The Baltimore Examiner, the city's only free daily newspaper, announced that due to poor ad sales it will be forced to close, leaving the city with one daily newspaper, the Baltimore Sun.
After 30 months of operation, the paper will print its last issue on Feb 15.
The Examiner's 90-person staff was notified of the closing in a meeting last Thursday.
"A lot of reporters thought it was going to be another pep talk. I have a feeling no one here really knew what was going on," Stephen Janis, a reporter for the Examiner said, referring to the meeting.
The Clarity Media Group, which owns the Baltimore Examiner and the Washington Examiner, wrote an official letter to the Baltimore staff explaining their financial troubles, failed attempts to find a buyer for the paper and finally the decision to shut it down.
"In the end, the economic dynamics that have ravaged the print media industry also prevented a sale of the Baltimore Examiner . . . This is very disappointing for all of us. Obviously, it is not the outcome we envisioned when we launched the newspaper over 30 months ago," Clarity CEO Ryan McKibben wrote in the Jan. 29 letter to the staff.
Starting Feb. 16, with only one daily newspaper, Baltimore's news coverage will be somewhat deficient, according to Janis.
"Reporting in journalism, like any sort of watchdog process, benefits from redundancy, from having more eyes and ears," he said.
For many years, Baltimore has had only one major newspaper, with the resources of a major news bureau. And even that paper is rapidly shrinking, according to Wayne Biddle, Writing Seminars professor, who was an editor and reporter for the New York Times.
"It's been a long time since the Baltimore Sun had the resources to cover local news in a really cogent and extensive way. So the loss of the examiner is just going to make a bad situation a little bit worse," he said.
"It certainly stretches into the several dozen," Brent Jones, Sun reporter and union representative for the Sun newsroom, said, referring to job cuts at the Sun.
With an emphasis on local coverage and short articles, the Baltimore Examiner's coverage is unlike any other Baltimore newspaper. Their newsroom is geared toward local news exclusively, according to Janis.
"Our investigative reporting became episodic. New news would come forward after each issue. Rather than having a 10,000-word piece, you could unfold a story over time, and that was unique."
At the Examiner, reporters are expected to write an article everyday. Although stories are often just 400 words, the bulk of the work comes in reporting, rather than writing, according to Janis. On certain days Examiner reporters are expected to write two or three stories.
Biddle, an experienced and award-winning journalist said he would hesitate to recommend journalism to his students in this economic climate. Even if one found a starting level job at a newspaper, the odds of keeping it five years later are small, he said.
Despite the unrelenting pressure and the poor projections for the field, layed off newspaper staff are even resorting to unconventional measures to continue reporting.
Janis and a group of other Examiner reporters are collaborating to start a "fresh and exciting" new local news source in Baltimore.
"It's a great job, there's no better job than being a journalist that I can think of," he said.
However, in a world where anyone can publish a blog post from their phone that will reach across the world in a matter of seconds, there may no longer be a place for traditional reporters.
"The newspaper business as we have known it for the last 100 years is gone. It should be exciting for young people, but for people of my generation, it's kind of scary and it leads to a lot of nostalgia," Biddle said.
Brent Jones described the feeling in the Baltimore Sun newsroom as being filled with anxiety. The Sun has already had several rounds of cuts and has lost much of its staff. However, the fate of the Examiner did not increase their anxiety, according to Jones. While the Examiner has only been around for 30 months, the Sun has been in existence for 172 years.
Rather, the drastic cuts at large national papers like the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times, have given them more cause for anxiety. The Los Angeles Times is the largest newspaper owned by Tribune Co., which also owns the Baltimore Sun. Tribune Co. is facing a $13 billion debt and falling advertising revenues.
According to McKibben, the Examiner's biggest problem also related to ad sales. Particularly, the proximity of the Washington and Baltimore papers made ad revenue impossible.
"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," he wrote in the letter to the Examiner staff.
Despite the dire circumstances for print news, the Examiner staff is committed to putting all their efforts into publishing quality issues until Feb. 15.
"We still have nine excellent newspapers to put out under difficult circumstances," Editor-in-Chief Frank Keegan of the Examiner wrote in an e-mail.
