Just a year and a half ago, Baltimore-area media people were singing the praises of the Examiner, the free daily launched in 2006 to compete with the Baltimore Sun.

The paper had gained a number of local and national retail advertisers and was eager to negotiate with buyers on everything from ad format to ad placement.

Now, the Examiner is gone, or just about to be, another apparent victim of the tanking economy and the uncertain future for newspapers generally, especially free dailies.

Denver-based Clarity Media Group told employees yesterday morning that the last edition of the paper will be printed Feb. 15. The paper’s web site will go offline as well, and about 90 employees will be affected.

“As successful as we have been in generating strong news content and evolving an innovative distribution system, the ‘synergistic’ revenue that we had counted on, by linking marketing and advertising between the Baltimore Examiner and our Washington newspaper, never reached projected levels,” said Clarity president and chief executive officer Ryan McKibben in a note to employees today.

“That is, while the Baltimore Examiner attracted some great and loyal advertisers, we were not able to gain the levels of revenue anticipated by linking together the two markets.”

The synergy strategy may have been poor avenue to pursue, media people say.

 “As close as these two markets are, you would think there is [more synergy], but as close as they are, they’re different in some respects,” says Michele Selby, an executive vice president at Media Works Ltd. in Owings Mills who had clients advertise in the Examiner.

She said she was surprised to hear of the closure, even after the Examiner eliminated several days of home delivery last year.

Certainly the closure of the Baltimore edition casts doubt on the entire Examiner model, as envisioned by Philip Anschutz, the Colorado billionaire behind Clarity.

The company also owns papers in San Francisco and Washington, and had been rumored to be launching a fourth Examiner edition in Los Angeles in late 2007 but evidently got scared off by the then-softening ad economy.

The papers target high-income neighborhoods with delivery and offer advertisers rates a third or half of those charged by the existing newspapers in the market. The heavily local news content is aimed largely at busy women as the key household decision-makers.

But as Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell, points out, the free paper model faces a lot of hurdles right now.

“Free papers are struggling, after achieving a splash (Metro, Examiner) at launch,” he says. “There's simply more competition for readers' time, more internet usage (internet news usage has now surpassed newspapers, according to recent Pew study). IPhones are giving access to news for people on the go -- and that's current news.”

Just yesterday, Metro International said it has shuttered the Spanish editions of its free daily, closing operations in seven cities.

Doctor says Baltimore, where the Sun has a weekday circulation of more than 200,000, may have been a poor choice of markets to begin with.

“Baltimore never was the best market to try a free daily in,” he says. “Though Examiner could find synergies with DC, market conditions have far outweighed those synergies.”

Shelby says Examiner sales people were still issuing proposals and coming up with special sections in recent days. Even last week, the paper was listing job openings on the internet.

“More competitors is better. It means more creative thinking and the ability to negotiate, so I’m sorry to see them go because of that,” Shelby says. “We had clients here who either had contracts with them or were running advertising on a regular basis.

“That’s one less media option in the market.”