1978 Called. It Wants Its Newspaper Back

In the original deal, Tierney agreed to produce steadily increasing profit margins, undermining the supposed virtues of private ownership by essentially rendering his papers subject to the same demands they’d faced from Wall Street. That he evidently thought he could fulfill such a promise is almost ­inexplicable — which is, of course, the downside of Tierney’s irrepressible optimism. The company is attempting to renegotiate its loan terms. And oddly enough, this is one instance in which the fiscal instability of the newspaper business works in a publisher’s favor. No bank in its right mind would take the Inquirer and Daily News now. At their current value, the papers can’t fetch a price equal to the original loan amount. So almost anything appears possible. We could witness these papers continuing in slow decline. Perhaps they’ll merge. Or we could see more dramatic outcomes: Analysts across the country are predicting that the next step in the evolution of American newspapering will include some Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructurings — and potentially even closings. The Tribune Co., which includes the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, has already filed for bankruptcy. So as American newspapers, the Inquirer and Daily News are on the endangered species list. From this perspective, the tale of Philadelphia Media Holdings looks like a classic business fuck-up — and an example of how optimism can be indistinguishable from simple hubris.

IT’S HARD TO imagine Philadelphia without the Inquirer. From 1972 to 1990, under editor Gene Roberts, the paper earned 17 Pulitzers in 18 years, serving as one of America’s fullest expressions of the post-­Watergate boom in investigative journalism. If it was Sunday morning, a big, fat Inquirer accompanied that first cup of coffee. Today, the paper’s editorial staff has been gutted from 525 to roughly half that number. Which provokes the chicken-and-egg argument of whether that caused, or is the by-product of, the circulation fall-off from 500,000 10 years ago to 300,000 today. Sunday circ dropped nearly 14 percent, to 556,000, in the past year alone.