Denver financier Philip Anschutz’s Clarity Media Group will launch its third free daily newspaper, The Baltimore Examiner, next spring, the company said today. Michael Phelps, former vice president of Lee Enterprises Inc. and publisher of the Quad-City (Iowa) Times, will serve as its publisher.
The Baltimore Examiner will be distributed Monday through Saturday via home delivery, vendors and newspaper racks. It will have circulation of 250,000, according to a statement issued by Clarity.
“We are very excited about metropolitan Baltimore,” Ryan McKibben, chief executive of Denver-based Clarity, said in a prepared statement today. “We have found that this market craves more choice in terms of a daily newspaper… and the Baltimore Examiner will be a strongly competitive alternative by providing exceptional value to local advertisers and a standard of professional journalism to expanded local news coverage.”
Clarity already operates The San Francisco Examiner and The Washington Examiner. It also has trademarked the Examiner name in 69 cities, including Denver.
In Baltimore, the startup newspaper would compete with the Baltimore Sun, which is owned by the Chicago-based Tribune Co.
Anschutz, known for taking undervalued assets and turning them into profit generators, purchased the struggling but storied San Francisco Examiner in 2004. He launched the Washington Examiner in February using the operations and distribution of Alexandria, Va.-based The Journal Newspapers, which he also acquired in 2004.
Media analyst John Morton on Friday said it is hard to determine how the newspapers are doing because their financials are not publicly available. Nonetheless, they continue to publish, even with The Washington Examiner operating in the shadow of the acclaimed Washington Post, he noted.
“The people they seem to be appealing to are those who aren’t happy with what they get in the news on television but aren’t interested in the heavy lifting of The Washington Post,” said Morton, president of media consulting firm Morton Research Inc. in Silver Spring, Md.
Staff writer Kristi Arellano can be reached at 303-820-1902 or karellano@denverpost.com.
