By Adam Pagnucco.
It’s happening, folks: the Baltimore Banner has announced that it is expanding to cover Montgomery County.
We have seen this coming for a while. In March, I reported that the Banner was running an online survey asking about whether it should cover MoCo. And ten days ago, Baltimore Fishbowl reported that the Banner was hiring for MoCo coverage. According to its article:
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On the Banner’s online job board, the news organization says “We’re expanding our coverage into Montgomery County and looking for passionate reporters who want to make a real difference through impactful local journalism….Whether you’re an experienced journalist looking for a change or an emerging, high performing reporter, we want to hear from you.”
Montgomery County is Maryland’s largest by population, and often regarded as something as a desert for local news, after the Washington Post acquired and then shut down the Gazette chain of local papers. The county also has significant wealth and large economy in the D.C. market, potentially attractive to the Banner as it seeks paying subscribers for sustainability.
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And then yesterday, the Banner posted this on Facebook.
The Banner now has a Montgomery County section on its website. It does not have a lot of MoCo-specific articles yet but I imagine that is going to change.
So are we “something as a desert for local news,” as Baltimore Fishbowl calls us? I’m not sure I would go that far – we have Bethesda Today for example, which is a lot more than what Prince George’s County has.
But I will say this: I started writing in 2006. The media landscape was very different then. The Post paid a lot more attention to us. The Gazette had a network of community reporters which no outlet can currently match. The Examiner had a full-time local reporter. The Sentinel was still active. Additionally, there were many more blogs. Silver Spring was a hotbed of them with Dan Reed’s Just Up the Pike, the excellent Silver Spring Penguin, Silver Spring Singular and others. Rockville had Rockville Central. The state had two opposing ideological blogs: Red State Maryland (on the right) and Free State Politics (on the left). The Gazette’s Blair Lee was the ruling columnist back then, and he was equal parts acerbic and entertaining. And Bruce DePuyt’s NewsTalk on NewsChannel 8 had lots of regular local news and discussion.
Compared to the local news ecosphere of that time, today’s environment feels very lonely to me.
So welcome to the Banner! Competition is great for local media as it is for almost everything else. Let the folks at the Post, Bethesda Today, the Banner and the other outlets sharpen their pencils, start hunting for stories and scoop each other left and right. We will all benefit in the end.