1978 Called. It Wants Its Newspaper Back

There are rumblings that his reign might be coming to a close. PMH vice president Mark Frisby started taking a more active role in April, after an arbitrator gave six fired ad reps their jobs back. There’s talk that PMH chairman Bruce Toll and Tierney aren’t getting along, and that Tierney might find a graceful exit from his CEO post, leaving Frisby in charge. Frisby denies any coming transition of power.

Tierney’s relationship with the unions has been antagonistic at best, featuring some very public disagreements, like the time he bitched to Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz about the Newspaper Guild’s “selfish,” “self-centered” leadership. By comparison, Frisby is a career newspaper executive, previously the publisher of South Jersey’s Courier-Post, where unions came with the territory. No doubt he understands how to usher underperforming staff into that great good night without breaking all the dishes — or incurring a pile of legal bills. Tierney’s salesmanship and Frisby’s newspaper background could make for a good team. Yet a management shake-up seems beside the point. New work rules, more aggressive sales tactics, who stays and who goes — who cares? Such changes are playing out within a broader narrative of decay and futility. The Philadelphia Inquirer is in a dying industry in a dying economy. If it’s to survive, long-term, it will have to make such sweeping changes that everything that’s happened up to this point will seem mere prelude.

THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY is awash in bold theoretical fixes: Maybe newspaper companies need to publish just one print edition per week, filled with investigative stories and analysis, while continuously updating their websites all day, every day. Since the Internet has intruded on the television market and, to a lesser extent, radio, existing media might do best by banding together online, selling advertising and generating content across all platforms while enjoying the cost benefits of pooled resources.

No one knows where the answer lies. But the answer certainly isn’t the traditional model, and the most ambitious experiments to some extent recall Bunch’s Norg.

“I think the principal ideas of the Norg are sound,” says Bunch. “But I don’t know that the DNA of an existing newspaper company will permit it to become that. Someone might have to start the enterprise from scratch, because it’s a different culture.”

It’s a culture that’s more vibrant and youthful, predicated on individual appeal, not institutional importance. Think about what the Internet has meant to the music industry. Numerous recording artists are bypassing record labels and finding audiences by posting videos on YouTube, profiles on MySpace and free downloads on their own websites. The British rock band Radiohead sold three million digital downloads of a new album last year, with no record-company involvement. Journalism is slowly building its own stars through the Internet, like Josh Marshall, who left his traditional media job at The American Prospect to start Talking Points Memo, a lefty political news site that now employs 12 people.