Most days, Imtiaz Patel can be seen zipping around town on a scooter as he gets to know Baltimore.
As CEO of the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, parent company of the local news startup The Baltimore Banner, Patel’s trips have proven essential to grasp and navigate the landscape. He and a growing team of news, tech and marketing executives started building the nonprofit organization from scratch last year with a goal to launch online by June.
That launch moved one step closer to reality in early December when former Los Angeles Times Managing Editor Kimi Yoshino arrived in Baltimore to plan how to run the budding newsroom of about 50 reporters and editors. (Yoshino announced her first hires earlier this week.) Local real estate sources say it will plant its flag on the waterfront where accounting firm Ernst & Young had offices at the Power Plant.
“Things are going well,” Patel said in late December. “Kimi is hard at work thinking about exactly what content do we launch with and what’s our different take on these things. She is interviewing people for newsroom roles and leadership. And we’re busy continuing to hire on the business side. We’re up to 15-ish people now.”
The initial focus will be hyper-local news covering City Hall, the Maryland State House, public safety and criminal justice, diversity and equality, education and culture with plans to expand to statewide coverage in about five years.
“What’s interesting is Baltimore is almost the perfect place to do this,” Patel said. “There’s not a one-dimensional story here and there’s a lot of positive things going on in Baltimore, and a lot of issues in the city, too. A lot of different things from a reporting standpoint. One thing I’ve found fascinating is a lot of people have a Baltimore connection out there in the world. It’s almost like Baltimore is the center of the universe.”
Patel kicked off the effort with Stewart Bainum, Jr., chairman of Choice Hotels International Inc. and of The Venetoulis Institute, and the late Ted Venetoulis, the former Baltimore County Executive and businessman who passed away in October after a brief illness.
Together, they aim to start a new model for local news coverage with The Banner’s launch that is being hailed as a leap of faith at a time when local newspapers around the U.S. — including The Baltimore Sun and its smaller metro newspapers like the Capital Gazette and Carroll County Times — are under attack from new hedge fund ownership and other corporate interests.
That crystallized locally in May when shareholders of Tribune Publishing approved a $633 million sale of the newspaper chain including The Sun to hedge fund Alden Global Capital. The nonprofit model of The Banner will allow revenue and growth from subscriptions, advertising and donations from supporters, foundations and other nonprofits.
Patel is a former Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal executive who oversaw circulation growth and has also advised The Philadelphia Inquirer and USA Today on digital growth and tech transformation platforms.
Next up is creation of The Baltimore Banner.
“It’s a big task to start from scratch, but we feel good,” he said. “There’s a lot of unknowns, but if you put a good team together, and we’re taking our time to hire the right people who can think as needed to fix problems and solve things, it will be successful.”