino recalled recently from The Banner’s temporary downtown co-working space. “D. introduced me to some other Black writers and journalists.”

The Banner then made its first real splash early in the new year with a follow-up announcement: It had hired not just McDaniels, who is Black and a well-respected journalist with leadership experience at The Sun, but also that it had stolen veteran reporters Justin Fenton, Liz Bowie, and Tim Prudente from The Sun, and hired Washington Post music and culture contributor Lawrence Burney, whom Watkins had recommended.

Fenton is the author of the Gun Trace Task Force chronicle, We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption, which David Simon made into his latest HBO project and is set to air this month. He also has nearly quadruple the number of Twitter followers as the next-highest Sun journalist and seven or eight times that of most of the prominent journalists in the city. Bowie is an award-winning education reporter with unparalleled experience on that critical beat. Prudente, who covered the courts and cops at The Sun, has already broken one major story for The Banner–that a city parking garage had been turned into a makeshift morgue to cope with a backlog of autopsies, resulting in the resignation of the state’s chief medical examiner. Burney is the founder of the award-winning Baltimore and Black-centered arts magazine, True Laurels, and brings city music and arts knowledge and relationships that few, if any, other journalists in Baltimore possess.

For his part, Fenton says his move was borne out of the increasing realization that Alden had no intention to retool and rebuild The Sun. “We’ve weathered a lot at the paper over the years and had some departures over the summer that felt like we crossed a plane,” he says, noting the resignations of experienced editors Anne Tallent and Eileen Canzian. “All of a sudden, I went from thinking we’ve been doing good work in spite of our circumstances, [to where] I was worried that we finally actually hit the bone and it was going to be real bad.”

Since that announcement, The Banner has lured away several other key Sun journalists, including Pam Wood, its top state government reporter, and Taylor DeVille, its top Baltimore County reporter, and business and health reporter Hallie Miller. Yoshino also convinced former Sun editor and former L.A. Times colleague Richard Martin to return to Baltimore, and he will serve as deputy editor under McDaniels.

In late April, The Banner also hired two more Black journalists with Baltimore roots, and overall, it seems to be doing better than The Sun in building a diverse staff, which, even after its formal apology, has hired overwhelmingly white replacements to fill the shoes of the journalists who left for The Banner. Leslie Gray Streeter, an accomplished journalist who spent two decades at The Palm Beach Post, will write a regular column for The Banner, and Jasmine Vaughn-Hall, who previously worked at the York Daily Record, will work as a community reporter.

Having established it will produce content that rivals The Sun, two other questions emerge: 1) How will it be different and more interesting than The Sun, if it’s hiring largely former Sun staff and traditional legacy publication journalists at the outset? To date, Burney seems to be the only out-of-the-box editorial hire. And: 2) Can it raise the $15-million annual budget that Bainum and CEO Patel’s research tells them it will need to be sustainable once the initial seed money–which is substantial, make no mistake–runs out?

In terms of offering something unique in comparison to The Sun, Yoshino, McDaniels, Fenton, and Bowie say that there is discussion in their newsroom every day about what defines a “Banner story.” First and foremost, it means a Baltimore and metro-area focus. Readers shouldn’t expect posts on the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the president’s State of the Union on the homepage, for example, not even with an Associated Press byline, unless there is a significant Baltimore angle.

That said, the intention is not to cover every breaking news story, homicide, or fire, the way The Sun does as a matter of practice as the city’s paper of record. There won’t be daily game coverage of the Orioles. Going in, the plan is to do more enterprising, explanatory, and investigative journalism. The kind of work that probes past the “who, what, where” of journalism to the “why and how” questions. To that end, the start-up staff is getting months to dig into, and bank, compelling pieces intended to get The Banner off to a flying start. In-depth local journalism, in other words, that takes time, resources, and commitment that was increasingly in shorter supply at The Sun. It’s work that the City Paper, which Tribune purchased and then shuttered, was known for as well.

In fact, Yoshino, who is cautious about invoking the City Paper because she doesn’t want to alienate its loyal former readership, says The Banner will have a substantial freelance budget like the City Paper, which is a contrast to The Sun and other traditional legacy papers, which are almost entirely staff-written. That should help bring new voices into the city’s journalistic ecosystem.

A formative “creatives in residence” initiative was announced in March. The initial cohort includes D. Watkins, poet and essayist Kondwani Fidel, E.R. Shipp, who won a Pulitzer when she was at the New York Daily News, and Charm City Table blogger Simone Phillips, who has one of the largest social media profiles in Baltimore. Yoshino also said award-winning Baltimore-based photographer Shan Wallace, who should add some striking visual pop, has been hired. Podcasts and more video-oriented journalism are likely just down the road.

As far as revenue, Bainum and Patel envision a mix that is ultimately 50 percent subscriptions, 25 percent ads, 15 percent philanthropic contributions, 5 percent from events, and 5 percent miscellaneous. Subscription prices will be comparable to The Sun, giving Baltimoreans a real choice.

Whether The Banner can become more than the sum of its posts and feel like an integral part of the fabric of Baltimore life the way The Sun, still colloquially referred to by older Baltimoreans as The Sunpapers, and City Paper did remains to be seen. In the battle for pageviews, The Sun certainly hasn’t been so stripped that it’s without familiar bylines. Columnist Dan Rodricks, neighborhood historian Jacques Kelly, obituary writer Fred Rasmussen, enterprise reporter Jean Marbella, and Ravens beat writer Mike Preston, to name a few, all still bring institutional knowledge and journalistic bona fides, which remain in increasingly short supply for newspapers everywhere in the country.

“It was sad to leave The Sun, it’s an institution I love, and I love the people I worked with at The Sun,” says Bowie. “But I also spent 18 months trying to find new ownership and came to see the sustainability of local news coverage is a national problem. I don’t know how to solve this sustainability problem, but Stewart Bainum is committed to finding an answer. This is an opportunity to experiment and create something new that might last. Who knows? Maybe it’ll last 185 years.”

The best possible outcome is that Baltimore becomes a two-newspaper town.

True Laurels has evolved from a blog to a fan zine to a glossy print publication since it began in 2011, and its next iteration begins tonight, when Red Bull Radio launches True Laurels radio show at 6 p.m.

True Laurels founding editor Lawrence Burney will be joined live in the studio in New York with Baltimore legend Lor Choc, the 20-year-old West Baltimore R&B hip-hop artist featured on the cover of issue 3 of the print edition.

The hour-long radio show will stream live each Wednesday on redbullradio.com, hosted by Burney and exploring the music and culture across the African diaspora through discussions with artists, journalists, and other guests who can bring insight and perspective.

A Baltimore native, Burney sees music as a byproduct of society and wants to investigate those connections, covering music from his home region as well as the South, the Caribbean, West Africa, and beyond.

Also a staff writer for Noisey, Lawrence splits his time between Baltimore and Brooklyn.

“To me, the music is not just the music,” Lawrence told Baltimore in an interview earlier this year. “Music is the best introduction to any society. That’s why it has to be taken seriously.”

In 2011, Lawrence Burney started a local music and arts blog by the name of True Laurels. As a Baltimore native, he saw a hole in the city’s ever-evolving media landscape and in no time evolved his web-only format into an indie zine and now today’s integral print publication, featuring compelling photography and both first-person and reported stories on Baltimore’s black creatives. On the eve of True Laurels Issue 04, we sat down with Burney to talk about his musical upbringing, his gig at Vice, and the importance of giving back to the place where he grew up.
 
 

How did you get into writing? 

My interest didn’t start until like my 12th grade year. I got into a lot of trouble in school. I was suspended for behavior-related things. I had this one writing teacher at City in ninth grade and we never liked each other. We always clashed. In the 11th grade, I had him again for college writing. We got into altercations—all this crazy stuff—but in the midst of all that, I still got As and Bs on all of my assignments. That’s something I kept in the back of my head: I must be pretty okay at writing if this guy, who has every reason to fail me, is still giving me As and Bs.

When it was time to start applying for colleges, I decided I was going to go to school for journalism. It wasn’t like a thing I did since I was a little kid; I stumbled into it because I needed to do something with my life.  

Do you come from a creative family?

My mother is a writer. She actually went to University of Baltimore at the same time I did, for creative writing. She’s also a musician. She and my grandfather were in a jazz-funk band together, Wolf Pack, so I would travel with them to local gigs and be in studio sessions with them. We all lived in the same house for a good part of me growing up, so my alarm clock was my grandfather playing his guitar. He toured with George Clinton for like two tours as the drummer, and my mother opened up for Gil Scot-Heron one time on Charles Street when I was probably eight. I didn’t know who he was at the time, but I knew he was important by the way people talked about him. 

So music was a part big of your upbringing.

In high school, my reputation amongst my friends was just knowing a lot of music. I would make them mixes and just impose my will on making them like the music that I liked. It’s basically what I’m still doing now. Then my daughter was born when I turned 20. I was feeling pressure from that. I had to do something. I had to gain some clarity on my life’s path. So I just combined those interests—the writing and the music. It was the end of 2011 when I made the True Laurels’ WordPress.  

What was the rap scene like back then?

It was constructed in a completely different way at that time. Growing up, it was just battle rappers. Baltimore was more of a club music city. This whole rap scene really started in 2014 when Young Moose and Lor Scoota got hot. Before that, some artists like Los, Skarr Akbar, and Comp had some national success, but because technology wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now, people didn’t look at it as “the Baltimore scene.” Even when I started True Laurels, that wasn’t the case. When I went to UB was the first time I even started learning about central Baltimore. That part of town was not a place that most black people from Baltimore really knew too much about. We’re on the east and west sides.  

Whereas, for at least the last decade, the local and national media has considered Baltimore’s “music scene” to be headquartered in Station North. Station North was just North Avenue when I was growing up. There was a Tyrone’s Chicken that I would go to with my grandfather after we played basketball at Druid Hill. He knew about the Copycat and all that because he was a musician, but I was never exposed to it. It was all new to me. The Windup Space. The Ottobar. It was an exciting time because I was being put in a new environment. I didn’t ever party with alternative types of black people or artsy white kids. I didn’t hang out around queer people or anybody who thought a little differently. That just wasn’t my upbringing. But I was learning about a new part of Baltimore while staying in tune with what was coming out of the parts of the city I was familiar with and bringing it all together.    

You founded True Laurels as a music and arts blog in 2011. 
I wanted to document the scene but also really try to paint a full picture of what inner-city, black Baltimore is. If you left it up to a place like the Urbanite, where I interned in 2012, you’d think Baltimore was only Hampden, Charles Village, Station North, and Mt. Vernon. This is still a struggle in the perception of Baltimore. When I’m in other places, people only know about the crime, the drugs, The Wire. That’s people’s main point of reference. And The Wire is a good show—mostly accurate in my opinion. I resisted watching it until I was in my 20s, but I ended up watching and it actually helped me make more sense of my own life. Even this whole Gun Trace Task Force can be tied back to things that were talked about on that show.  

Speaking of the task force, your profile of local rapper Young Moose in Issue 03 was a great piece of journalism. 
The problem is there hasn’t been someone who is actually a black person from the inner city writing these stories, with the nuance to show that black people from Baltimore are a very diverse group. This is an almost 65 percent black city, so not everybody is going to be living on a block that’s mostly vacant. That’s a lot of people’s reality, and part of my life I lived in those kinds of neighborhoods, too, but it’s not everything. There’s diversity that needs to be depicted, and I’m trying to pull all of those pieces together.     

You are also a staff writer for Noisey, the online music publication of Vice, where you’ve written a number of stories on Baltimore artists. Do they give you a lot of creative freedom? They put a lot of trust in me. Through Vice, I’ve been able to tell stories about Baltimore that just don’t get told. I think stories like the one I wrote on Young Moose help people understand what it’s like for a person like him to grow up in a city like Baltimore—how they’re perceived by institutions, and how that trickles down into every part of their life. I do want to expand my voice and speak to different audiences, but if I can’t speak to the people that I come from, that’s not a win. That’s not enough for me.  

You’ve recently done deep dives into the youth-driven music scenes of other cities like New Orleans and Johannesburg. Does that inform the work you do in Baltimore, or vice versa? 
True Laurels has helped me form what I want to be as a journalist. Because I’m from a city like Baltimore—misunderstood and oversimplified— I’m really interested in regionality and how the politics of a city affect the way that the young people there operate. I have a lot of curiosity about how things work, here and around the world. To me, the music is not just the music. Music is the best introduction to any society. That’s why it has to be taken seriously.  

You live in Brooklyn, but you come back to Baltimore every week? 
At the very least, I’m here every 10 days, spending time with my daughter, trying to stay updated on what’s going on. I’m constantly in communication with the younger musicians on Instagram and YouTube. I’m 27 now and I realize that I am in some ways an elder statesman for these young people. Lor Choc’s 19. Deetranada’s 16. Young people drive culture, so you have to embrace them. Even when changing True Laurels from a fan zine to a more conventional magazine, I had to ask myself: what would a 17-year-old Lawrence think about this? In hip-hop culture, presentation and looking fresh matters. But there are artists here who are now starting to get traction and make it believable that you can actually get somewhere. And that’s why I feel encouraged to keep going—who knows what could happen next?  

You’ve talked about True Laurels existing as documentation—a physical record of black culture in Baltimore. 
You have to know the history and apply that to the present to know what’s coming next. That’s why, every week, I’m trying to post archival black Baltimore-related footage on the True Laurels Instagram. It’s important to inform people there has always been cool shit going on in this place for a long time. It’s helping me paint an even broader picture of Baltimore, and like The Wire, it’s helping me make sense of my own life.  

Issue 4 comes out in June. Who are you really excited about right now? 
Lor Choc is one of my favorite artists. I’m super impressed by her creativity. She’s a great storyteller, which I really enjoy. She has her own approach. But it’s not just artists. . . . I’m excited to see any young person from this place make strides on the national stage. Coming from here, a lot of people don’t think they can make it. The whole crab-in-the-barrel thing has become the narrative that people accept. I want people to recognize how amazing Baltimore is. If I can play any role in having less people settle, that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to do publications. I’m trying to do film. I’m trying to do movies. The same way [film director] Ryan Coogler incorporated Oakland into the Black Panther, I want to do that for Baltimore. I’m trying to diversify the perception. I have no finish line for what True Laurels can be. I want to push it to every height that it could possibly achieve.