Print media court mouse demographic.

Sun to lose an inch, the latest local print publication to downsize
By Joan Jacobson
The ever-diminishing Baltimore media is now literally shrinking by size of paper – and some are disappearing altogether and going to web-only. The City Paper’s new design came out last week, looking more like a newsletter than the big, fat bulky tabloid we’re used to. In a month, readers of The Baltimore Sun will find their sadly anemic (not to mention bankrupt) daily paper shrinking by at least an inch in page size. Likewise, The Urbanite, enjoyed for its classy design, is a shadow of its former self. Once 15 by 11 inches, it is now 11 by 9 inches. And the new Exhibit A (the Daily Record’s legal magazine for general readers) lasted only briefly in paper before it went to internet-only. I get mine via email. SmartWoman Magazine has also gone entirely on line. Many of these changes have also come with painful staff reductions and pay cuts, so the quality of the product has diminished, as well. I keep wondering when this journalistic bloodletting will end. Just when I think it’s reached rock bottom, it freefalls further. Local media is being sucked down the drain so fast that I didn’t even have time to post this blog before the Baltimore Examiner wrote its own obit. The next casualty might be ‘b’, the one paper I won’t miss. Launched last year by Tribune Corporation’s cheapskate specialists, it has few readers and fewer advertisers. This tacky, ill conceived publication (frankly an embarrassment to the entire Baltimore media community), has almost no original content and is supposed to appeal to young hipsters who don’t like to read. And guess what? I hear they’re not even reading ‘b.’