The Fight for the Future of Philadelphia’s Newspapers

THE NEW GROUP, already mired in complex relationships, got off to a difficult start. Marimow’s new tenure began that May. But beforehand, the then-editor, Stan Wischnowski, had to oversee coverage of the paper’s new owners. He planned to disclose Katz’s relationship with Phillips.

Citing fears that Katz’s wife was “frail,” Phillips wrote to Norcross in a March 31st email: “I can’t tell you how much I worry about the potential consequences of such a story. … I have tried to dissuade Stan from this, and I might yet succeed. But maybe not. If not, that may be too high a cost. Part of me wants to kill the whole deal over this. … ”

That line, suggesting that a reporter at the Inquirer had the power to kill his deal, must have been a knee-meets-groin moment for the usually all-powerful Norcross. But Phillips’s attempts to dissuade Wischnowski are even more interesting, journalistically.

In journalism, reporters are taught to reveal any potential conflicts of interest. Considering that Phillips’s role at the paper might ultimately influence Katz’s business decisions, and the degree to which her relationship with Katz might raise questions about the paper’s coverage, there really wasn’t any other choice for Wischnowski but to disclose. Furthermore, the new owners were taking a pledge not to do exactly what Phillips was doing—interfere in editorial. But she was undeterred.

“[T]he relationship poses no conflict for the newspaper,” she wrote to Norcross in another email that same day. “I have always stayed out of stories involving Lewis. Also argued that there was really no relevance to this, beyond gossip appeal.” But Wischnowski pressed on. “Katz and his wife, Marjorie, have two children,” read a disclosure in an April 3rd Inquirer story. “The couple have lived apart for many years. Katz is in a long-term relationship with Nancy Phillips, an award-winning Inquirer investigative reporter.”
The passage is strikingly restrained, even French, in its attitude toward what remains, technically, a long affair. But it was accurate.

The same could not be said for the announcement, that same week, that Marimow was returning to his editor’s post.

“Who shall I say hired me?” the new-again editor had asked Phillips when they were closing the deal.

She helped craft what she later called “the official version”—that Osberg happily hired Marimow back.

In reality, Greg Osberg demoted Bill Marimow in 2010 and recommended against rehiring him in 2013. So did then-chief operating officer Bob Hall, who told the new ownership group that Marimow had “problems” with women and minorities. Nonetheless, Osberg signed and sent Marimow a letter of employment. Osberg also issued quotes for a press release about how glad he was to have Marimow back in charge, just 18 months after he’d demoted him.

For anyone who even remotely followed happenings at the local paper, the official version was an unbelievable fiction. And Marimow waved in the general direction of the facts: “I think the local owners might have suggested it’d be great if I returned,” he said.

The official version served as a white lie, not unlike allowing fired employees to declare they resigned. Yet the tale remains unsavory: The new, politically connected ownership group, fresh from its vow not to interfere, brings in a peerlessly ethical editor to buff up its image, while fobbing off an at-best-incomplete story of how it all came to pass to the public, and even its own reporters.

As one person close to the formation of the ownership group told me: “The pledge always struck me as Lemon Pledge. Something to clean up the surface.”

RIGHT OUT OF the gate, the new ownership group divided. Norcross, a data hound, presented a thick stack of findings from a survey of current and former readers to advocate for major change. Katz, backing Marimow, argued for what amounted to a comparative status quo.

Norcross’s was the more clear-eyed, modern vision: Working with Hall (who replaced Osberg as publisher in mid-2012), he advocated a significant redesign of the print product; a complete overhaul of the company’s Web strategy; a reduction in editorial op-ed pages from two to one; and a renewed focus on local news by eliminating the jobs of five editors and replacing them with seven reporters.

The list isn’t perfect: Do readers really reject “op-ed columns” as a concept, or just the version the Inquirer had been producing? Will mere data-crunching ever deliver something truly innovative or visionary?

Still, the list, particularly in terms of a redesign, more local news, and an awareness of the digital product as preeminent, comports with the newspaper industry’s current direction. And the initiatives triggered a proxy war: Norcross pressed for change behind Bob Hall; Katz pushed back wherever Marimow (and presumably Phillips) required assistance.

Hall submitted a list of editors to be demoted or fired. But Marimow resisted, with Katz acting as his benefactor. In one email to Hall, Katz wrote that he was invoking his blocking rights to prevent the changes.

“Bob,” Marimow would say, “we need evolution, not revolution.”

As slogans go, an appeal to Darwinism is a bit of a drag. But Marimow contends he only used the “evolution” line to slow the redesign and avoid alienating subscribers with an unrecognizable paper. Of course, keeping readers at all is a tricky business. After decades of crushing losses in readership, the Inquirer has spiraled a further 25 percent in recent years, its subscriber base dropping from 350,000 in 2007 to roughly 258,000 now. But in whatever context Marimow meant the words, they seem to capture something of the man.