All acknowledgement to Poynter's Jim Romenesko, whose blog alerted me to the Reporter's Notebook Web site, which contains a compelling collection of memories by alums of the long gone Clearwater Sun newspaper. While I'm not so sure about the contention that a newspaper 25 miles away can't provide comprehensive coverage of a community, it is illuminating and sobering to read about the Sun's glory days.

A particular standout is the essay crafted by Mike Pride, a well-regarded, recently-retired editor of the Concord Monitor, who worked at the Sun through the '60s and '70s. He writes that the newspaper didn't learn for years that the reason Scientologists seemed to know so much about their efforts to investigate them, is because a clerk at the paper was a spy for the church.

Pride writes: "Besides their secretive ways, two things made covering the Scientologists hard. First, they were confrontational and unpleasant (Hubbard’s doctrine described journalists as "Merchants of Chaos"). Second, our city desk clerk was a Scientology spy. We wrote nearly 200 stories during the year after we disclosed the Scientologists’ presence, and they always seemed to know what we were up to. They publicly humiliated Tom Coat, a desk editor who had agreed to go to Tampa to take the first Scientology course for a Sun series (his outing made for a better series, actually). They attacked Sableman’s reputation. They threatened lawsuits. With pages-long accounts of "errors," they challenged the accuracy of every substantial story we did. And more than once Fred Rock, a Scientology press-office hack, stood over my desk badgering me as I edited a story for that day’s edition. One morning I got in a shoving match with Rock. We knew the newsroom had been infiltrated, but we never guessed the spy was the friendly, efficient, sympathetic "June Phillips." We learned this only years later from FBI files."

Read the rest here.