The Baltimore Examiner is folding. This is one of those papers that launched a couple of years ago (30 months, to be precise) with much bally-hoo about free distribution and targeted home delivery. It was well-designed and snappy, but they couldn’t make a go of it.
Gawker has the memo:
However, as successful as we have been in generating strong news content and evolving an innovative distribution system, the “synergistic” revenue that we had counted on, by linking marketing and advertising between the Baltimore Examiner and our Washington newspaper, never reached projected levels. That is, while the Baltimore Examiner attracted some great and loyal advertisers, we were not able to gain the levels of revenue anticipated by linking together the two markets.
Obviously, aside from the economic environment and the troubles facing newspaper generally, the real issue here was that the owners were focused on “synergy.” (They use it elsewhere in the memo, too.) When will corporations learn that buzzwords = death?
For the moment, the other two papers in the Examiner chain (Washington and SanFran) seem safe. I really liked the resurrection of this brand, and I’m sad to see Baltimore go. Further, I also think that free and ad-supported should be a viable business model, particularly if someone figures out enough datamining to make that “targeted home delivery” worthwhile (despite the skin-crawling personal invasiveness of it all).
Grant Hamilton
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