Stewart Bainum – Media Nation

How The Baltimore Banner’s embrace of DC sports fits with its editor’s civic-minded mission

*The Washington Nationals will soon be covered by The Baltimore Banner. Photo (cc) 2022 by All-Pro Reels / Joe Glorioso.*

The gutting of The Washington Post may prove to be an opportunity for The Baltimore Banner. According to an announcement, the Banner, a digital nonprofit startup, will cover Washington teams, including beat coverage of the Nationals baseball team and the Commanders football team. The Banner’s editor-in-chief, Audrey Cooper, is quoted as saying:

This decision is part of our unwavering commitment to serve Maryland with honest, independent journalism. It builds on last week’s announcement that we are expanding our news coverage into Prince George’s County and represents another step in strengthening our statewide reach.

At a time when so much pulls communities apart, sports bring us together. The Washington Post’s decision to eliminate its sports section creates an opportunity for us to serve more Marylanders with The Banner’s distinctive mix of fearless accountability reporting, engaging storytelling and sharp analysis.

I found Cooper’s comments about sports bringing people together to be especially interesting because they parallel something she told Mike Blinder recently on the Editor & Publisher vodcast:

America is having a hard time having civil, civic conversations right now and I think the reason behind that is because of the shrinking local news ecosystem. If we spent more time worrying about whether our kids are being educated, whether our roads are paved, whether our water is safe to drink, and less time about these national culture fights that, to be honest, don’t affect our day-to-day lives, I think there’s a chance that local news has to re-teach Americans how to have civic conversations.

To me, saving the great American experiment means saving local news. And I think it’s difficult to find a place in America right now where that’s not, where Baltimore is like second to none. I mean, I think what’s happening here and what the Banner is doing is the most interesting experiment in local news, and I wanted to be a part of it.

This echoes a theme that Ellen Clegg and I explore in our book, “What Works in Community News,” and on our podcast. The nationalization of everything has a lot to do with why we are so polarized. We live in communities, in neighborhoods, but the phony controversies that are ginned up in the national media — especially on Fox News — gain more resonance than they should when we lack reliable sources of local news to inform us about what really matters.

Follow my Bluesky newsfeed for additional news and commentary. And please join my Patreon for just $6 a month. You’ll receive a supporters-only newsletter every Thursday.

The Jeff Bezos-owned Post’s decision to eliminate its sports staff and cut back on metro coverage was mind-boggling. As Poynter media columnist Tom Jones observed (second item), the Post’s sports section was “legendary,” and it “was once known for having some of the best sportswriters in the business with the likes of Shirley Povich, Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon, Sally Jenkins and Thomas Boswell, just to name a few. And the sports department of today — well, of last week — also had a deep talent pool with brilliant journalists including Chuck Culpepper, Dave Sheinin and columnists Candace Buckner and Barry Svrluga.”

The Banner’s move follows a bid by Washington City Paper to purchase the Post’s sports and metro sections. Tina Nguyen reported in The Verge that though soon-to-depart publisher Will Lewis was receptive, the talks went nowhere, and the paper went ahead with massive cuts — initially reported as 300 of the paper’s 800 journalists, but which is now being revealed as even worse than that. (Former Post reporter Paul Farhi, writing for Washingtonian, places the number at 350 to 375 positions eliminated out of a total headcount of 790.)

If the Banner’s embrace of Washington sports and coverage of Prince George’s County is successful (previously the Banner started covering another Washington suburb in Maryland, Montgomery County), I hope it might lead to more — maybe even a Washington Banner. The Post is supposedly going to continue covering national politics. But when Bezos bought the paper in 2013 from the legendary Graham family, the Post was primarily a regional paper that had more in common with The Boston Globe or The Philadelphia Inquirer than it did with The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal.

Perhaps the Banner, City Paper, Washingtonian and others can make up for that local news gap. It would also be nice if one or more of them amped up their book coverage, as the Post’s standalone book section was a casualty of the bloodletting. (And the entire photo staff. Good Lord.)

The Banner is quite a story. Earlier this week I wrote an article for The Conversation about five large regional newspapers that have achieved sustainability of a sort. Four of them are either owned by billionaires or owe their current success to billionaires. I could have mentioned the Banner as well. Hotel magnate Stewart Bainum founded and endowed the Banner after he was spurned in his bid to purchase The Baltimore Sun and then all of Tribune Publishing from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.

The Banner launched in 2022 and, according to Cooper in her interview with Blinder, has 75,000 paid subscribers. As of last September, the newsroom staff comprised nearly 100 people. It’s won a Pulitzer Prize, and — Boston trivia alert — Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory serves on its board of directors.

Poynter’s deep dive into Baltimore’s setting Sun and the rise of the Banner; plus, media notes

Perhaps no city has benefited from a forceful response to the depredations of Alden Global Capital more than Baltimore. In 2021, the slash-and-burn hedge fund purchased Tribune Publishing’s nine major-market daily newspapers, including such storied titles as the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel and the Hartford Courant.

And The Baltimore Sun.

Now Angela Fu of Poynter Online has written a deep dive into the Baltimore media scene on what happened after Alden’s subsequent sale of the Sun a year ago to David Smith, the head of Sinclair Broadcast Group, infamous for imposing his right-wing views on newscasts at the company’s national empire of television stations (in New England, Sinclair has stations in Portland and Providence).

The other principal subject of Fu’s article is The Baltimore Banner, a digital nonprofit begun in 2022 by wealthy hotelier Stewart Bainum after his efforts to purchase the Sun — and then the entire Tribune chain — were spurned by Tribune’s board. Unlike most nonprofits, even some of the larger ones that Ellen Clegg and I included in our book, “What Works in Community News,” the Banner is what you might call a full-service news project, with a newsroom staff of about 80. (The Sun now employs just 56.) The Banner offers breaking news, sports, arts and culture in addition to the accountability journalism that is the hallmark of such projects. Fu writes:

While the Sun battles staff attrition, the Banner continues to grow. Since June, it has launched an “Education Hub” and expanded business coverage. The Banner is also working to extend its footprint across the state, hiring a number of regional reporters to cover counties that lack local news sources and starting region-specific newsletters. Ongoing experiments include live blogs, vertical video on the site’s homepage and comment sections on certain stories for subscribers.

Fu’s reporting is detailed and even-handed. At the Sun, she reports that there has been a wave of departures since the Smith takeover and widespread angst over his forcing the paper to run second-rate stories from the Baltimore television station that he owns. Smith has also ordered up critical reporting on the city council while funding a campaign to shrink the size of the council from 14 members to eight.

But though the Banner has been widely praised for its all-in approach to filling the gap created by the Sun’s decline, Fu writes that it has also come under criticism for taking an outmoded approach to reporting on law enforcement and for covering the city’s opioid crisis (in partnership with The New York Times) in a way that failed to acknowledge the work of grassroots organizations.

Also of note: The Banner’s board of directors includes Brian McGrory, chair of Boston University’s journalism program and a former editor of The Boston Globe. The city is also served by the Baltimore Beat, a nonprofit that covers the Black community.

What I found kind of odd about Fu’s story was the framing. She found that the Sun under Alden did not turn into the fiasco many had predicted, and that the real newsroom exodus didn’t begin until after Smith acquired it. She begins by describing the competition between the Banner and the Sun in covering the catastrophic accident that took out the Francis Scott Key Bridge last March, competition that she says was good for the city, and she wonders whether that brief moment is closing as Smith imposes his will.

Fu’s done the work, so I’m not disagreeing with any of this. Nor do I disagree with her observation that Alden may have held back on budget cuts at the Sun because it didn’t want to fall behind the Banner. But did anyone think it was going to last? In fact, it took Alden less than three years after it bought the Sun to turn around and sell it to a terrible owner who is transforming the paper into something of a right-wing laughingstock. Does it really matter if Alden destroyed the Sun by cutting it or by letting David Smith ruin it? Pick your poison.

The reality is that Baltimore is incredibly lucky to have one news source of record, and that source is now The Baltimore Banner. Bainum tells Fu that the Banner is eventually going to have to break even and survive on its own. Let’s hope the community gives it the support that it needs.

Media notes

• Muzzle follow-up. Last July, I gave a New England Muzzle Award to Waltham Community Access Corp., which claimed a rival had violated its copyright by grabbing clips of government meetings, even though WCAC receives guaranteed funding from licensing fees mandated by state law. That rival, a citizens journalism group known as Channel 781, sued, claiming that WCAC had acted in bad faith. Now a federal judge, Patti Saris, has refused to dismiss the suit and has instead asked the two sides to work out a settlement, Aubrey Hawkes reports in The Waltham Times.

• Going hybrid in New Hampshire. The Keene Sentinel of New Hampshire, one of New England’s feistier independent daily newspapers, is emulating many of its for-profit peers by starting a nonprofit arm that will accept donations to pay for certain types of public interest reporting. According to an announcement, the Local Journalism Fund aims to raise $75,000 in 2025, and will kick it off with a public event on Jan. 21 featuring two journalists from the Uvalde News Leader in Texas, which covered a horrific mass shooting at a local elementary school in 2022.

• The blizzard of Ozy. I never thought anyone could make me care about the decline and fall Ozy Media founder Carlos Watson and his associates. I have to say that I wasn’t even sure what it was, though I have since learned that it published meme-friendly news (and some serious stuff) in the same digital space as BuzzFeed, Mic and Upworthy. At my friend Emily Rooney’s urging, though, I listened to a three-part podcast on Watson’s rise, fall and his criminal trial hosted by the Columbia Journalism Review. It’s little more than a conversation between host Josh Hersh and my former “Beat the Press colleague Susie Banikarim, who covered the trial. That doesn’t sound too exciting, but — as Emily promised — it’s smart and riveting. Highly recommended.

A funding dispute in Baltimore highlights a challenge over nonprofit news and racial equity

Tracie Powell at the 2019 Knight Foundation Media Forum. Photo (cc) 2019 by the Knight Foundation.

My reporting and podcast partner Ellen Clegg has published a first-rate analysis for our What Works website about a dispute over nonprofit news funding in Baltimore, relating it to her work in Memphis, where she wrote about MLK50, a small project with Black leadership, and the Daily Memphian, a large, well-funded, mostly white website.

In Baltimore, there’s a similar dispute taking place between the Beat and the Banner, the latter a digital publication launched by hotel mogul Stewart Bainum and intended as a comprehensive replacement for the venerable Baltimore Sun, which has fallen on hard times. Ellen takes note of a piece written for Poynter Online by Tracie Powell of the Pivot Fund about a huffy tweet posted by David Simon, best known for his work on “The Wire,” in which he accused the Beat of a racially based shakedown when a Beat collaborator tagged him in a fundraising tweet.

It’s complicated, so read Ellen’s post, in which she also recounts an eye-opening (and jaw-dropping) conversation she had with a white media type in Memphis.

Leave a comment | Read comments

Why we should be wary of The Baltimore Sun’s return to local ownership

The Baltimore Sun’s convoluted ownership journey took an unexpected turn on Monday. The notorious hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which acquired the paper as part of its purchase of Tribune Publishing in 2021, sold the Sun to David Smith, who’s executive chairman of the television network Sinclair. The price has not been disclosed.

Smith is a Baltimore guy, and he’s buying the Sun as an individual — that is, the Sun will not be part of Sinclair. In that respect, the deal is similar to Jeff Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post in 2013. The Post is not part of Amazon, although the mega-retailer was enlisted to sell discount descriptions to the Post, especially during the early years of Bezos’ ownership.

We are in the early hours of the Sun deal, so we don’t know how this is going to play out. It’s striking how much fear and criticism I’ve seen given Alden’s reputation as the worst newspaper owner on the planet, infamous for slashing newsrooms, selling off real estate and making journalists work out of their homes. Normally a transfer to independent ownership would be celebrated, and, in fact, Smith might provide an infusion of cash and energy. Then again, he might also bring his toxic brand of right-wing politics to the Sun.

The Sun is the flagship of a regional group that also includes the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, the site of a horrific mass shooting some years ago.

This didn’t have to happen. Back when Tribune was for sale, Baltimore hotel magnate Stewart Bainum reached an agreement to buy the Sun from Alden once Alden had acquired Tribune. Bainum, though, came to believe that Alden was not adhering to that agreement, and he wound up bidding for all of Tribune’s nine major-market newspapers.

Although Bainum was offering more money than Alden ($680 million versus $635 million), word at the time was that Alden’s bid was more straightforward, and the vulture capitalists won the prize. Among other things, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times and then a member of Tribune’s board, declined to stop the sale to Alden, for which he was roundly criticized.

Bainum, meanwhile, used some of his wealth to found The Baltimore Banner, a nonprofit digital venture that immediately established a reputation for journalistic excellence. It will be fascinating to see whether Smith rebuilds the Sun into a worthy competitor to the Banner, or if instead he uses it to grind his political axe.

Leave a comment | Read comments

There he goes again: Patrick Soon-Shiong delivers another paper to Alden Global Capital

Patrick Soon-Shiong. Photo (cc) 2014 by NHS Confederation.

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the wealthy surgeon who owns the Los Angeles Times, has delivered yet another daily newspaper into the greedy hands of the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Soon-Shiong announced Monday that he’d sell The San Diego Union-Tribune to Alden’s MediaNews Group. By my count, the Union-Tribune becomes the 10th paper that Soon-Shiong has helped turn over to Alden. As Sara Fischer and Andrew Keatts report for Axios, the new owners immediately announced cuts to the newsroom.

When Soon-Shiong bought the LA Times in 2018, the Union-Tribune was thrown in as part of the deal. Soon-Shiong was hailed by optimistic media observers as someone who, like Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post and John Henry at The Boston Globe, would provide his papers with the runway they needed to become self-sustaining enterprises.

Please consider supporting this free source of news and commentary for just $5 a month. You can sign up here.

It’s been a mixed bag. Soon-Shiong’s main interest has been the LA Times, but he’s gone back and forth between investing and cutting. By no means has the Times been hollowed out as if it had been owned by, oh, let’s just say Alden Global Capital. But he’s run a lean ship, with the Times announcing just a few days ago that the recent sale of its press meant that game stories, box scores and standings would be eliminated from its print edition, according to Andrew Bucholtz of Awful Announcing.

Selling off the San Diego paper to one of the worst possible buyers is reminiscent of John Henry’s decision to sell the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester to a Florida chain back in 2014. As I recount in my book “The Return of the Moguls,” folks at the T&G thought Henry had promised not to sell unless a local buyer could be found; Henry told me his only promise had been not to sell to GateHouse Media. In any case, GateHouse managed to acquire the T&G within months and immediately began hollowing it out. GateHouse later morphed into Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain with about 200 dailies, which is notorious for its cost-cutting.

Alden Global Capital’s two newspaper chains, MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, make it the second largest owner with about 100 dailies. Alden is often described as the worst newspaper owner in the country, denounced as “vulture capitalists” who slash news coverage and sell off real estate in an attempt to squeeze out as much revenue as possible. Locally, Alden owns the Boston Herald, The Sun of Lowell and the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg.

Soon-Shiong was perhaps the central player in Alden’s acquisition of Tribune Publishing. Whereas MediaNews Group comprises mainly smaller papers, plus a few large dailies such as The Denver Post, Tribune owns eight of the largest, most iconic papers in the country, including the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel and, closer to home, the Hartford Courant.

In the spring of 2021, Tribune, then comprising nine papers, was up for grabs, as it had been many times before. Stewart Bainum, a Baltimore hotel magnate, was attempting to buy the chain and sell off some of its properties to what he hoped would be public-spirited local owners. His main interest was in saving the Sun. Also bidding for the papers Alden. The hedge fund actually offered less money than Bainum, but its offer was reportedly less complicated as well.

The Tribune board ended up voting to sell the papers to Alden — a move that could have been halted by just one board member. Soon-Shiong, who was on the board, abstained, and he did so in a way that mean his vote essentially counted as a yes. As The Washington Post reported at the time, Soon-Shiong submitted his ballot without having checked the “abstain” box; if he had, his vote would have been counted as a “no.”

Bainum went on to found the nonprofit Baltimore Banner. Tribune, meanwhile, spun off one of its most prominent papers, the Daily News of New York, which remains part of the Alden empire as a separately owned entity.

So what’s next for The San Diego Union-Tribune? Nothing good, you can be sure. Voice of San Diego, a nonprofit news site, headlined its story “LA’s Richest Man Sells Union-Tribune to Feared ‘Chop Shop.’” Will Huntsberry and Scott Lewis interviewed the news-business analyst Ken Doctor, who predicted that San Diego will not be rid of Alden anytime soon.

“People get confused because these people are cut-throat capitalists,” Doctor told them. “But their papers are making money and they’re holding onto them for the time being.”

Houston becomes the latest city to announce a nonprofit news project

Downtown Houston. Photo (cc) 2018 by David Daniel Turner.

Big news out of Houston, where several major philanthropies have announced they intend to raise $20 million to start a nonprofit news project — just the latest major metropolitan area to embrace nonprofit journalism.

What makes it a bit unusual is that the Houston Chronicle, the legacy daily, is owned by Hearst, generally regarded as one of the better newspapers chains. Of course, all corporate chains are problematic, but Houston is not like Baltimore, where hotel magnate Stewart Bainum is launching the nonprofit The Baltimore Banner after losing out to the hedge fund Alden Global Capital in his bid to buy The Baltimore Sun.

The Houston effort is being led by the American Journalism Project, whose chief executive, Sarabeth Berman, told the Columbia Journalism Review:

Local news is a public service — one that’s been in sharp decline. This project demonstrates that local philanthropies can, and need to, play a transformative role in rebuilding and sustaining independent, original reporting in service of communities.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

With an anticipated launch in late 2022 or early 2023 on multiple platforms, the new nonprofit news organization will elevate the voices of Houstonians and address the needs of the community as identified in the American Journalism Project’s extensive research. Its wide-ranging coverage will be available for free to readers as well as other news organizations.

I wish them well, of course. Still, it’s hard not to wonder if the money could go to better use elsewhere. Greater Houston residents already get first-rate coverage of state politics and public policy through The Texas Tribune, which is also a nonprofit, and the Chronicle is presumably doing a better job than your typical Alden or Gannett paper.

Click here to read the full press release.

With Alden on the prowl again, it’s time to stop hedge funds from destroying newspapers

Previously published at GBH News. It’s rather late in the game to ask whether hedge funds can be stopped from buying up every last one of our local newspapers. After all, about half of us are already stuck with a paper that is owned by, or is in debt to, the likes of Alden Global Capital (Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group), Apollo Global Management (Gannett) and Chatham Asset Management (McClatchy).

Still, with Alden having now set its sights on Lee Enterprises, a chain that owns 77 daily newspapers in 26 states, we need to take steps aimed at preventing what is already a debacle from devolving into a catastrophe.

So what can be done? Steven Waldman, the co-founder of Report for America, which places young journalists in newsrooms, has some ideas. At the top of his list: redefining antitrust law.

“In general, antitrust law for the past three or four decades has focused on whether mergers would hurt consumers by raising prices or reducing competition,” Waldman wrote recently for the Washington Monthly. “But before that, antitrust regulators looked at mergers more broadly, including whether they would hurt communities. And that’s what needs to happen here.”

Waldman would also provide tax incentives for nonprofit organizations seeking to buy newspapers as well as tax credits to make it easier for news organizations to hire or retain journalists. That latter provision is part of the Build Back Better legislation, whose uncertain fate rests in the hands of Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

“This will strengthen local news organizations of all shapes and sizes, making them less vulnerable to vultures,” Waldman argued. “The legislation could be a powerful antidote to the sickness spreading within local communities.” Trouble is, the tax credits would benefit the Aldens and the Gannetts just as much as they would the independently owned news organizations that are struggling for survival. Still, it seems like a step worth trying.

The problem with hedge funds owning newspapers is that such funds exist solely for the purpose of enriching their investors. Newspapers, of course, aren’t exactly lucrative. But they still have advertising and circulation revenues, even if they are much smaller than they were, say, 20 or 30 years ago. Cut expenses to the bone by laying off reporters and selling real estate, and you can squeeze out profits for the enrichment of the owners.

Alden is notorious for being the most avaricious of the bunch. Which is why shock waves ripped throughout the journalistic community last week when Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute reported that Alden — just months after feasting on Tribune’s nine major-market dailies — was making a bid for Lee, whose papers include the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Buffalo News and the Arizona Daily Star. (Julie Reynolds, an investigative reporter who has been dogging Alden for years, recently spoke about the hedge fund with Ellen Clegg and me as part of our podcast, “What Works: The Future of Local News,” at Northeastern University.)

Lee’s papers also include the Omaha World-Herald, and therein lies a sad story. The World-Herald was at one time the flagship of hometown boy Warren Buffett’s newspaper chain, which he began assembling in 2012. But despite Buffett’s self-proclaimed love for newspapers, he failed to invest in their future, cutting them repeatedly and eventually selling out to Lee. Now they face the possibility of a much worse fate.

Or not. Several days after Alden offered to buy Lee in a deal valued at $141 million, the Lee board of directors adopted a poison pill provison. As reported by Benjamin Mullin in The Wall Street Journal, Alden — which currently holds about 6% of Lee stock — would be forbidden for the next year from increasing its share above 10%. If nothing else, the move provides some time for other buyers to emerge. Perhaps the chain will be broken up, with some of Lee’s papers being acquired by local owners.

As Waldman suggests, there is nothing inevitable about local news being destroyed at the hands of venture capital. About two and a half years ago, I wrote about The Salt Lake Tribune, acquired from Alden by local interests and converted into a nonprofit news organization. Now, according to Lauren Gustus, the Tribune’s executive editor, the paper is adding staff and resources. “We celebrate 150 years this year and we are healthy,” she wrote in a message to readers recently. “We are sustainable in 2021, and we have no plans to return to a previously precarious position.”

Alden’s acquisition of Tribune Publishing (not The Salt Lake Tribune; I realize there are a lot of Tribunes to keep track of here) was an avoidable tragedy, made possible by a board that placed greed above the public interest. Since closing the deal, the hedge fund has been hacking away at Tribune newspapers that were already much diminished, including the Chicago Tribune, New York’s Daily News and the Hartford Courant.

Yet some good may come out of it, too: Stewart Bainum, a hotel magnate who had competed with Alden for Tribune, is starting a well-funded nonprofit news site, The Baltimore Banner, that will compete with Tribune’s Baltimore Sun. Maybe that will lead to similar efforts in other Tribune cities.

Meanwhile, Lee Enterprises’ newspapers are safe, at least for now. What will happen a year from now is anybody’s guess. But as long as the vulture can be kept outside the cave, there is hope for the millions of readers who depend on a Lee newspaper to stay informed about what’s happening in their community.

Kara Swisher to Patrick Soon-Shiong: How could you let Alden buy Tribune?

Kara Swisher. Photo (cc) 2017 by nrkbeta.

I just skimmed the transcript of Kara Swisher’s interview with Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. It gets off to a slow start — but eventually she lets him have it in the chops over his pathetic rationalizations for not stopping the hedge fund Alden Global Capital from buying Tribune Publishing earlier this year.

The short version, for those who aren’t sure what I’m talking about: Soon-Shiong, a billionaire surgeon and medical entrepreneur, owned 24% of Tribune, which publishes nine major-market daily newspapers. He could have blocked Alden by voting no or by voting to abstain, thus giving Baltimore hotel magnate Stewart Bainum more time to put a deal together — or to see if another buyer might emerge.

Instead, Soon-Shiong declined to vote at all, which allowed the deal to go through. Here’s the heart of what Swisher told him:

So essentially you’re saying I couldn’t save them. And I’m — I don’t quite know what to say. There’s some point where you do make a stand and say, you can’t do this. And especially with Alden Global Capital having a reputation it does, you might have stood up for it. You might have said no. But you felt the current owners weren’t going to really do anything with your money. As you said, they had an agenda. It seems like you have a theory of their agenda. But they weren’t going to make it better. And so any port in the storm, is that what you’re saying?

Soon-Shiong’s hedging is pretty much in line with his recent interview with Brian Stelter of CNN. But this response screams out:

Well, it’s a little more than that, right? I think there should be enough civic responsibility in Chicago, enough civic responsibility in Florida, civic responsibility wherever these — Baltimore. And obviously, as you knew, there were certain billionaires and multimillionaires. So to be fair, it should be really the responsibility of people living in their community. I live in California. So I can’t personally be responsible for Florida or Baltimore and Chicago.

Baltimore? Baltimore? Is the good doctor kidding? Bainum originally had an agreement to acquire The Baltimore Sun from Alden after Tribune was sold and then donate the Sun to a nonprofit. After he concluded that Alden was jerking him around, he tried to put together a group that would buy the entire chain. (Bainum is now launching a nonprofit news project in Baltimore.)

Look, it’s great that Soon-Shiong seemed to be committed to the Times and his other paper, The San Diego Union-Tribune. But if you look up the word “disingenuous” in the dictionary, you just might find his photo.

Previous coverage.

Become a member of Media Nation for just $5 a month!

Spurned by Tribune, Stewart Bainum moves ahead with nonprofit news in Baltimore

Baltimore. Photo (cc) 2014 by Patrick Gillespie.

Among the worst outcomes of Stewart Bainum’s failed bid to purchase Tribune Publishing is that he lost out on an earlier deal to buy The Baltimore Sun and donate it to a nonprofit organization.

The hedge fund Alden Global Capital had originally agreed to spin off the Sun to Bainum after buying Tribune’s nine major-market dailies. That deal fell through when Bainum, a Baltimore hotel magnate, balked at Alden’s terms and tried to buy the entire chain.

So it’s very good news that Bainum appears to be moving ahead with a nonprofit venture that would compete with the Sun. Rick Edmonds of Poynter reported earlier this week that Bainum is advertising for a chief product officer who’ll work for a “well-funded startup” aimed at becoming “a new paradigm for digital first, cross-channel local media.”

The project will include the web, mobile, terrestrial and satellite radio and video, both on television and online, according to the ad, which adds that the “vision is to be the leading provider of news and lifestyle content in the Baltimore area.”

Bainum was originally willing to pay $65 million for the Sun. Assuming that money is still on the table, this should be a well-funded regional news product. Bloomberg and the Lenfest Institute are involved, too, though Edmonds suggests their role will be minimal.

One aspect I find interesting is the cross-platform nature of the project. The biggest challenge facing online-only media is getting the word out that they exist. As a former newspaper executive once told me, the problem with dumping the print edition in favor of digital is that print is essentially a billboard for digital. If print goes away, you disappear to non-subscribers. Bainum might avoid that problem by moving into radio and television as well as digital.

I also wonder whether there’s an underlying strategy to wrest the Sun away from Alden. Given the way the hedge fund is already decimating its holdings, which include the Chicago Tribune, New York’s Daily News and the Hartford Courant, there is little doubt that the Bainum project will be a better, more comprehensive news organization than the Sun on the day that it debuts.

If the Sun’s audience and advertisers (yes, nonprofits can accept ads) move en masse to Bainum’s venture, Alden might prove willing to walk away.

Previous coverage.

Become a member of Media Nation for just $5 a month!

Despite spinning off a few papers, there are no signs that chains are walking away

Nantucket, where The Inquirer & Mirror is once again locally owned. Photo (cc) 2007 by Michael Galvin.

From time to time I’ve taken note of rare instances when Gannett has sold some of its 1,000 or so papers to local ownership. In Massachusetts, for example, The Inquirer & Mirror of Nantucket was acquired last fall by a group headed by the editor and a local businessman.

Kristen Hare of Poynter asked Gannett for some numbers, it turns out that the chain has sold 24 papers to community interests. (Be sure not to miss the correction. As you’ll see, Gannett can’t even keep track of how many papers it owns.)

Not that there’s any benevolent motive at work here. Gannett is going to do what’s best for its bottom line, and a few isolated weeklies don’t fit with its strategy of regional groups, dailies and stories shared across papers regardless of whether they have any local interest.

Just recently, Gannett shut down two weeklies west of Boston — the Marlborough Enterprise and the Hudson Sun. Maybe there weren’t any local buyers available. But those towns are also covered by Gannett’s MetroWest Daily News, so there was an incentive not to empower any possible competitors.

Writing for the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, Mark Jacob speculates that the hedge fund Alden Global Initiative might sell off some of the nine major-market dailies it acquired when it gobbled up Tribune Publishing earlier this year. I suppose anything is possible, but that seemed to fly out the window when Baltimore hotel magnate Stewart Bainum’s efforts to buy Tribune fell short. Bainum planned to break up the chain, starting with The Baltimore Sun, which he wanted to donate to a nonprofit. In the end, though, Alden’s offer prevailed, even though it was loaded with undisclosed debt.

Jacob also profiles The Berkshire Eagle of Pittsfield, a rare instance of a newspaper that Alden was willing to sell to local interests, and The New Bedford Light, launched despite Gannett’s refusal to sell The Standard-Times.

And then there is this odd observation by Jacob:

In some ways, large chains can be beneficial for local news consumers. They often bring website expertise, technical support and consistent business practices. And they may have a greater ability to recruit talent.

No. Some chains are better than others, but all of them are dedicated to the proposition that newspapers exist mainly so that the owners can squeeze out profits that could otherwise be invested in news and technology. Even in terms of digital publishing, I have rarely encountered an independent news website that is as clunky and intrusive as a typical chain site.

As the old saying goes: Local doesn’t scale.

Become a member of Media Nation for just $5 a month!