Press Lord 2.0
IN CITIZEN KANE, THE REPORTER dispatched to discover the meaning of “Rosebud” never finds it. I didn’t either. I’m tempted to guess that Tierney’s mother is his Rosebud, but honestly, if you’re a Rosebud-seeking reporter, Tierney is no fun. He wants you to know that he used to stutter. He wants to point out his mother’s humble alma mater from the balcony of his big new empire. He wants you to help him claw his way into the larger story of the newspaper and the city. “Regardless of how this turns out, it’ll be the first line in his obituary,” says Alison Grove. “He’s the local guy who bought the paper. It’ll be a good story.”
The bolder and newer the thinking, the better the story. So I’m guessing you won’t hear much more from Tierney about journalism as a vital public service. That was a useful story a year ago, when Tierney talked like a civic lion. These days, he wants to be a corporate turnaround artist like his friend Mike Hagan of NutriSystem — the kind of guy who’s celebrated in business-press features for Reviving The Brand. The idea that a newspaper owes something to its community beyond profits clearly isn’t what excites Tierney anymore, and maybe it never did. What excites him is the possibility that this cobwebby enterprise of American metro journalism — this business that belongs to the era of Charles Foster Kane — could be made to rhyme with the values and business climate of 2007, and that Brian P. Tierney could be the guy to make it happen. Forget the civic experiment. Philadelphia Media Holdings is a mere business experiment now.
On January 3rd, Tierney laid off somewhere around 70 editorial staffers at the Inky. “In my position, you have to say, Where do we need to make the investments? And they’re not easy decisions.” Tierney chose to invest in marketing and in new technology at the printing plant. “I don’t think anybody thinks that the way to turn this around is to hire 500 more people and not market what we already do,” he says, pointing to recent modest circulation increases for both papers as proof the ship is starting to turn. At the same time, Tierney insists that the business can’t be successful “without making the Inquirer as great as we all want it to be.” He likens the Inky to his old ad firm, Tierney & Partners. T&P wasn’t nearly as large as the big New York firms like McCann Erickson, but “pound for pound, were we better than McCann Erickson? Yeah. I mean, the Israeli Mossad is a great force, you know? Is it as large as, you know, other nations? No. Pound for pound, though, pound for pound, can they outpunch anything? Yeah. And I think that’s how we can be great.”
Part of the Tierney experiment, then, has to do with whether he can shrink his Mossad force without endangering the mission — whether he can slash his staff and Revive The Brand at the same time. Of the 70 or so laid-off journos, not all were good or hardworking, but a fair amount were one or the other, and some, like Natalie Pompilio, were both. Pompilio braved the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the streets of Baghdad to file reports for the Inky; she was revered by her colleagues for her prose and her skill with hard-news crime stories. “We keep hearing how we’re going for a ‘quality newspaper’ — in air quotes,” says Pompilio. “But the company’s making it really hard for them to put one out.”
Tierney’s layoffs also made life difficult for other staffs that do the work he has said is essential to Reviving The Brand. Like the copy desk. Copy editors are proofreaders who also write display copy, including Page One headlines. Tierney wants a paper that “pops,” yet he has laid off 13 of the paper’s 45 copy editors — the Inky’s gurus of pop. The layoffs also hit hard in New Jersey. All along, Tierney had said that it makes more sense for the Inky to have good local-news coverage in Jersey than to have a Jerusalem reporter. Well, the Jerusalem reporter has been recalled to a desk in Conshohocken — and the New Jersey staff has been slashed from 27 editors and reporters to just 20. In February, when I called Kurt Heine, the Inky’s New Jersey editor, he told me his Cherry Hill newsroom felt newly empty. “You can see big open areas now. How’s your office space? Need a place to work?”
Still, journos are trying to look on the bright side. Heine says that in a way, the layoffs have been “liberating,” because now he can’t afford to cover “the small stuff” like school-board meetings. Andy Maykuth, who’s covered genocide in Africa and the war in Afghanistan, was reassigned to the city desk, writing stories about fires and Mummers. “In 24 years, I’ve never covered the Mummers,” says Maykuth. “But they were so disoriented, they needed somebody to do that. So that’s fine. ... You do it because you’re a pro. ... You do it because a guy like Bill Marimow asks you to.” Says Marimow, “It’s all hands on deck. And what that means to me is that everyone is going to have to subordinate their self-interest and their preferences to the needs of the institution. ... Roll up your sleeves and put your head down and do what’s required.”
It’s got to be strange for Marimow — an Old World guy trying to do a job with a New World allocation of resources. It’s got to be even weirder that at the same time he’s talking about loss, sacrifice and “all hands on deck,” his boss is going out on his own and hiring new staffers. In February, Tierney announced that Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, and conservative radio host Michael Smerconish would be writing for the Inquirer‘s editorial page. Tierney recruited both men himself. He went after big game, reaching out to Rick Santorum and legal-potboiler auteur John Grisham. He also struck a deal to serialize the new thriller by Lisa Scottoline, Daddy’s Girl. (Tierney says he was jazzed about the Scottoline thing because the Inky has a history of serializing books “back to Charles Dickens.") Scottoline will also write a column for the Image section, “sort of an Anna Quindlen, Ellen Goodman-type thing,” says Tierney.
Originally published in Philadelphia Magazine, April 2007.
