The Baltimore Banner is hiring a Washington Nationals reporter.
Kyle Williams announced Wednesday that he is joining the Banner to cover the Nationals as the nonprofit news outlet expands its Washington, D.C. sports coverage. Former WaPo Nationals beat writer Andrew Golden will also be joining the staff, per the Banner’s announcement. The hires are part of the Banner’s move into D.C. sports coverage, announced in February, when editor-in-chief Audrey Cooper said the outlet would add journalists to cover the Nationals and Commanders day-to-day, alongside enterprise reporting on the Capitals, Wizards, and Maryland Terrapins.
In February, the Washington Post axed its entire sports section as part of a sweeping round of layoffs that left the seventh-largest metro area in the country without daily professional sports coverage. The Banner moved almost immediately to fill that void, registering dcbanner.com and thedcbanner.com domain names, hiring at least one former Post staffer, and began talking to more displaced journalists about potential roles. Cooper’s minimum plan called for three additional reporters, plus an editor, and her memo announcing the expansion served as a direct rebuke to Post leadership. If reader data actually drove their decisions, as they claimed, she argued, they would not have eliminated sports coverage at the precise moment the Banner’s own data showed strong subscriber demand for it.
The irony running through all of this is that the Washington Post has quietly re-entered the Nationals beat in the weeks since the layoffs, hiring Danielle Allentuck — who had been covering the Orioles for the Baltimore Banner until January — to cover the team. The Post eliminated its sports desk, then went to the Banner’s own roster to start staffing back up, hiring away the reporter the Banner had covering the Orioles to put her on the Nationals beat. Now the Banner is hiring its own Nationals reporter. The paper that created the vacancy and the outlet that moved to fill it are now both covering the same team in the same city at the same time.
Make of that as you will.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.