Press Lord 2.0
When I meet Tierney for lunch, six days before Christmas, the Annenbergs are on his mind. I don’t have to ask him a question. Unprompted, he starts talking about Legacy, the Annenberg biography by Chris Ogden, which Tierney loved so much that he bought a stack of copies to hand out to his employees. “It’s a sweeping story, and it really is kind of the American story,” Tierney says. “This guy” — Moses Annenberg — “comes over, incredible poverty, with a bat in one hand, and off he goes.” Tierney is especially fascinated by the story of Walter, who struggled all his life with a stutter. Tierney also stuttered, until, at age 16, he learned to enunciate by reading Dr. Seuss books out loud with a speech therapist. Tierney volunteers this information. He adds, “It’s exciting, too, to see Walter Annenberg for six months not wanting to occupy this office and then deciding finally to take it over ... certain low expectations about what would happen next. ... It’s in this office that he came up with the idea for Seventeen magazine, TV Guide.” People told Walter that TV Guide was a crazy idea. “Within four or five years, they’re publishing a billion of them a year, you know?”
A few weeks earlier, Tierney had invited Walter’s widow, Leonore, to come visit. She looked at Tierney’s office and told him that Walter’s desk had been in a different spot. Tierney moved his desk. “I want all the good vibes, good ideas, I can get,” he says. But in other ways, Tierney has made the publisher’s suite his own. On the wall, a new sign reads YOU GET THE CULTURE YOU’RE WILLING TO ACCEPT. There’s a red “EASY” button from Staples next to his iMac; when you press the button, a voice says, “That was easy.”
The most powerful motivational object is Tierney himself. He is 50, with soft features framed by wide cheeks and thick brown hair that snaps back when he runs his hand through it. Today he’s wearing a white shirt with the top button open, spilling salt-and-pepper chest hair. After we finish our cafeteria sandwiches, he stands up. He steps to the big white flip pad — “my famous flip pad” — and starts pitching his vision for Philadelphia Media Holdings, which he doesn’t describe as a newspaper company but as “a brand of local news and content.” With a fat red marker, he scribbles a rectangle representing the Philly.com homepage. He calls it “a shopping mall” of content. To attract more shoppers, Tierney wants a localized version of MySpace; to create more content, Tierney wants journalists to use digital cameras and blogs. “I’m not going to force anybody to do it,” he says, although he hopes journalists will want “to play the game up on the balls of their feet and be excited about it and be relevant.” Explaining what he means by “relevant,” Tierney mentions that when the Mel Gibson DUI story broke last summer, both Philly newspapers covered it on inside pages, “but Philly.com should have had that as a bigger thing than just a line, because everybody went to Drudge” — the right-wing gossip site — “or CNN.” The website could use its own journalists who only do Mel-type stories, or who shoot their own “silly and fun” videos, like the one where the guy puts the Mentos candy in the Diet Coke and creates a soda volcano. “I love the smile of our own reporters doing those sorts of things, you know what I mean?”
Tierney is just getting started. For the next two hours, he roams all over the 12th floor like a lost gymnast looking for his next apparatus — pointing to things he’s stuck on the walls, new honor boxes, cooler ads, any hard evidence of big changes. He shows me a table lined with dozens of local newspapers Tierney sees as his competition, papers like the Courier-Post and the Burlington County Times; Tierney flips through them every week to check out the ads and see “what’s going on in their communities.” He shows me a prototype of the “Inquirer Express,” a one-page capsule version of the day’s top Inky stories, boiled down to short paragraphs in the style of USA Today and “sponsored” with a large ad from Commerce Bank. ("It’s just a terrific win-win-win.") Tierney also brags about his deal-cutting acumen, especially his decision to chuck CareerBuilder.com, the papers’ old job-search partner, in favor of Monster.com. Tierney says the CareerBuilder guy “was so rude to us. He kept saying, ‘Tony Ridder, Tony Ridder.’ I said, ‘With all due respect ... I’m not Tony Ridder. I’m a little bit more like Tony Soprano.’” Tierney twirls to face his iMac and pops in a CD. It’s a TV ad promoting one of Tierney’s new spin-off sites, PhillyCars.com. Over a bass-heavy beat, an Afro’d rapper sings, “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with a little Philly love.” Tierney lip-synchs along with the rapper and says, “We’re gonna drop a bunch of money on this thing” — $400,000 in the first month alone, for slots on the Sugar Bowl, American Idol and 24.
Tierney’s ideas strike me as creative, economically sensible, coherent, ambitious — but if the Inky journalists I know could hear this stuff, they’d be scared shitless.
But that’s just it. Tierney doesn’t talk this way with his staff. Tierney isn’t telling his journalists how much he admires Annenberg. He isn’t telling them that he thinks the Burlington County Fucking Times is the Inky’s competition. Tierney’s journalists have no idea. So if that’s true, how did this public-relations guru manage, in just a few short months, the impressive public-relations feat of making his 530 or so journalists fear and loathe his impressive-sonofagun guts?
TIERNEY IS A PITCHMAN. That’s his culture. He sells stuff. Always other people’s stuff. Hoagies for Wawa, credit cards for Advanta, the blue-chip products of blue-chip companies like Aramark and Exelon, political candidates for the GOP. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t believe in some of the things he sells. He does. As a Catholic, he went to war with the Inky in the ‘90s over its investigation of Cardinal Bevilacqua’s spending priorities, then reached out to Catholic voters on behalf of George W. Bush in 2000. Later he handled PR for the Camden diocese and its law firm while they fought off those pesky allegations of child molestation that kept appearing under the bylines of those (totally biased!) journalists at the Inky. So he believes in the Church. Bush, too. In 2003, when Tierney chaired Sam Katz’s mayoral campaign, he resisted attempts to broaden his candidate’s appeal in a Democratic city by having Katz criticize Bush. At one early strategy meeting, a leading GOP consultant told Katz he should try to become Philly’s Mike Bloomberg, perhaps by coming out against the U.S. involvement in Iraq. Says the consultant, Chris Mottola, “I thought Brian was going to have a stroke. ‘You can’t do that! You can’t do that! The White House will never stand for that.’” Katz lost. Tierney says, “I’m post-political now,” though it’s clear that certain folks see him as the Great Right Hope; at a business breakfast in October, a man approached Tierney and said he thought the Inky should feature more “good news” that was “fair and balanced.” Tierney said, “I’ve got 1,400 letters just like yours. And five on the other side.”
Originally published in Philadelphia Magazine, April 2007.
