Right outside of the nation’s capital, Montgomery County has a million people, but a barren media landscape. The Banner wants to change that.
Editor’s note: Charles Sennott is off this week. During his tour across the United States earlier this year, visiting local newsrooms that are pushing against the spread of news deserts, the name of The Banner came up often as an example of a promising approach. This week, our editor Alana Campbell puts the spotlight on The Banner, almost a year after it expanded into the county where she was born.
When the Baltimore Banner announced last year that it was expanding its coverage into Montgomery County, numerous news leaders referred to the county as a “news desert,” crediting this status as a primary reason for the expansion. I was born and raised in Montgomery County, and it was there that I fell in love with journalism, getting my first reporting chops at Paint Branch High School’s paper, Mainstream. I remember going to the library and looking for local papers only to be surprised that there wasn’t one. I didn’t have the words for it back then, but since I’ve started working at GroundTruth, I’ve become way more acquainted with the concept of news deserts and very quickly realized that the county I grew up in — despite being the most populous county in the state and directly adjacent to the nation’s capital — was indeed a news desert.
A news desert, as defined by researchers at UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism, is “a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.”
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The data backs this up. A 2018 study by UNC put the total number of papers in the county at exactly one: The Montgomery County Sentinel. The report mentioned Montgomery County by name to highlight a point: “The 1,449 counties with only one newspaper still publishing range from Arthur County, Nebraska, with 500 residents, to Montgomery County, Maryland, with more than a million people.” All of the other Maryland counties with just one paper have a small fraction of the population, ranging from 1 to 15 percent of Montgomery County’s size. Furthermore, the one paper UNC identified has since folded its print edition; an updated report using their methodology would likely classify the county as a total news desert.
Other studies paint a similarly negative picture.
Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative has published far more recent comprehensive reports with their 2025 State of Local News report, which we’ve discussed in this newsletter previously. On one hand, it identifies Maryland as having the second most newspaper losses over the last two decades of all U.S states, having lost 70.5% of its newspapers. Paradoxically, its 2025 Local News Ecosystem Barometer puts Montgomery County at a zero percent chance of being a news desert, citing eight outlets it doesn’t list by name.
Fortunately, a 2024 study from the Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland adds necessary nuance and paints a clearer picture. The first-ever comprehensive baseline assessment of Maryland’s local news ecosystem, the study found that the great majority of outlets in the state are small — many with just one or two people producing all content. Most of what they publish is breaking news triggered by official announcements. The study concluded that as the Washington Post shifted away from local coverage toward a growing national digital audience, and as Washington TV and radio stations stayed focused on breaking news and broadcast promotion, a void was forming — particularly in Montgomery and neighboring Prince George’s counties.
Montgomery County did have 17 outlets covering it, the study noted, but that number is misleading. Seven of them are blogs, mostly single-person operations, and four of those are run by the same man, sharing most of their content across them. Though hyper-local sites like MoCo360, Montgomery Community Media, and The MoCo Show, provide daily news and information, there isn’t anything resembling a metropolitan newspaper that exclusively covers the county.
This didn’t happen overnight. Just fifteen years ago, there were eight local print newspapers serving Montgomery County. The Montgomery County Journal shut down in 2005. The Washington Post’s local weekly Montgomery Extra section shuttered in 2009. Then, in 2015, came the most significant blow, largely dictated by corporate strategy: the Montgomery Gazette closed all five of its local editions.
Purchased by the Post in the early 90s, the 55-year-old Gazette distributed over 450,000 free copies as recently as 2014. But when Jeff Bezos bought the Post, he shuttered the weeklies to focus financial resources on positioning the Post as a national paper. Twenty-six reporters, editors, and photographers lost their jobs. Montgomery County went from seven Gazette reporters covering countywide and local news to a handful left at the Post, the Sentinel, and Bethesda Magazine. The loss of robust accountability reporting on the county government, schools, and police was catastrophic, and amateur citizen blogs could only fill a fraction of that void.
Then came the fall of The Montgomery Sentinel. Founded in 1855, it ran for 165 years as a print newspaper — one where investigative journalist Bob Woodward got his start. It stopped printing in 2020. Its circulation, which had reached over 200,000 in its 1990s heyday, had dwindled to just 5,000 households for its final print edition. The paper moved online but shifted toward feature coverage, no longer offering the daily reporting on county government, courts, and schools that it once did. With its demise, Montgomery County now had zero local print newspapers.
Adam Pagnucco, who has run The Montgomery Perspective, a blog about local county and state politics, since 2006, watched the whole thing unfold. “The media landscape was very different then,” he wrote in a post last year. “The Post paid a lot more attention to us. The Gazette had a network of community reporters which no outlet can currently match. The [Washington] Examiner had a full-time local reporter. The Sentinel was still active… Compared to the local news ecosphere of that time, today’s environment feels very lonely to me.”
Adjacent to this contracted landscape arrived The Baltimore Banner.
Founded in June 2022 by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, a nonprofit established by businessman and former politician Stewart W. Bainum Jr., the Banner launched as an all-digital outlet with 42 journalists and plans to grow to over 100. In the years since, it became one of the youngest newsrooms to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize, was a finalist for yet another Pulitzer, and grew into the largest newsroom in Maryland — roughly 145 people on staff, with about 95 journalists. By the end of 2025, it had surpassed 75,000 subscribers despite operating behind a paywall.
On September 15, 2025, amid all of this buzz, the Banner announced it was opening a bureau in Montgomery County — its first major expansion outside the Baltimore area. Expanding into a county of a million people 35 miles southwest of its main reporting hub was a massive leap, and it coincided with a rebrand from The Baltimore Banner to just The Banner.
In an interview with Editor and Publisher earlier this year, Banner editor-in-chief Audrey Cooper acknowledged that, “Montgomery County is much much closer to D.C. and it’s culturally much different than Baltimore. So it poses interesting challenges and opportunities for our coverage.” but added that “Even though it is a stone’s throw from the nation’s capital, Montgomery County is a news desert and it’s also part of our state,” expressing ambitions to be “the primary news source for people in Baltimore and Maryland.”
Cooper also stressed that “saving the great American experiment means saving local news,” and emphasized the role that expansion plays in that: “To have impact in your journalism, you have to have scale.”
Leading the new bureau is Executive Editor Zuri Berry, who heads a team of about ten reporters and editors based in Rockville, the administrative center of the county. I sat down with Berry to take stock of what the bureau had built — and what it still had left to do.
His prior experience in major metro areas gave him a useful lens for understanding how a county this large could still be a news desert: “I was in Boston for a very long time, and you have this world-class city that’s right across the river in Cambridge, but it doesn’t get the same kind of love and attention that it deserves.” The same dynamic plays out here, he said. The numerous urban and rural communities within Montgomery County and Prince George’s County along the 270 and Route 1 corridors “are essentially a dead zone in terms of media coverage,” and Washington D.C. is “the center of gravity.”
The Banner’s staff saw this as an opportunity. The bureau launched with a community poll to get a better understanding of what county residents wanted to see more of and where they should direct their reporting. The reception to the Banner’s arrival was enthusiastic. There was local journalism happening in Montgomery County before they got there, Berry said, but it wasn’t as robust as people felt the community deserved.
In the year since launch, the bureau has published over 1,100 stories. In terms of subscribers, Berry said the bureau sits at around 15,000 between Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. Though he couldn’t disaggregate the two from his dashboard, he estimated roughly 12,000 of those are Montgomery County readers — out of approximately 85,000 total Banner subscribers.
Longer enterprise stories are what he believes will distinguish the Banner from other news sources in the region, and it’s where he sees the Banner having a tangible impact.
The story he keeps coming back to as an example happened in the bureau’s early days. A teen was struck and killed while walking on University Boulevard in Kensington. Every local outlet and TV station covered it, but what the Banner did differently was follow up — knocking on doors, talking to the parents. Because they built that relationship, they learned the family had already complained multiple times about speeding on that block — had even written to a state senator with a letter documenting it. That gave the bureau an accountability story about what local leaders had actually done with those complaints. Speed cameras went up. The speed limit changed. That’s the kind of downstream impact Berry is aiming for.
He also acknowledged something important about the patterns of coverage that preceded the Banner’s arrival: when stories did come to Montgomery County, they tended to cluster around areas adjacent to the capital: downtown Silver Spring, Bethesda, maybe Rockville. “It would be a surprise to see Gaithersburg or Germantown mentioned in the Washington Post or another outlet.” The Banner, he said, is making a deliberate effort to identify and prioritize undercovered areas while still covering the county’s major population centers.
Getting a real sense of where those undercovered communities were — and what people actually wanted from a local news outlet — is part of what drove “listening sessions” the bureau held across the county. These free community events, where people offered their direct feedback, ideas and concerns to journalists, allowed the Banner’s new team to directly engage with residents across the county.
“It’s almost like you have all of this data on a community, and then you go talk to people and either validate it or add context to it,” Berry said. The sessions also provided opportunities to pick up story ideas and sources. A lot of council members, community leaders and activists showed up — people with a vested interest in particular policy issues. “We were able to connect with those people and do better journalism because of it.”
Over the next year, Berry said he’s focused on evolving these sessions. What started as a way to introduce the bureau to the community and to learn from the community for their own journalism is now being redesigned as something more ongoing. “The goal is to evolve them into something more topical and newsy — more of a discussion where people can bring ideas and challenge some of the issues coming up within the county and community.”
When I asked Berry to assess where things stand overall, he was measured but optimistic. “It was definitely a news desert,” he said of the county, but “adding 10 journalists changes a whole bunch of things,” he said. “Does that mean we can get to everything? Absolutely not…. But we’re certainly in a better place. If a story doesn’t get surfaced by us, it will get surfaced by someone else. And if it doesn’t get surfaced by them, it will get surfaced by us.”
The Banner is not yet profitable, but Berry sees a path. “There’s a north star for us as an organization to get to sustainability. We’re not at that point right now, but we can get there. We’re on the front line of that, in Montgomery and Prince George’s.”
As someone who will always view Montgomery County as home, his final statement was particularly resonant: “I’m thankful that we have a bunch of ambitious people who took a chance on this place to try to do something new and different that will help contribute to the success of local news.”
I’m also glad they took a chance. Expansion can be a risk, but the Banner has taken a bet that local news — done at scale with a team of reporters on the ground — is important. In Montgomery County, there are signs that investment is paying off both for the news organization and the communities they serve.
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This article originally appeared on Groundtruth and was syndicated by MediaFeed.co.
