Three minutes before the big staff meeting Thursday where they broke the news to us that this newspaper was going out of business, an editor named Frank Keegan called me into his office. He’d just hung a huge photograph on his wall, a shot of Barack Obama talking to the big War Memorial Plaza crowd here last weekend. The photograph was meant to hang there as a reminder of history coming to Baltimore no matter what the future holds.

Keegan’s the top guy in The Examiner newsroom, and he didn’t find out exactly what was coming until the night before, and he promised confidentiality, a promise every journalist keeps no matter what rank. He decided to drag the picture in and hang it anyway.