Media: Another Funeral in Philadelphia

They had another funeral at the once mighty Philadelphia Inquirer this week, this time the layoffs of 71 reporters and editors.

I worked 21 years for the Inky’s rival, the Philadelphia Daily News, but my heart is just as broken as if I had lost a dear friend – or in this case nearly five dozen of them.

Joe Gandelman, the maestro of The Moderate Voice, a fine blog where I also hang my hat, can relate. Joe also toiled for Knight Ridder, the newspaper chain that owned the Inky and News until it lost its mojo, and has recently learned that one of his best friends, a publisher for another major chain, is again looking for work.

This is yet another manifestation of the sea changes roiling the newspaper business because of outside forces as well as the failure of newspapers themselves to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

ENTER DARTH VADER

I rarely blog about my former incarnation as an editor and reporter. Much of what transpires in the rarified air of newsrooms has little consequence for the Average Jane, although too many journalists would beg to differ because they have been breathing that air for so long. Nevertheless, the sad saga of Philadelphia’s two newspapers is worth telling and reflecting on.

During my two-plus decades in Philadelphia, the Daily News and Inquirer won a combined 19 Pulitzer Prizes and in their own rather different ways exemplified the best in journalism.

The Inky covered the world with a savoire-faire that earned it the lion's share of those Pulitzers, while the News, a fesity tabloid, covered the city in a way that was so intimate and so street smart that editors from out-of-town papers flocked to its newsroom to try to understand -- and emulate -- why it had such a deep bond with its readers.

Both papers made money. In the Inky's case, buckets and buckets of money. But this wasn't enough for a venal suit by the name of Anthony "Tony" Ridder, chief executive of Knight Ridder.

Back in the day, Knight Ridder was the class of U.S. newspaper chains because of its commitment to excellence, and even in the years before Ridder ran it into the ground its reporters were well ahead of the rest of the mainstream media in reporting what was really going on in Iraq.

But at some point the balance between having well-resourced newsrooms and keeping Knight Ridder's stock price up tipped in the direction of Wall Street, and Ridder was the tipper in chief.

Ridder said two things that best exemplify why he became the Darth Vader of an industry that trashed newspapers although they were in decent financial health, remained viable investments and were vital players in their communities.

First, Ridder infamously remarked that Knight Ridder was moving to San Jose from its longtime Miami headquarters

So that it could be closer to the Internet.

Then he had this to say when the Inky won multiple Pulitzers in 1987:

"I'd like to see it win a Pulitzer for cost-cutting."

Ridder, with the acquiescence of his Tweedledum board of directors, slowly bled the News and Inky. Although there was not a direct cause-and-effect relationship because of the aforementioned inability of papers to adapt to changing times, the circulations of both went into precipitous declines.

Ridder put Knight Ridder on the auction block late in 2005, and after numerous machinations, the considerably leaner Inky and anorexic News were "saved" by a group led by Brian Tierney, a Philadelphia public relations guy, meaning that the papers would be locally owned for the first time in decades.

That might seem like a good thing, but the group had zero publishing experience and it shows.

Tierney promised not to make further cutbacks, but there have been several rounds of them. Tierney promised not to shake up the hierarchy of editors, but he fired the Inky’s editor in chief.

Tierney also promised to not meddle with editorial content. So far he was been true to his word, but that seems to be of little consequence because he, like Ridder, also is bleeding the Philly papers.

THE TRAIN LEAVES THE STATION

Although newspapers are leading agents of change, they have been slow to embrace change themselves. This is nowhere more evident than with the Internet and blogosphere, and the websites of the Inky and News are good examples of the change-averse culture that still permeates their newsrooms despite the gun that they have had to their heads for quite some time now.

When I bailed from the News in 2001, the print edition was losing readers in droves, but relatively few of them were being lured to the paper's website although the Internet was The Next Big Thing.

The website was a mess because almost no one except the webmaster took it seriously. Certainly not the people with the big offices. And no matter how big the story, updating anything on the website during a news cycle took an act of Congress.

For better or worse, the Internet is the future of Philadelphia's newspapers and the people running the show still aren't getting it right a decade after the Web train pulled into the station and the smart money warned that they'd better jump on board with both feet or else.

Part of this malaise is (again) the fault of Tony Ridder, but in fairness it has a whole lot more to do with the world outside the newsrooms of the two papers, which has been changing at a speed that most newspaper editors have neither recognized nor appreciated.

Among the changes are the death of the evening newspaper and the emergence of cable news channels and the 24/7 news cycle, but the biggest change is the Internet.

I've been tracking my own changing websurfing habits over the five years since I left the News.

Back then, I visited three or four blogs and 15 or 20 newspaper websites a day. Today I visit 30 to 40 blogs and perhaps five newspaper sites. I still buy the dead-tree edition of the Sunday New York Times because it remains a great deal even at $5 a pop and it feels good to hold a newspaper in my hands. Oh, the nostalgia!

Although I regularly read Will Bunch, the News’s world class blogger, and Dan Rubin, his counterpart at the Inky, I seldom do more than glance at the papers’ websites and on some days don't even do that. Too little breaking news. Too little special content. Too much yesterday and too little tomorrow. (The News is so short handed that Bunch, who in baseball parlance is a franchise player, is unable to blog as often as he would like because the City Desk sends him out to cover fires and other news stories.)

Don't get me wrong. Snazzy websites, world-class bloggers and interactivity out the wazoo are not cure-alls for what ails Philadelphia's newspapers, let alone others.

But they are the only proven way to stanch the loss of old readers and (gasp!) even attract new ones, and that message still has not sunken in.

I wonder whether it ever will.