COLD TYPE: A Baltimore media blog By JOAN JACOBSON

What happens to local news if the daily newspaper ceases publication? And what might take its place? Those are the questions being explored in Baltimore next Tuesday (6/2/09) at a symposium entitled “The End of Local News? If Communities Lose Newspapers, Who Will Fill the Void?”

It’s a nationwide problem, as readership and ad revenue dwindle and more and more major metropolitan newspapers succumb.

Though The Baltimore Sun hasn’t shut down, many of its readers have, in fact, shut it out by canceling subscriptions or even refusing to read it online because they find it is so devoid of local news coverage.

The free symposium, sponsored by the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, will be from 5 to 7 p.m. in Westminster Hall, 519 West Fayette Street on the University of Maryland Baltimore campus.

Panelists will include:
Monty Cook, editor, The Baltimore Sun
Mark Potts, former reporter for the Chicago Tribune and Washington Post, cofounder of WashingtonPost.com and proponent of hyperlocal, user-generated news sites.
Jayne Miller, chief investigative reporter, WBAL-TV.
John J. Oliver Jr., publisher, The Afro-American.
Timothy A. Franklin, Louis A.Weil, Jr. Endowed Chair, Indiana University School of Journalism, former editor, The Baltimore Sun.
The evening’s moderator will be Merrill College Dean Kevin Klose, former president of National Public Radio and long-time broadcast executive and print journalist.

The symposium is a program of the Merrill College’s Abell Professor in Baltimore Journalism, now held by former Baltimore newswoman Sandy Banisky.