• by Ray Schultz , January 23, 2024

The Baltimore Banner, the nonprofit that competes with The Baltimore Sun, has added 500 new subscribers per day in the three days after news broke that David D. Smith, the chairman of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, was acquiring the Sun from Alden Global Capital, according to NiemanLab. 

Traffic to The Baltimore Banner’s website also doubled, according to Kimi Yoshino, editor in chief of the Banner. In addition, there has been a rise in donations.

The Banner now claims 89,000 paid subscribers, versus 70,000 seven months ago.

Smith reportedly told the Sun newsroom that he “had read the paper only a few times in recent months and hadn’t read it at all in the previous 40 years,” The New York Times reports.

The purchase price for the Sun is said to be somewhere in the vicinity of $100 million.

Smith urged the staff to be focused on profits.

Stewart Bainum founded the Banner in 2022 after trying to buy the Sun.