Andre Stark – Media Nation

Ron Mitchell tells us how The Bay State Banner is serving Greater Boston’s communities of color

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I 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.

Ellen and I 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 my 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.

I’ve got 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

We used Otter, an AI-powered tool, to produce a transcript of our conversation, then fed it into Claude and asked it to write a 600-word summary, which was then read by us for accuracy. The results are below. Do you find this useful? Please tell us what you think by using the Contact form linked from the top of our website.

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The Bay State Banner marks 60 years of serving the Black community in Greater Boston and beyond

Congratulations to The Bay State Banner, which is embarking on its 60th year of publication. The Banner, founded by Melvin Miller, covers the Black community in Greater Boston and beyond. It was acquired in 2023 by two Black journalists, Ron Mitchell and André Stark, and it continues to provide strong coverage through a weekly print edition and a robust website.

In an editorial marking the Banner’s milestone, Mitchell, now the publisher and editor, writes that Donald Trump represents a dangerous threat to Black and brown communities, observing that even Trump’s seemingly positive actions carry within them the whiff of segregation:

This Trump administration is the first one to have increased funding for historically Black universities and colleges. That is a good thing for HBCUs, which have historically been underfunded. But those increases, coupled with the attacks on DEI on historically white campuses and the Supreme Court’s wrongheaded ban on considering race in their admissions, contain dangerous echoes of the “separate but equal” doctrine that a prior Supreme Court unanimously ruled unconstitutional.

Mitchell also quotes W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote, “There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.” And he pointedly signs the editorial with his full name, Ronald Du Bois Mitchell.

This week’s edition also contains a reprint of the commemorative section that the Banner put together in celebration of its 50th anniversary. You can access the print edition online, but I’m going to have to track down a copy.

The Banner is a great example of how an independent local media outlet can serve a community not just by covering it, but by giving it a voice.

The Bay State Banner is switching to broadsheet

As Ron Mitchell and Andre Stark, the new owners of The Bay State Banner, mark a little over a year of publishing New England’s leading newspaper for the Black community, they’re also making a major change in format: the tabloid-sized paper is going broadsheet. As Don Seiffert reports in the Boston Business Journal, the Banner is now being printed by the Times Union, in Albany, New York.

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Melvin Miller sells The Bay State Banner to a Black-owned independent group

Today brings some incredibly good news for independent community journalism in the Boston area. Melvin Miller, the legendary founder, publisher and editor of The Bay State Banner, has decided to sell the paper. Miller, 88, has been a stalwart in covering the Black community since he launched the paper 57 years ago. But as he says, he’s not getting any younger — and not only is the Banner remaining independent and Black-owned, but there are plans to expand as well.

The Banner will be acquired by a group headed by Ron Mitchell, an editor and video journalist at WBZ-TV, and Andre Stark, a filmmaker whose credits include GBH-TV and its national programs “Frontline” and “Nova.” Yawu Miller, Mel Miller’s nephew, will stay on as senior editor, and Ken Cooper, who recently retired from a top position at GBH News, will serve as an editorial consultant overseeing the addition of three regional editions north of Massachusetts, in Connecticut and in Rhode Island. Colin Redd, who’s worked as business development manager at Blavity, a website popular with younger African Americans, will oversee a digital expansion.

Mel Miller was quoted as saying:

I’ve been looking for some time for someone to step up and take over the job. I think the Banner is needed more than ever. Both Ron and Andre are from old Roxbury families with deep ties to the community. They know the people, know the streets, know the issues we face. I have every confidence they will carry on the great work we’ve done for close to 60 years.

The Bay State Banner is a Boston institution. Miller has been performing a great service to the community since 1965 — and he’s performing another one now by leaving it in what sounds like very good hands.