Episode 119: Ron Mitchell

Dan and Ellen talk with Ron Mitchell, publisher and editor of the Bay State Banner. In 2023, Mitchell and Andre Stark, both seasoned television news journalists, purchased the Banner, a newspaper covering the Black community in Boston.

The Banner was started in 1965 by Melvin Miller. The print weekly is legendary for covering stories that were ignored by other publications. Stories about the Black and Latino communities in the Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan. Mitchell and Stark are expanding its digital footprint.

During his 27 years at WBZ, Mitchell created news coverage focused on racism in elementary school textbooks in 2014, and a series chronicling an 11-year lawsuit that culminated in an $11 million dollar award to a Black firefighter in Brookline.

Dan and Ellen also talk with Sanjana Mishra, a Northeastern journalism and criminal justice graduate. She's worked in local news, communications and social media. She took two courses with Dan last semester and somehow lived to tell the tale. She wrote a final paper called "How private equity and corporate ownership are killing local journalism and American democracy," an in-depth examination of how Alden Global Capital and USA Today Co. — known as Gannett until recently — have hollowed out newsrooms in a never-ending quest for higher profits.

Ellen has a Quick Take on North Star Stories, a daily radio broadcast on local news carried by AMPERS, a network of 17 community FM stations across Minnesota. It's by community, for community, and it's funded partly by donors and partly by the state.

Dan has a Quick Take about the latest on The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which announced earlier this year that it was shutting down in the face of mounting losses. What's happened since is mostly good — but it comes with a sour aftertaste.