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He tried and failed to obtain The Baltimore Sun. Now the Maryland resort magnate Stewart W. Bainum Jr. is developing an formidable publication meant to contend with it.
The prepared electronic news outlet, The Baltimore Banner, will have an annual running spending budget of $15 million, and Mr. Bainum is now searching to employ the service of an editor in main and a staff members of 50 journalists, the newspaper expert Imtiaz Patel, an adviser to Mr. Bainum, explained on Thursday.
Mr. Bainum’s aim, Mr. Patel added, is to develop the most significant newsroom in Maryland — extra than 100 journalists — and lean on membership gross sales to attain sustainability. The Baltimore Banner will be run as a nonprofit group and will not give print editions. The Atlantic 1st described Mr. Bainum’s ideas on Thursday.
The development of The Baltimore Banner is a aspect result of the major newspaper offer of the past yr, when the hedge fund Alden Global Capital bought Tribune Publishing, the corporation at the rear of The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sunlight and other big metropolitan dailies, in a deal valued at $630 million.
Months ahead of Tribune’s shareholders accredited that sale, Alden World Funds announced that it had achieved a nonbinding offer to promote The Sunshine to Mr. Bainum for $65 million as soon as the greater acquisition experienced been finished. Mr. Bainum’s plan was to flip the 184-calendar year-old newspaper to a nonprofit organization that would operate it as a public rely on.
That arrangement fell via, nevertheless, leaving Mr. Bainum to attempt to place alongside one another new bids for Tribune Publishing as a full. Individuals attempts did not appear to fruition, but Mr. Bainum did not get rid of curiosity in becoming a publisher.
“He has this eyesight of making up the real option paper of history and investing the means he would have place into The Sun,” Mr. Patel, the adviser, claimed on Thursday.
A indigenous of Takoma Park, Md., Mr. Bainum is the chairman of Alternative Accommodations International, a onetime spouse and children small business that is a single of the largest hotel chains in the world, such as the Convenience Inn and Good quality Inn makes. A lifelong Democrat, he served in Maryland’s state legislature from 1979 to 1987.
When he was assembling bids for Tribune Publishing previously this 12 months, he hoped to discover local, civic-minded benefactors keen to just take ownership of the company’s personal papers, a group of big-circulation dailies that incorporates The Hartford Courant, The Orlando Sentinel and The Everyday News.
Journalists at several Tribune papers publicly supported Mr. Bainum’s attempts to acquire the corporation, and quite a few of them had been publicly essential of Alden World-wide Money, which has a name for stringent cost-reducing at the dozens of newspapers it owns by a subsidiary, MediaNews Team.
