Baltimore Banner now has more staff than The Baltimore Sun

Baltimore’s biggest newsroom is no longer the city’s old daily. The Baltimore Banner now employs more staff than The Baltimore Sun and its affiliates combined, a change that matters far beyond newsroom bragging rights because it changes who has the resources to track City Hall, Baltimore City Public Schools, the police department, and neighborhood-level problems across the city.

The Banner launched on June 14, 2022, with backing from Stewart W. Bainum Jr.’s nonprofit Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism. In less than two years, it grew to about 80 full-time journalists by June 2024, and reporting in March 2024 put its total staff at 125, with roughly 80 in the newsroom. That made it Baltimore’s largest newsroom, even as The Sun was still being described in one recent profile as a “small local online-only news outlet.”

The size gap reflects a larger transfer of power in local media. The Baltimore Sun was sold in January 2024 to David D. Smith, executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, and conservative commentator Armstrong Williams. After that sale, at least 20 Sun journalists left over the following year, according to reporting cited by The Banner. Kimi Yoshino, the Banner’s editor-in-chief, said the sale triggered a big surge in new Banner subscribers and donors, suggesting that readers and funders were voting with their wallets as much as their clicks.

The business numbers show how quickly the balance shifted. The Banner said it had 70,000 paid subscribers less than a year after launch in June 2023, a remarkable total for a newsroom that did not exist three years earlier. Later reporting put its subscriber count at 55,000 by the end of 2024, still a strong base for a nonprofit outlet trying to pay for beat reporting, investigations, and statewide coverage.

For Baltimore, the bigger question is not which masthead wins the horse race, but which newsroom has the muscle to keep pressure on the people running the city. The Banner is also expanding beyond Baltimore into broader Maryland, which means the fight is no longer just over coverage of Inner Harbor openings or Harbor East politics. It is about who defines the daily news agenda for Baltimore residents, and whether that agenda is set by a legacy paper in flux or by a nonprofit startup that has already outgrown it.