Baltimore was just the start for local-news champion Stewart Bainum Jr.

After creating a successful local-news startup, The Baltimore Banner, Stewart Bainum Jr. and his team began exploring opportunities in other places.

Last fall, they ranked 40 cities east of the Mississippi “and the number one was Pittsburgh,” Bainum said in a phone interview Tuesday.

When he reviewed the study in December, Bainum thought it’s interesting but “we’ve got our hands full” in Baltimore.

“Well hell, 30 days later it was announced the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was going to close,” he said. “So as a result, we started talking with the powers that be there, the folks in Pittsburgh, the Block family that owned the paper for almost 100 years now of its 240-year history, and here’s where we are.”

On Tuesday, Block Communications announced the Post-Gazette’s sale to the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, a nonprofit Bainum founded with $50 million that launched the Banner in 2022.

The Blocks had decided, after a labor dispute, to close the paper May 3. Now it will continue with newsroom investments. Back-office operations will merge with the institute’s but the paper will continue to be printed Thursdays and Sundays.

Bainum and his family pledged another $30 million for the Pittsburgh and Baltimore ventures. The price wasn’t disclosed but was “markedly less” than that, he said.

A Maryland native who chairs Choice Hotels International, Bainum tried buying The Baltimore Sun in 2021. Rebuffed, he bid $650 million for its parent company, Tribune Publishing, with plans to spin papers off to local owners. Tribune ended up with notorious cost-cutter Alden Global Capital.

Bainum didn’t give up on his goal to revive journalism in Baltimore. He founded the Banner, hiring a top-tier team that won a Pulitzer Prize last year for local reporting, on the opioid crisis. Now it’s expanding regionally as The Washington Post cuts local coverage.

Alden also outbid Bainum in Pittsburgh, The New York Times reported, but the Blocks took his offer.

This cements Bainum’s legacy as a great champion of local news in America but he cautioned that “we’re a work in progress.”

“We haven’t done everything right at all, and we’re learning as we go,” he said. “So we’re happy to share what has worked and what hasn’t worked with anybody in the country that’s addressing this issue, trying to find solutions, because it’s a puzzle that has got to be solved.”

Here are edited excerpts of our conversation:

Dudley: As you get economy of scale, will you work down that list of opportunities and add more mastheads?

Bainum: Well there is scale advantage in this business because about 20 to 25% of your total expenses are fixed no matter how many subscribers or advertisers or contributors you have.

Dudley: You seem to be finding ways to make this business work. What do you say to doubters?

Bainum: We haven’t figured it out yet. We still have a lot to learn. But the Post-Gazette is a very strong brand — it was founded before George Washington became president. We’re buying the assets and we’re basically going to start a new business with those assets. Our aspiration is to create an organizational culture similar to the culture we have in Baltimore, which we try to base on the values of collaboration, respect, openness, transparency, ambition and a sense of urgency.

Dudley: What are some lessons learned so far?

Bainum: It’s culture, it’s attracting, retaining extraordinary talent. And then I think a lot of it comes down to building a first-rate infrastructure: back office, marketing, engineering, technology, data analytics.

Dudley: I wonder if the success is partly because your generous commitment provides certainty — you can get good people because they know they’ll have a job for a while.

Bainum: That’s a big part of it, because it’s difficult to attract great people. It’s hard to attract great talent and say you’re not sure you’re going to have enough money to pay them in six months.

Dudley: Will Pittsburgh be positive in the next year or two?

Bainum: There’s revenue there but there’s also a lot of losses so it’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to be a quick fix but we think there’s a way to fix it over time.

Dudley: Did you assume the pension obligation?

Bainum: We’re buying the assets. We’re not assuming any of the liabilities. It can be viewed as a startup but it’s a startup with great assets to begin with — the brand, digital assets, domain, advertising book, the 60,000 subscribers. We’re going to hire a great staff. We’re going to encourage all of the people currently employed at the Post-Gazette to consider applying.

Dudley: Do you have personal ties to Pittsburgh, like you do in Baltimore?

Bainum: Not really. My wife is from Western Pennsylvania.

Dudley: People may think he’s going to save my local newspaper, too. Is that what you want to do, or are you trying to build a model to encourage other successful people to step forward and play a similar role?<strong>Bainum:</strong> Well, certainly the latter, but scale does matter in this business. You know we’re not four years of age yet so we’re still a startup. Taking Pittsburgh on is quite significant for that reason. But we’re open to other opportunities. In this case, two-plus-two equals certainly more than four in our view. And if two-plus-two-plus-two can equal more than six, seven or eight, then I feel we have an obligation to look at it. But we’ll be disciplined and be very careful in deciding what to consider.

Dudley: That’s a strong endorsement of local news and the potential for a good operator.

Bainum: That’s the mission. We started with two goals, one to deliver high quality, independent journalism to Baltimore and to help people navigate their lives better and understand the community better. And the second goal was to do it in such a way that would create a sustainable business model for local news at scale, that could be replicated in communities across the country. That’s our goal, is to find a solution to local news in this country.

Dudley: Why is that important?

Bainum: When people don’t know what the hell’s going on in their community, they can’t govern themselves. And when the stories on one side of town are not being told on the other side of town, empathy and understanding go down, and polarization goes up, which is a huge problem today.

Dudley: Thank you and good luck.

Brier Dudley is editor of The Seattle Times Save the Free Press Initiative. This column was originally published on April 16th, 2026 and is reprinted here with permission. Dudley’s work will appear regularly on the Medill Local News Initiative site.