The Baltimore Banner CEO on Progress There and Plans for Their Pittsburgh Newspaper Purchase
A conversation with Bob Cohn
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One of the most interesting stories in the news business these days is what’s going on at the Baltimore Banner. The site has the largest news staff of any local nonprofit, is unusual in employing a paywall (even as others, such as in Salt Lake City, move the other way) and just acquired the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which had been slated for shutdown after years of mismanagement and a long labor dispute.
The Banner has a principal benefactor in Stewart Bainum, and strong leadership in Audrey Cooper as executive editor (succeeding Kimi Yoshino) on the news side and Bob Cohn as CEO on the business side.
Cohn has been in his role since February 2024, after four years as president of The Economist. He previously spent more than a decade at The Atlantic, including more than five years as president there. Earlier, he was executive editor of Wired and of the Industry Standard. He began his career as a reporter for Newsweek. Cohn generously agreed to talk with me earlier this week on the heels of the Pittsburgh acquisition. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
RT: Thanks so much for doing this. Can we start with an update on the business side of the Banner? In particular, I think two things people in the industry are looking closely at are how many paid subscribers you have now, and what can you say on how much money you lost in 2025 before contributions from your founding funder, as well as what you project at this point for 2026.
BC: The business has four revenue prongs, and it’s important to put that in context: subscriptions, advertising, events and philanthropy. And by that I mean philanthropy, not from the Bainum family, but that our philanthropy team raises. About half of all revenue comes from subscriptions, and we have, right now, 81,000 paid subscribers. [RT note: That’s up from 69,000 eight months ago, but short of the original target for this point.]
We’ve seen pretty good growth in each of our four years to get to that 81,000. About 30% of our revenue is from the combination of advertising and events. And then a little more than a fifth of the revenue is from philanthropy.
RT: So where did you come out last year?
BC: Last year we did about $18 million in revenue, and this year we are budgeted to do about $22.5 million in revenue.
RT: Are you saying what you’re spending?
BC: No, but we’re spending more than that in each of those years.
RT: Stewart Bainum has said that his commitment to the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, which is the parent company, he’s now taken up to $75 million, is that right?
BC: The total is actually $80 million. He pledged $50 million back when he started Venetoulis five years ago; then the Banner launched a year after that. He said this was to establish the Baltimore Banner as a going enterprise. And then recently, he contributed another $30 million to Venetoulis to help with the acquisition in Pittsburgh, and to take both properties to sustainability.
RT: Does that mean that the $50 million had been exhausted?
BC: It was on the road to being exhausted. It was not yet exhausted, but it would have been prior to us getting to break even.
RT: By the way, when you say that advertising and events are 30% of your revenue, it always seems to me that in both of those things, you want to talk about net revenue. So how much of that is net revenue?
BC: Both of those numbers are net numbers.
RT: So it’s roughly $5.5 million after expenses associated with those two things, right?
BC: Exactly, right.
RT: The Banner won a Pulitzer Prize last year and was a finalist again last week-- congratulations. What has been the impact of that in business terms?
BC: I think it’s just a shot in the arm for the whole organization. It lifts everything, the journalists and the journalism, the whole brand. What that means is more people have heard of us when we knock on the door for the first time, and folks we have relationships with have more confidence that the partnership is working for them because of the reach of our journalism and the recognition of our journalism.
Race and an expanding target
RT: I’m going to get to Pittsburgh in a minute, but before I do, I want to ask you a sensitive question. The original focus of the Banner, as I understood it, was going to be on the city of Baltimore, which is roughly 60% Black, but your more recent expansions have been in the suburbs, and I note that Baltimore County is only about 30% Black, and the other suburbs are mostly lower than that. What do you know about the readership of the Banner by race? And how do you think about all of that?
BC: Well, let me start by saying the original mission of the Banner was to be the news organization for all of Maryland, and we started with Baltimore, because Stewart, as you know, had just made a bid to purchase the Baltimore Sun that faltered at the eleventh hour. So he decided to go ahead and start the Banner as kind of a rival to the Sun. But when they set up Venetoulis as the parent organization, the idea was that the Banner would need to expand beyond Baltimore City in order to reach scale.
So all along, the goal was to be the leading news organization in the whole state, starting with Baltimore City, and then adding those counties that are kind of within the gravitational pull of Baltimore, like Baltimore County and Howard County and Anne Arundel County. And then, as I know you know, we turned our sights to the two largest counties in Maryland, which happen to be Washington, DC facing and not Baltimore facing.
So we now have journalists on the ground, dedicated coverage, in seven counties, six counties plus Baltimore City, accounting for about 75% of the state. The overall racial makeup of the audience is not as concentrated Black as it was when we were focused more specifically on Baltimore City. But as we’ve expanded, our makeup looks more like the makeup of the state.
RT: Do you have a sense of what the proportions are among your readers?
BC: I don’t think we have any recent quantitative research on that since we’ve expanded outside of Baltimore and the Baltimore suburbs.
RT: Would your aspiration be for the audience to more or less reflect the target market?
BC: Sure, we want readers wherever we’re producing journalism and so the overall makeup of the readership ought to reflect the makeup of the market. Absolutely.
Print is still “five years from dying”
RT: Okay, let’s turn to Pittsburgh. You’ve pledged to keep printing the Post-Gazette two days a week. How open ended is that commitment?
BC: We will keep a print newspaper so long as readers want it, are willing to pay for it, and advertisers like it and are willing to support it. As long as it makes financial sense, we’ll be fully committed to print. And frankly, we arrived thinking, you know, print is dead, right? What are we still doing with print here? But print has been five years from dying for the last 30 years. So we’re committed to print in Pittsburgh, so long as the community is committed to reading in print and paying for print.
RT: What do you think the effect on the economics of the Post-Gazette would be if the paper went digital only at this point?
BC: Revenues would suffer and the net would suffer as well. Print makes sense right now. So we’re not going to walk away until that’s not true.
RT: Do you think, from where you sit-- and I know that you’re not there-- that the Atlanta Journal Constitution, as it turns out, went digital-only prematurely?
BC: I don’t know. It’s one thing to start a digital only publication, never having been in print, and be able to attract an audience. I think it’s quite different to take away something that people have enjoyed and expect as part of the their newspaper.
Sustainability soon
RT: I’ve heard that you all believe you can get the Post-Gazette to break even pretty quickly after it lost an average of more than $15 million a year over the last two decades. Is that true, and if it is true, how do you see that transition happening?
BC: I think Venetoulis will get to break even in a matter of a few years-- that is the combined operations of the Baltimore Banner and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. We’re able to do that because of the power of shared services and the fact that everything from marketing and HR to product and technology and finance can be under the leadership of Venetoulis serving both markets and both properties, and there’s tremendous economies of scale in that, while still having, of course, dedicated newsrooms, dedicated advertising and events businesses, dedicated on the ground brand marketing. I think continued growth in the consumer business and subscriptions will take both places to break even and the overall Institute to break even over the next few years.
RT: Pretty significant staff reductions in Pittsburgh were announced even before the closing on your deal. What can you say about those?
BC: Well, we haven’t announced any staff reductions.
RT: I mean, just before closing. There were significant staff reductions in Pittsburgh, right?
BC: Well, it was an asset purchase, which means that the prior owner terminated everybody. We arrived with nobody in the newsroom, and then we rehired many people from the old Post-Gazette into the new Post-Gazette. So we started with a blank sheet of paper.
About 90 journalists from the old Post-Gazette indicated an interest in coming over, and we ended up hiring 58 of them. And, as you noted, the Post-Gazette had been losing a lot of money, and we had to make some hard decisions about having a smaller operation until we could stabilize the finances.
The Banner started with 35 people in the newsroom not even four years ago. And as revenues grew and as business improved, the newsroom grew. And I fully expect that the Post-Gazette newsroom will grow after we can stabilize the business.
RT: How many people are in the Banner newsroom now?
BC: A hundred.
RT: And how many were in the Post-Gazette newsroom just before the deal was announced?
BC: About 100.
RT: So it’s gone from 100 to 58
BC: Yes.
RT: And you would expect it, as you say, to go back up over some period of time.
BC: Yes. As to the comparison to the Banner newsroom, while interesting and potentially useful, the Banner now serves seven counties and 4.5 million Marylanders. The Post-Gazette footprint right now is quite a bit smaller than that.
Pittsburgh and beyond
RT: Would you expect over time to expand the Post-Gazette footprint as well in western Pennsylvania?
BC: I think it’s too early to tell, but we will go wherever we think there’s a need for high quality independent journalism and where the Post-Gazette brand has salience, and in the areas surrounding Pittsburgh-- where the Post-Gazette already is-- I suspect there may be value in continuing to explore those areas.
RT: What sort of support do you expect from the Pittsburgh philanthropic community?
BC: We’re just starting conversations but we believe that both the business community and the philanthropic community in Pittsburgh care deeply about high quality news, and have indicated that they could be supportive of a reimagined Post-Gazette.
RT: Do you foresee Venetoulis making other acquisitions around the country?
BC: Eventually perhaps. It will depend on how Maryland goes and now how Pittsburgh goes. When we launched the Banner four years ago, and really when we started Venetoulis five years ago, the goal was to do independent quality news in communities that need it most, and to build a model for local journalism that could work at scale and could be sustainable. And if we could build that model, to then take that and try it elsewhere. So we’re in that phase of it right now, where we think we have something that is working in Maryland, and we’re going to refine it in Pittsburgh, even as we continue to work it in Maryland. And it’s premature to think about going to other markets, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
RT: Well, on that intriguing note, thank you again.
Thanks to you and Mr. Cohn for this revealing conversation. Good on you for pushing for racial demographics, and I'd like to hear more from Banner on non-affluent audiences.
As an Atlantan who worked at AJC long ago, the comparison with Banner is intriguing. My local observation is that Atlanta has a bustling ecosystem of micro-local outlets (print and digital). I'm forever wondering if there's a way that the AJC (probably under nonprofit ownership) could be an umbrella for the ecosystem. Not exactly on point, but today's Nieman Lab story on Deborah Turness (ex-BBC and NBC news chief) talking about "flywheel" newsrooms in which "talent" might spend some time with a network and other time in joint or solo ventures with various revenue agreements. Seems like a metro news provider could strike such deals with micros.
Unusually frank and very informative. Although its not core to our work, the framing arount print strike me as incomplete. Yes, there is a segment that still values it on both the advertising side AND the reader side. Yes it generates cash, but its generally NOT creating any economic value as some sunsetting business do (ie not a cash cow in the old 4 by 4 strategy matrix). It has bad returns to scale. And it ties up a huge amount of capital and management time that could be used for something that DOES have future value. And it bifurcates sales efforts and likely confuses the advertising market places, again sopping up a lot of management time. Management time is the ultimate scarce resource particularly in a business where constant innovation is required. To me, the fact that print is always 5 years away from disappearing is more about frozen management thinking and vain hope, than it is about the reality of the business.