Paul Jay thinks we are far past the time for journalistic niceties. The CEO and senior editor of the Baltimore-based nonprofit journalism outlet The Real News Network (TRNN) minces no words as he speaks from his spacious downtown office. “How broad do you want to be on the truth?” he asks. “Do you want to narrow the truth, so it’s so limited and you don’t tell people the big picture and what the threats are?”

He’s talking about an innovative style of news-making that seeks to bypass corporate journalism and advertisers, making media that is more accessible to broad populations. And his offices look like the kind of place where innovative work is being done. The renovated warehouse space is all exposed brick and steel beams. Some staff members work out in the open, at several long, wooden tables. Others have glass-walled offices. Windows let in plenty of natural light, as well as views from the bustling city below (TRNN is within walking distance from City Hall).

The space includes three studios for creating videos, one of which is also equipped for podcasting. Modern soul food restaurant Ida B’s Table is on the first floor, and there are work spaces available for rent. Outside is a marquee that posts weekly messages about the latest in local news—sometimes bitingly direct, and sometimes tongue-in-cheek.

“Pugh wants ethics exemption. LOL,” read the marquee in May when Mayor Catherine Pugh requested a sweeping exemption from city ethics rules. One day in September there were seven murders in 24 hours, and the block-letter text simply read: “7 murders in 24 hours. What’s next for Baltimore?”

Jay says he likes to cut through the noise. On the day of our interview, for example, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had just issued a calamitous new report, which makes the case that the world had just 12 years to stave off the most detrimental effects of climate change.

“Either you believe in science, or you don’t,” Jay says. “I’m not a climate scientist, but the leading climate scientists are saying this. So why don’t we say that? What’s wrong is most of what’s calling itself journalism isn’t journalism. It’s either the narrowest reporting without any real historical social, economic, context. Or it’s like what’s going on with CNN, MSNBC, or FOX, in which they just chase ratings. They don’t give a damn about the actual truth of the situation.”

“If we are going to do local news in Baltimore, we’d better look like Baltimore.”

Founded in Toronto in 2003, The Real News expanded and made Baltimore the headquarters 10 years later. The company employs more than 30 people, who work as editors, camera operators, managers, journalists, and office managers. TRNN is a nonprofit—they don’t accept advertising and are supported by donations, and by the organization’s separate, for-profit business entities.

“There would be no problem if we had a budget even a fraction of The Baltimore Sun,” Jay says. “Our whole budget is around $3.3 million.”

They have large and small donors, and they also have a for-profit segment that helps keep the lights on, too. TRNN purchased their building using donated funds ,and they rent out space. TRNN is also the primary investor in Ida B’s Table, so they get funding from that, although vice president of finance and operations Leandro Lagera is quick to point out that the primary goal of Ida B’s is not to make money, but to foster community.

Jay says that he and his team knew they wanted to expand operations beyond Canada and into the United States as early as 2008. In 2009, they opened a small office in Washington, D.C., a few blocks from the White House. Then they decided that D.C. wasn’t the place for them.

“After a couple of years, we really started to understand that if we want to speak to ordinary working people, we needed to be in a city and learn how to do local news,” Jay says. “For most people, news and politics are local.”

He and his team settled in Charm City, partly because they’d gotten to know about it through their time in D.C. They also elicited the help of veteran journalist Marc Steiner, who, after leaving Morgan State University’s WEAA-FM radio station, produces his eponymous show through TRNN.

After that came the work of creating a newsroom that looked like the city.

“We made a determination when we came here that if we’re going to do local news in Baltimore, we’d better look like Baltimore,” he says.

One of TRNN’s more recent hires is education expert and attorney Khalilah Harris, as host and executive producer. A black woman from Brooklyn, New York, who has lived in Baltimore since she came to attend Morgan State University 24 years ago, Harris has worked for social justice around education for several decades, but never in front of the camera as a television host. Among other things, she served as deputy director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans under the Obama administration.

Harris says she is there to not only bring her knowledge of policy, law, and education to the table, but also her perspective as a black woman.

“How do we serve as good stewards of helping people find solutions for themselves or bring to the surface the solutions that already exist locally in Baltimore?” she says. “Baltimore is really a microcosm of all national issues and also in a location that could prove to provide solutions to those things.”

Jay oversees the management of the outlet with the help of his wife, Sharmini Peries, a journalist and former economic and trade adviser to ex-Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, and author and former Black Panther Eddie Conway.

The newsroom is considered far left by mainstream standards, and its goal, in essence, is to skirt the extraneous elements that come with traditional journalism (no ratings to chase, no advertisers to satisfy), and reach out directly to the people—specifically Baltimore’s black working class. TRNN does this with stories that can be read on their website, streamed on YouTube, or watched on television through Baltimore’s public access channel and Comcast On-Demand.

“We want to become the mainstream media for Baltimore,” Jay told a City Paper reporter in a 2014 story about the network’s beginnings.

Now, after a 40-year run, City Paper is gone, and nationally, many other outlets have shuttered as well. There is no other large-scale alternative outlet to serve the city. Suddenly, TRNN is poised to play an even bigger role in the city’s journalistic ecosystem.

The fact is that Baltimore is a decidedly black, working-class city (according to the 2010 Census, 63 percent of the city’s population of over 610,000 is black), but most of the people telling the city’s stories are white. TRNN’s reporters and producing team, however, skews far browner, mostly Baltimore born and bred, and much more working class in terms of their background and world view.

TRNN offers updates on national and international news (you can find news from Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean among the network’s offerings), but Baltimore takes center stage. You’ll find news related to the city in its own highlighted yellow section on TRNN’s website. Reporters have covered topics such as labor issues at Johns Hopkins and the toll climate change takes on poor communities and have interviewed local third-party politicians. In their series “Hidden Victims,” reporters Taya Graham and Stephen Janis tackle the ways that black women in Baltimore can be victims of police violence.

Jay says that he’d like to see the network bring more black women aboard.

“I’m more experienced, but I’m white, and it’s harder for me to be heard in this city,” Jay says. “It’s black working women who will decide the fate of this city, and so we need to be better at finding women, black women, who can do this kind of journalism.”

“There are not as many reporters holding politicians, institutions, and the powerful accountable.”

In 2014, shortly after being released from prison—he served more than 40 years stemming from the 1970 murder of a Baltimore City Police officer—Conway came to The Real News.

Conway, who has always maintained his innocence, was already an established name in the activist and prison abolitionist community and was working in Baltimore’s Gilmor Homes. He said people he knew kept coming to him and telling him the journalists at TRNN wanted to interview him. Finally, he acquiesced. TRNN had a number of black activist groups as tenants, and Conway liked that. He also liked the idea of widening the number of people who could learn about the causes he cared about.

“I said, ‘Look, I like what y’all are doing because even though I’m down there and I’m reaching 100, 200 people—what you’re doing is you’re reaching potentially millions of people,’” he says.

Conway, who was trained in journalism by famed writer and columnist Tom Wicker while he was in prison, reports and also produces a show called Rattling the Bars, about issues around life in and out of prison. But working at TRNN is a little different for him. Conway admits that he brings a very distinct point of view—and even an activist’s sensibility—to his journalism, but he thinks there’s room for that.

“There is no such thing as objective reporting,” he says. “Everything you do comes from your paradigm. And if your paradigm is one of conscience-raising and activism, then your journalism will reflect that.”

However, he says he does not cover or have anything to do with stories TRNN produces about any activist causes he is directly involved in.

Reporter and show host Eze Jackson is another TRNN hire who comes from an activist background. After serving in the Navy, Jackson found work at Service Employees International Union, where he stayed for 10 years. He was also president of Marylanders for Marriage Equality in 2012, just before Maryland legally recognized same-sex unions.

Like Conway, he has learned to walk the line between his personal convictions and his journalistic integrity. He’s learned on the job from veteran reporters like Stephen Janis and former TRNN editorial director and City Paper editor Baynard Woods.

“I just decided to try it,” Jackson says of reporting. “I kind of naturally grabbed onto it because I was like, ‘Oh, this is not very different from making music, making songs, or creating a music video.’”

While some of this is old hat for TRNN, more journalists are looking to the nonprofit model to investigate and report meaningful stories.

“As traditional legacy news organizations in many places get smaller, these nonprofit news organizations are filling a void and doing important work for democracy,” says former Sun associate managing editor and current University of Maryland visiting scholar Marty Kaiser.

Kaiser sits on the board of the nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and has helped lead other nonprofit outlets around the country. “There are not as many reporters holding institutions, politicians, and the powerful accountable,” he says. “That’s where many of these nonprofit news organizations can make a difference.”

If it sounds like a daunting responsibility, it is. TRNN journalists wear many hats to get stories covered.

“We all have general beats but we’re a small team, so we tend to focus on multiple things,” says managing editor of the Baltimore Bureau Dharna Noor. She says it’s basically like having multiple plates spinning at one time. “I cover climate stuff and environmental racism, but sometimes I also report on labor because we don’t have a labor reporter.”

Noor also writes her own scripts, helps write and edit other people’s scripts, and helps out at various TRNN events.

“Our difficulty is money more than anything,” Jay says. But he thinks that as TRNN continues to hone its mission, those donations will come. “Part of it is we have to be better storytellers. We have to be better at taking specific things that happen, report on them, but then give them this kind of context, this kind of analysis, this kind of meat on the bones.”

When veteran rapper Eze Jackson was brought on as a producer for The Real News Network in August 2016, he pitched the idea to host an interview series that brought local performers together to address social and political issues. The twist? In true Charm City fashion, he wanted the conversations to happen around a newspaper-covered table with a pile of steamed crabs in the center.

“One of my favorite things to do as a Baltimore boy is eat crabs,” says Jackson, also the frontman of experimental hip-hop group Soul Cannon. “For me growing up, those were some of the best bonding times. I’ve seen family beefs squashed because people sat down at the table together to eat crabs. You start talking, and if somebody doesn’t quite know the right way to do it, you show them. It’s just such a great Maryland pastime.”

The quasi-talk show and crab feast taped its first episode two years ago and has since featured a handful of Baltimore greats (think TT the Artist, J Pope, Micah E. Wood, Shodekeh, Mike Evenn, and JPEGMAFIA), who perform in-studio and discuss everything from feminism in the arts to the perception of violence in hip-hop culture.

This summer, The Whole Bushel transformed into a live recording event held at Ida B’s Table—which is under written, in part, by The Real News Network. The first live show occurred in June with vocalists Bobbi Rush and Brooks Long, and the second in August featured soul performers Jonathan Gilmore and Ama Chandra. Guests were invited to hear the conversation and performances first-hand while cracking crabs alongside the artists at the restaurant.

“One of the things I kept hearing from people was, ‘When can I come eat crabs with y’all?’” Jackson says. “So I was like, ‘Let’s make it a live event.’ At the last one Jonathan Gilmore got everybody up dancing and they called me up there to freestyle a couple times. It was a lot of fun.”

The live iteration will continue at Ida B’s Table on Wednesday, October 24 from 7-10 p.m., when Jackson will be joined by brass legend Rufus Roundtree and QuiQui Martin—Jackson’s former Baltimore School for the Arts classmate who went on to become the lead singer of R&B girl group Isyss.

Jackson says that the talks have become a great platform for artists to address the issues that often inspire their work.

“You go on the road and everybody asks you the same interview questions,” he says. “‘How do you describe your sound?’ ‘Who are some of your influences?’ But for this show, I don’t give a shit about any of that. There are so many artists in the city that do community work outside of their music.”

For example, Jackson cites J Pope advocating for HIV awareness, local emcee Greenspan leading the fight against city food deserts, and Jonathan Gilmore’s work as a special education teacher in addition to his musical career.

Looking back at the show’s nearly two-year run, Jackson says one of the most poignant episodes was the first that aired, which featured Chandra alongside rapper Ashley Sierra and spoken word artist Neptune the Poet.

During the talk, Chandra shared her experience of surviving an assault in her home after the Baltimore Uprising, Neptune the Poet spoke candidly about two of her uncles who she lost to gun violence, and Sierra addressed corruption in the Baltimore City Police Department, saying: “It’s not just a few spoiled apples. What you have going on is a messed-up barrel. You need to restructure what you’re putting the apples in.”

“That episode gave me the most chills when we were done,” Jackson adds. “We covered so many heavy topics, so I knew I wanted to put that one up first. I also thought it was really important to start the show off hearing black women’s voices.”

On a personal note, Jackson says that he has enjoyed how the show has strengthened his relationships with other local performers. Especially with the upcoming live tapings—which will take a hiatus during the winter season and pick back up in the spring—he says he is looking forward to bringing more voices to the table.

“I love the culture of bringing people together around food,” he says. “Especially when it’s with artists who I didn’t know before. It’s been a great bonding experience. That’s the joy I get from it.”

Back in 2015, local journalism nonprofit The Real News Network approached chef David Thomas about partnering to open a restaurant inside its downtown building on the corner of Holliday and Saratoga streets.

“The Real News is this no-nonsense organization that is very much trying to be a voice for the voiceless,” Thomas says. “And, in most cases, that is those in the African-American community. It really made sense to me that this restaurant paired nicely with their mission.”

This weekend, after more than one year of planning, Thomas will officially debut Ida B’s Table—his homage to legendary journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells that emphasizes modern soul food.

“The only true American cuisine is Southern cuisine,” says Thomas, who previously owned Herb & Soul in Parkville. “When slaves came from Africa, they brought foods like yams, watermelon, and salted fish, and the natives helped us to cultivate the land. I just want people to understand that local sustainability was not cliché for the slaves—it was how they survived.”

To properly introduce the community to the new concept, Thomas and his wife, co-partner Tonya Thomas, will be hosting a star-studded lineup of grand opening events running from Saturday, September 23 to Tuesday, September 26.

The celebration kicks off on Saturday, September 23 with a special event featuring activist and Hollywood actor Danny Glover (think Lethal Weapon and Angels in the Outfield.) Glover sits on the board of The Real News Network, and Thomas says that he has been involved in the restaurant since the beginning.

“Most restaurant openings don’t have this type of fanfare unless you’re a big chain or a big-name chef,” Thomas says. “But Ida B. Wells is worthy of that type of spectacle.”

Aside from sharing his grandmother’s monkey bread recipe with Thomas to feature on the menu at Ida B’s, Glover will also be cooking up his family’s time-honored gumbo for the event.

“The recipe has been passed down in his family for 100 years,” Thomas says. “I’m always excited when I can put my hands on that much history.”

Saturday’s ribbon-cutting will also feature a talk by Chicago-born author Michelle Duster, a direct descendent of Ida B. Wells who will read passages from her books detailing her great-grandmother’s work and legacy.

Emceed by local musician and Real News correspondent Eze Jackson, the evening’s program will also highlight live jazz sets by Ama Chandra and Lafayette Gilchrist. And, of course, Thomas will be whipping up a special prix-fixe meal for all attendees featuring Glover’s gumbo, fried chicken with pimento cheese, wild game hen, and biscuits with caramelized peaches and cardamom-sorghum whipped cream for dessert.

The grand opening festivities continue with a family-friendly workshop led by local music educators Jamaal “Mr. Root” Collier and Max Bent on September 24, a special industry night on September 25, and a presentation by culinary historian Michael Twitty paired with a meal inspired by his book on September 26.

Though Thomas is no stranger to the local culinary scene, he says that it’s refreshing to be able to launch something new.

“Restaurants are like babies,” he says. “You conceptualize them, and think and dream about them for so long that, even once you get them up and running, your mind never stops working. I’m always looking forward and thinking ahead.”