WSJ: ' Examiner is boldest experiment yet'

Posted by Robb Montgomery on April 5, 2006 at 6:57 PM

The Wall street Journal reports today that Volume One, Number One of the Baltimore Examiner debuted with a press run larger than the 169-year-old Baltimore Sun.

Baltimore's entire operation was built from scratch (unlike San Francisco and Washington, D.C.)

The Examiner -- or the X, as it is known -- aims to be a slimmed-down, but full-fledged metro daily, complete with a copydesk, photographers, editors and reporters. Though there have been alternative weekly papers stacked in coffee shops and bookstores for decades, and free dailies handed out to commuters in recent years, this new subscriber-less paper will offer daily news targeted to the suburbs and the tonier parts of the city.

The Wall Street Journal

Some key quotes and other figures:

"Can a mature subscription-based daily paper -- even one as respected as the Sun -- be vulnerable to an upstart that's giving news away?" says Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. "It really and truly is a very interesting and open question."
"What I think is interesting about this economic model is its concession that newspapers are really about the advertising stream anyway," Mr. Kunkel says. The little-known secret of most papers, he says, is that income generated by selling the paper barely covers the costs of attracting and keeping readers. "So what the freebies are saying is 'Heck, let's stop the charade.' "

We certainly take them very seriously," says Sun Publisher Denise E. Palmer.
Six years ago, Tribune acquired the Sun as part of its merger with Times Mirror. Ever since, Tribune has struggled to improve the profitability of the Times Mirror papers. The Sun, which charges $2.50 a week and up for home delivery, lost 20,000 readers last year, or nearly 8% of the previous year's total, and now sells 247,193 copies a day.

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