In our third MTC Journey update from Fellow Emma Patti Harris, the Baltimore Banner Managing Editor shares her experience from the Class of 2024’s recent convening in Salt Lake City – including the importance of celebrating wins on her performance challenge of transforming the fledgling, city-centric startup to a performance-oriented newsroom serving all of Maryland.

I presented my challenge update on the two-year anniversary of The Banner, and was happy to report that, we had to recast some of our goals because of the growth my challenge has helped drive — and some luck with breaking news.

We’re five months into implementing new policies and strategies that I developed to help make our Express Desk more audience-focused, and we continue to see increases even over the 400% increase in unique visitors I reported in March. Since then, we’re seeing a 28% increase in average stories per week and a 50% increase in new visitors per month.

I’m proud of how this team has come together and is thinking through what the audience needs and wants and how they’re telling stories. Every time I sit in on their pitch meetings, I’m impressed; they’re becoming more of a model for the rest of the newsroom.

The breaking news did help put things in perspective. When we normalized the data, we discovered that we are continuously growing. But we also have to make our own news. So that’s why the Regional Team is also part of my challenge.

I’m working with Deputy Managing Editor Herman Wong, who we hired from The Washington Post, to begin implementing new ideas with that team. He’s taken on our daily coverage and is also spearheading political and regional strategy.

After my long presentation, [MTC Executive Director] Charlie Baum was like, ‘Emma, you’re really glass half empty, not glass half full. And there’s a really positive story here!’

I took that to heart, and looked at my slide deck and was like, ‘You know what? He’s right!’

We’re already pacing ahead of our subscription goals for the year, and yet I’m sitting here harping on about traffic woes! We need to be aware of audience trends, but we also have to look back and see what we’ve accomplished. And when I look back at the last two years of The Banner, I’m in awe of everything we have done.

During the Key Bridge collapse, for example, there were 110 stories by 39 different bylines! That is incredible! And in that moment, I realized we weren’t a start-up anymore; we were a mature newsroom that knew how to tackle a massive breaking story. It was good to have that feedback.

Celebrating wins is imperative to the organization because you have to acknowledge and appreciate the people who worked to get there so that they are bought-in and eager to take on the next challenge.