Here’s a smile for those old enough to remember when “Peanuts” lit up the world of newspaper comic strips and its characters were as familiar to us as relatives.
Remember the fussbudget Lucy? In a long-ago strip, she sees a spider crawling near her and goes into volcanic eruption.
“Spider! Spider!” she yells at Charlie Brown. “Hit him with a newspaper. Hit him! Hit him!”
“I haven’t got a newspaper,” says the befuddled Charlie Brown.
“Then subscribe to one!” cries Lucy
If only, if only.
The other day, there came messages from Kimi Yoshino and Imtiaz Patel. They know a few things about subscribers. Over the first full year of the Baltimore Banner, Yoshino has been its editor-in-chief and Patel its CEO and publisher.
The Banner is a nonprofit independent online news organization, which was initially the dream project of the late Ted Venetoulis and then bankrolled by hotel magnate and former state delegate Stewart Bainum.
Last week was The Banner’s one-year anniversary, and Yoshino and Patel each sent out messages marking the occasion. Each acknowledged the obvious — that things are rough in the journalism business. But each took pride, too, that it’s a hopeful Banner waving from the Inner Harbor these days.
Apparently, there really are people out there getting subscriptions, even if Charlie Brown didn’t.
“Across the country,” Yoshino wrote, “local journalism is in crisis. An average of more than two newspapers a week are disappearing, and more than 2,500 have stopped publishing since 2005. In the last several months alone, hundreds of journalists have been laid off — including 73 at my last employer, the Los Angeles Times.”
This is not news to anyone who has followed the most recent fortunes of Baltimore’s Sun, which once filled its old Calvert Street offices with more than 400 editorial people and now reportedly is down to about 70 folks, who are crammed into a new newsroom apparently designed to induce mass claustrophobia.
The Sun’s print circulation is down to about one-tenth of its heyday figure, and its online paid subscription is reportedly around 90,000.
Patel, in his message the other day, said The Banner is already up to nearly 75,000 paid online subscribers. And last month, he said, there were “more than 1 million unique visitors — faster growth than any other local news start-up in recent times.”
The Banner’s newsroom staff is now roughly the same size as The Sun’s and “we expect to have the largest newsroom in Maryland within the year,” Patel wrote.
“Our mission,” he added, “is to have a positive impact on Baltimore and the region. We exist for no other purpose. We are not here to make money like hedge fund owners of local news.”
That little dig is aimed at the most recent owners of The Sun, though neither Yoshino nor Patel mention that paper by name. They don’t have to.
Is The Banner really in it for the long run? That depends on a combination of paid subscriptions and advertising, but those are based on Baltimore-area readers’ interest.
How hungry are they for news about their own communities? Newspaper figures have been falling for more than a decade now, but so are local TV news numbers. TV viewers long ago grew weary of homicide stories leading all coverage, and they figured out there was no need to keep the set on until 11 o’clock just to check tomorrow’s weather, since they already knew it from checking their phones.
So will they give The Banner a chance to offer them some real news? This ain’t no amateur production. It’s clear over the past year that they’ve brought in some serious professional news people.
It’s also clear that they’ve made The Sun lift its own game.
In other words, in a time of diminishing quality journalism all over the country, we’ve got a chance around here to go against the tide. We could have two quality places to find news, if readers subscribe, and if both publications play serious ball.
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