New daily newspaper begins in Baltimore

Last Wednesday morning, Baltimore became a two-daily-newspaper city for the first time since the daily Baltimore News-American folded.

The News-American, which at one time published my syndicated religious column, was independent of the Sun. It was a real rival, rather than an afternoon edition of the morning, called the Evening Sun.

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If the Sun's owners had decided to make either of these newspapers basically conservative, possibly they could have survived. But they did not. And today's Baltimore Sun, having already sustained one of the largest losses of circulation in the nation, is now faced with a Monday-through-Saturday free tabloid. How much will this take away from the already bleeding Sun remains to be seen.

The Sun's Nick Madigan reported:

"Conventional industry wisdom holds that it is unlikely that a new paper will succeed in a market already dominated by another publication," said John Morton, president of Morton Research Inc., a media consulting company in Silver Spring.

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"But," he said, "The Examiner, with its free delivery and focus on single-family homes with a median income of about $73,000, is a kind of special animal."

"This isn't a paid daily," he said. "It's the new model for a startup newspaper."

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The Examiner, Morton said, might be "appealing to people who aren't satisfied with the news they're getting from their television stations, but don't want the heavy lifting of reading the daily newspaper."

"The number of people who read each newspaper matters more to advertisers than how many papers are delivered," said Timothy J. Thomas, vice president for marketing at The Sun. "They're trying to sell ads on the basis of circulation. That ceases to be a valid measure when one paper is free and one is paid."

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That, Mr. Thomas, is very similar to claiming that all advertising on television and radio is basically invalid because television and radio cannot charge listeners for listening, as the Sun charges its readers for reading.

The Sun also reported:

For more than a year, the Examiner has been delivering about the same number of copies in the Washington market as it plans to distribute in Baltimore, roughly 250,000 papers a day. But a recent survey by Scarborough Research showed that more than 100,000 people actually read the Washington Examiner.

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"If the Baltimore Examiner has a similar record here, it means that the paper will be read by about 100,000 people in the Baltimore area," Thomas said. "If you compare that to The Sun, we deliver more than 600,000 readers each weekday, more than a million readers each Sunday and 1.2 million readers over the course of an average week."

This, ladies and gentlemen, poses a couple of questions:

1. How many readers does the Sun claim for every subscriber?

2. What percentage of all the copy the Sun publishes, is actually read by those readers?

Additionally, the Sun reported:

In last Thursday's 48-page edition of the Washington Examiner, most of the paper's local and sports stories were written by staff reporters, but its foreign, national and business pages were filled almost entirely with Associated Press dispatches.

Which begs the question how many of its overseas bureaus has the Baltimore Sun closed down, and many are left? And what percentage of national and international news in the Sun is reported by AP and not the Sun?

The Sun further reported:

Still, the news that the Sun would have a rival added fuel to the larger paper's competitive fires.

"I welcome the competition," said Timothy A. Franklin, The Sun's editor. "It makes you sharper and better. I don't take any reader for granted."

Ladies and gentlemen, How many of you really believe that Sun Editor Franklin really, honestly "welcomes the competition"?

The Sun also reported (in what might be described as "The Full Length of the Dagger"):

In the last few months, the Examiner aggressively sought out The Sun's advertising and circulation know-how. It hired away one of the Sun's top advertising managers, Annie Hager, as well as a handful of advertising representatives from a staff of more than 100.

Last week, some of The Sun's delivery people went over to the Examiner, enticed by the prospect of Sundays off and an assurance that they could toss the paper on people's lawns and not put it in mailboxes, as the Sun demands in some areas.

But, in an apparent effort to save on labor costs, the Examiner seems willing to rely partly on news staff who are professionally untried. At least four of its reporters graduated only last year from the University of Maryland, College Park, where they worked for the campus paper, The Diamondback.

Keegan, the Examiner's editor, has plenty of newspaper experience. But he was fired from his last two positions as editor, from The Connecticut Post last year and from The Express-Times, in Easton, Pa., five years ago.

"It's always tough," Keegan was quoted as saying in a March 24, 2001, story in The Express-Times about his dismissal. "Getting fired is what editors do best. It's in the job description."

In Washington, where The Examiner began publishing in February 2005, Anschutz's experiment has met with less-than-stellar results, according to some former employees.

Patrick Rucker, 31, who was a reporter at the Washington Examiner for eight months before resigning in January, said at least five of nine metro reporters also quit while he was there, as did two editors, including the top editor, John Wilpers.

"For such a small staff, the turnover was unbelievable," said Rucker, who previously worked for the Chicago Tribune. "You had a hard-working but largely inexperienced staff – in some cases, it was their first job – trying to keep up with The Washington Post."

Neither the Washington Examiner's publisher, Herb Moloney, nor its editor, Nick Horrock, would comment for this story.

Washingtonians who received the Examiner were "constantly calling to say, 'stop delivering this thing,'" Rucker said.

Ladies and gentlemen: Please note that there was nothing at all numerical about these constant callers.

Why not? Why no Sun report of the actual number of Washingtonians who called to say: "Stop delivering this THING"?