Q&A: Kimi Yoshino on how The Baltimore Banner collaborates and adapts to meet local reader needs
Kimi Yoshino is the editor in chief of The Baltimore Banner, a local news organization launched in 2022 to cover Baltimore and Maryland. Yoshino is a long-time journalist who worked at local California newspapers like the Stockton Record and Fresno Bee before spending 21 years at the Los Angeles Times as a reporter, editor, and managing editor. We caught up with Yoshino to hear about her decision to leave California and help launch The Baltimore Banner and how it’s going nearly three years in.
WF: What made you want to join The Baltimore Banner?
KY: I was curious about what was going on in Baltimore. I mostly took the call about a new startup in Baltimore as a reporter, as I wanted to know what was going on to satisfy my curiosity. But then I heard about the job and thought it was really cool. I quickly met and talked to Imtiaz Patel, who was CEO at the time, as well as the founder, Stewart Bainum Jr. It moved quickly, and I became very interested in this idea of what The Banner was doing; it seemed exciting and challenging. It coincided with the publishing of an article in The Atlantic about the disappearance of local news and the hedge fund Alden Global Capital’s killing of different local markets. I got very fired up about what was happening to local journalism, and I wanted to be part of the solution. When I got the job offer, I didn’t even think twice. It has proven to be the most exciting, fun, and hard job that I’ve had to date. I’ve told many people that it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go build something new and serve a community and help fix the local news problem. It was too good to pass up.
WF: How did you think about being an outsider to Baltimore?
KY: I came into the job thinking about it as I would reporting a story. Who are the people I need to talk to? What are the issues I need to learn? I read a lot and met a lot of people. I was hired about six months before The Banner launched. I spent that time talking to anyone I could talk to. Even still, there’s no engagement I’ll turn down. I want to hear from the community, and I want them to learn about The Banner. All of our editors and reporters operate this way, they’re out listening to the community and talking about The Banner whenever they have the opportunity. I also asked people to give me a tour. In retrospect, it might have been crazy to just get in the car with a stranger. But I got in many cars with many strangers. People drove me around town, and the perspective on the city was different with everybody that I met and talked to. It was a really great introduction to Baltimore. The Banner has been pretty warmly welcomed. If you have the right mix of outsiders and insiders, you see stories — for people who have been living here, they might take things for granted, get kind of jaded, or think it’s a problem that’s never going to be solved. We have both outsiders and insiders at the Banner, and it’s turned out to be a really great mix.
WF: How does The Baltimore Banner collaborate with other publications or community organizations?
KY: Very early on, we wanted to share our content. We knew we were going to have a paywall, but we still wanted people to be able to read it. So, we worked with the public libraries in Baltimore to provide access to anyone who has a library card. We offered our coverage to a lot of smaller news organizations. For example, when the Key Bridge collapsed, we heard from The Dundalk Eagle, which covers a community on one side of the bridge. They’re a very small news organization, and they asked if they could run our stories, and we said yes. They’ve called us a few times since and picked up more stories, too. We’ve done that with many small community newspapers around the state who are interested in running our coverage. We also knew early on that we weren’t going to be able to do everything. We collaborated with Inside Climate News, who actually had a reporter based in Baltimore who covered the Chesapeake Bay and Maryland. We did not have an environment reporter for the first couple of years, so anything they wrote about Baltimore, we picked it up. We now have an environment reporter, and we still do collaborative editing and story ideas with them. One of our first partnerships was with WYPR, the local NPR affiliate in Baltimore. We attend each other’s news meetings, share stories, and our reporters go on the air. Later, we developed a similar relationship with WJZ, which is the CBS affiliate. Twice a day, our reporters go on TV. There’s one other major collaboration with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a philanthropic organization that has given grants to many news organizations. We are part of a Baltimore News Collaborative with them, WYPR, The Baltimore Beat, WEAA, and a number of other news organizations that work together on stories, mostly related to young people.
WF: What is one of the most exciting recent collaborative projects you’ve worked on?
KY: We had identified the drug overdose crisis in Baltimore as a major issue we wanted to tackle. We did some reporting early on to conceive this project, and around the same time, The New York Times was launching the Local Investigations Fellowship, and they encouraged us to apply. Dean Baquet, who leads the Fellowship, came to Baltimore and met with our staff, and we talked about this project — we didn’t know exactly what we wanted to do, but we had already started reporting and actually sued the medical examiner’s office to get data records on overdoses. Alissa Zhu, one of our reporters, was accepted into the Fellowship, and The New York Times realized this was a great project and series of stories. We also wanted our data journalist, Nick Thieme, to be involved — as well as our photojournalist, Jessica Gallagher. We had at least three people working on this series of stories, and it just went from there. The New York Times was really great about working with several of our staff members. We realized we were sitting on this interesting finding of Black men dying of overdoses at high rates in Baltimore. In order to report that story, we had to compare it to other cities, just to make sure it was unusual and an outlier. When we were done, we realized we had all this data — why don’t we share it? Big Local News was part of the Fellowship, so we worked with Cheryl Phillips to start reaching out to other news organizations and see if they were interested. We did some outreach and were happy when other news organizations were excited to work with us on it. An editor at the Chicago Sun-Times said it’s not very often you get this data gift-wrapped in a bow to you. There was still a lot of reporting they needed to do, but we were happy because it shined a light on a very important issue and an underreported group of people. Since then, we’ve been brainstorming how we can do it again with other topics.
WF: What are you looking forward to at The Banner in 2025?
KY: Last year was a huge growth and expansion year for The Banner. Our newsroom is up to around 85 people now. We’re going to continue to invest in regional coverage, which could open up collaboration with smaller news organizations around the state. We would all love to work with Big Local News again. When multiple news organizations are focused on the same issue, it amplifies the attention on that issue and is a great way to lead to solutions, have impact, and move the needle on the conversation. There are many other issues where cities are facing similar challenges. We also hope that other people will have the same thought we did. If another news organization in a different state is working on a project, maybe in the back of their mind, they’ll be thinking about sharing, too. Especially at a time when resources are limited and local news is facing challenges, we need to help each other. I hope that we can do more, but also be a model for others to follow.
WF: What is one of the biggest lessons you’ve learned since joining The Banner?
KY: When we started hiring people, one of the attributes we looked for was flexibility. The Banner, even in its young life, has gone through iterations. We’ve adapted as we’ve gone along. The most important thing we’ve been trying to keep front and center is the reader. What does the reader need to know today? What are they going to find interesting? What is going to help them have a better life in Baltimore and in Maryland? As journalists, it’s important to keep the reader centered. I appreciate this newsroom’s willingness to constantly assess. Are we serving the public? The news business is changing so rapidly. We have to be willing to constantly re-evaluate and iterate, and as a startup, that value has been embedded more firmly than in legacy newsrooms, where people may not embrace change, or it’s slower or harder to come by. We set the stage early at The Banner — we’re going to constantly change. It’s a very important lesson for today’s journalists because things are evolving and changing faster than ever before.
Will Fischer is a journalist covering the intersection of technology and media. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine and conducted local news research for City Bureau. Follow Will on Twitter @willfisch15 or email him at willfisch15@gmail.com.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a primarily grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism and support an informed society in New Jersey and beyond. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, the Independence Public Media Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, Inasmuch Foundation, and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. For more information, visit centerforcooperativemedia.org.
