1978 Called. It Wants Its Newspaper Back

Even worse, the Gross Clinic analogy only goes so far. A painting is static. It hangs on a wall. Newspapers require constant tending. And in this marketplace, with fierce competition for our attention, they need to evolve. Right now, in fact, they need to change or die.

It would be a tremendous irony, as well as unlikely, if Brian Tierney were to preside over the Inquirer’s transition away from capitalism. But then, that possibility is no more ironic than the current reality: that the end times are coming; that one of the most profitable and colorful enterprises in the history of man, newspaper publishing, is facing oblivion; and that the Inquirer is being looked on by the city’s rich as something no one could have envisioned 30 years ago: a charity.