Baltimore Sun to launch free tabloid aimed at younger readers

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BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Following the lead of its corporate parent's flagship publication, The (Baltimore) Sun plans to launch a free daily tabloid aimed at younger readers.

The publication, known as b, will debut on April 14 and publish on weekdays. It's modeled in part after RedEye, the free tabloid published by the Chicago Tribune. Both the Tribune and The Sun are owned by Tribune Co., which was recently taken private by billionaire investor Sam Zell.

Baltimore already has a free daily tabloid, The Baltimore Examiner, which is delivered in affluent neighborhoods in the city and its suburbs and is available downtown in boxes.

The new paper promises "quick-read, no-holds-barred coverage of the news young adults care about," along with a heavy dose of lifestyle and entertainment pieces, according to a press release. That stands in contrast to The Examiner, which is driven largely by local news.

"We’re the largest daily home delivered newspaper in the state of Maryland reaching over 350,000 households with over 568,000 adult daily readers," Baltimore Examiner Publisher Michael Beatty said. "Our readers are the most coveted and sought after demographic that advertisers are trying to reach. The Sun’s new product seems to be more of a rack and stack entertainment product that will rival the City Paper reaching the very young clubbing crowd."

The new Sun tabloid and its Web site, bthesite.com, will encourage readers to submit stories, blogs, photos and video, and b's editors hope user-generated content eventually will make up as much as one-third of the publication.

RedEye, launched in 2002, has been among the most successful of the youth-skewing daily tabloids; it survived a battle with the Chicago Sun Times' rival publication, Red Streak, which folded in 2005. Other such papers include Metro, a venture of Luxembourg-based Metro International that has publications in several cities; amNewYork, in which Tribune is the majority investor; and the Express, a Washington Post Co. publication distributed largely on Washington's Metro subway.

Washington and San Francisco also have their own versions of the Examiner, published by Philip Anschutz's Clarity Media Group Inc.

Miles Groves, an independent newspaper industry analyst based in Washington, predicted that The Examiner's presence in Baltimore would make b's launch difficult. The Examiner has a circulation of 250,000, while b hopes to be printing 100,000 copies a day by the end of the year. The new tabloid will not be delivered to homes.

"It's going to be an expensive project. To go for a young demographic that's probably already reading The Examiner and going online, I think it's tough," Groves said. "It would have been a more innovative idea five years ago."

Groves noted that unlike Chicago, Washington and other markets that have spawned successful free tabloids, Baltimore has little public transportation to speak of, meaning free publications have fewer opportunities to reach a captive audience of commuters.

"The idea that they would be buying out people and then hiring seems a little strange, conceptually," said Bill Salganik, local president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, which represents newsroom employees.

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