1978 Called. It Wants Its Newspaper Back
Early on, Tierney looked like a man with a shot at reversing these trends. He encouraged his journalists to embrace the Internet, to think of themselves as brands to be promoted through chat forums, video commentaries and blogs. In November 2006, however, he made a hire that appealed to traditional newspaper people but looks almost pointless today. Tierney brought in then-59-year-old Bill Marimow to edit the Inquirer. An impeccable journalist, Marimow won two Pulitzer prizes while working for Roberts’s old wrecking crew. He went on to edit the Baltimore Sun, a position he was ousted from when he took a principled stand against employee layoffs. His return to Philadelphia was portrayed romantically, and his hire certainly gave Tierney’s image — he’d spent years bullying reporters in town as a public relations exec — a much-needed buff and shine. But in two years, Marimow has made no dramatic changes to the paper’s coverage — at least, none so significant that they might cause people to run to the nearest newspaper box, or computer monitor, and check out the Paper of Record. Quiet, old-fashioned and exceedingly polite, Marimow is rarely seen about town. He seems more interested in plumping the Inquirer’s institutional grandiosity — an absolute impossibility, given the paper’s decreased staff size — than in fostering the growth of individual, Internet-era stars. And his hires, including old Inquirer employees, seem geared toward rebuilding the newspaper of 1978, rather than forging the news organization of 2015.
Tierney has missed on other counts, too. Bringing in Michael Smerconish, Rick Santorum and Lisa Scottoline as columnists was as crass as name-dropping at a dinner party, an attempt to co-opt the glow emanating from this city’s most well-known radio host, an abhorred Pennsylvania politician and, uh, a crime novelist, instead of growing his own stars. Tierney also promised a revamped and more ambitious website at Philly.com. But the result is unremarkable. New stories and fresh updates — the lifeblood of an Internet publication — are buried on the home page. And a Google trends snapshot doesn’t demonstrate any lasting uptick in viewers since the new site was unveiled in May 2008. Overall, daily print circulation has declined a little more than 10 percent since Tierney took over.
Tierney has failed to branch out and try new methods, even when those ideas could come from his own employees. One of the more visionary thinkers in the industry is Will Bunch, who pens stories for the Daily News and opinion for his blog Attytood. He has a book due out in February about Ronald Reagan’s legacy. Bunch is exactly what Tierney has said the industry needs — a journalist who turned himself into a brand.
Bunch used the big, threatening Internet to kick-start his career. And in 2005, he formulated a compelling Internet-based vision for the industry’s future: the Norg. A Norg is a News Organization, an entity that gathers information and distributes it, primarily online, via audio, video and the written word, without all the old conceits and lumbering bureaucratic inefficiencies of the metro newspaper. While a daily paper seems to preach to its readers from on high, a Norg would partner with the community, using citizens to help gather information and set the enterprise’s course. In short, Bunch’s vision smartly marries the old idea of a newspaper with the greater sense of community fostered by the Internet.
Alas, Will Bunch has never had a conversation with Brian Tierney about Norgs.Instead of seeking out creative thinking, Tierney supposedly wields a baseball bat and screams about losing his house — though in hindsight, that looks like typical Tierney hyperbole. What’s really at stake for him in this newspaper deal is his legacy.
