"We were stretched so thin as it is," said staff writer Luke Broadwater, whose Examiner work earned an award from the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association. He once ran "between Baltimore City federal court and Baltimore County court all in one day trying to cover three hearings all at the same time," he said. But, he added: "We were hustling, and when you hustle, you get good stories."
When it launched in 2006, the company, owned by Philip F. Anschutz, targeted six-day-a-week home delivery in affluent Baltimore neighborhoods where incomes are about $73,000 or more. It, like the other Examiners, was based on a free and locally focused model of publication.
"The Examiners are a kind of interesting experiment," said Rem Rieder, editor and publisher of the American Journalism Review magazine. "You've got kind of an untested approach at a time when newspapers are in decline because of the Internet. It makes survival quite a challenge."
Sun Publisher Timothy E. Ryan said in a statement that the paper has seen competitors come and go in its 172 years. But The Sun's "commitment remains unchanged: to provide our community, readers and advertisers with the best local media that will continue to meet their evolving needs."
The media industry has been hit hard by the poor economy, which has forced people to cut back on discretionary expenditures and businesses to cut back on advertising, which newspapers and other print publications rely on for revenue.
Christopher Corbett, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, pointed out that many outlets couldn't even afford to send reporters to ride along in presidential election campaign buses last year. And this month, Baltimore's free Urbanite magazine added a "donation" section to its Web site where readers can pledge amounts ranging from $25 to $5,000. We're going through "the worst advertising recession since World War II and maybe the Great Depression," said John Morton, an independent newspaper analyst in Silver Spring. It's hard to tell how much of the Examiner's failure is because of that or its business model. As a privately held company, it doesn't have to release information or statistics, Morton said.
In a statement, McKibben stressed that the Examiner business model "has achieved success." But, he said, the proximity to its other paper in Washington wasn't tenable. "It is not possible to maintain two major daily newspapers within a 50-mile distance and do justice to both publications," he said.
The company initially thought the nearby location would be a boon because it could package ads for publication in both papers, providing additional revenue. But sales "didn't materialize to the level that was in our projections," Clarity spokesman Jim Monaghan said in an interview.
In an effort to cut costs last year, the paper reduced home delivery to two days in Baltimore City and Howard, Harford, Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties and scaled back printing by 80 percent, distributing 335,000 Sunday papers and 256,000 Thursday papers but only 50,000 on the remaining days.
But it wasn't enough to keep the paper afloat. Examiner reporters struggled to absorb that idea yesterday, then push it to the periphery. There are still two weeks of publication left and events to cover. Said Janis: "We have to go put a paper out."
Sun reporters Julie Bykowicz and Annie Linskey contributed to this article.
