New 'Baltimore Examiner' Publisher Talks Up Free Daily Model, But Competition Not Impressed

By: Mark Fitzgerald Clarity Media Group, the chain owned by reclusive Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz, will launch its third free Examiner daily this spring in Baltimore.

The publisher of the new Baltimore Examiner is Michael Phelps, who recently left Lee Enterprises where he was a regional vice president and publisher of the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa.

"I'm the only employee right now," Phelps said in an interview. "I'm looking for an editor and a vice president of advertising."

Phelps said the Baltimore Examiner will follow the same business model of its predecessors in San Francisco and nearby Washington, D.C.

The Baltimore edition will home deliver the great majority of its 250,000 distribution to targeted ZIP codes, and will also have single-copy distribution from 2,000 news racks. Like the 163,000-circulation San Francisco Examiner and the 260,000-circulation Washington Examiner, the Baltimore paper will be a tabloid published Monday through Saturday.

Unlike them, however, the Baltimore Examiner will be Clarity's first start-up. The San Francisco Examiner was already a free daily when Anschutz bought it, while the Washington paper was created from a chain of paid and free weeklies in the metropolitan area.

"Obviously we've learned some operational things in terms of doing a better job of launching, and fine tuning and tweaking distribution," Phelps said. "But what we really learned is that this model works, that there's a huge element of the market that wants our model of higher story count, and shorter, more tightly edited stories."

The Examiner papers, he said, have also learned to do a better job of delivering households to advertisers, and delivering to households that want it. He declined to say what percentage of households in the Washington area ask for delivery to be discontinued, saying only that it was a "very small percentage."

In Baltimore, the daily print competition will be Tribune Co.'s Baltimore Sun, which in the most recent Audit Bureau of Circulations FAS-FAX reported its circulation by weekday, ranging from a low of 203,289 on Tuesdays to a high of 292,089 on Fridays. The Sun's Sunday circulation is 430,675.

"It would be a mistake to say it's a battle between the Sun and us," Phelps said. "There are plenty of people who are distributing news content and advertising in the market."

But Phelps said the free paper will benefit from the "way the Sun sells advertising" by finding advertisers who "appreciate a more targeted approach, and not paying as much."

A Sun official indicated the paper was not worried about the launch of the Examiner.

"The Sun is Maryland?s newspaper," said Alonza Williams, the newspaper?s public affairs manager. "We serve more than 1.2 million readers during the week, and our advertisers know the Sun is the best way to reach the Balitmore market. We don?t think an out-of-town tabloid that is dropped off free to litter people?s driveways will interfere with the value that advertisers see in the Sun."