Media: Philadelphia Magazine 100 Years

In honor of our centennial, we look back at some of the stories that shaped Philly Mag As Gaeton Fonzi and Greg Walter wrote in “The Reporter” (April 1967), Inquirer muckraker Harry Karafin was, at one time, “the best known — and the most feared — newspaperman in the business.” And theirs was a Karafin kind of story, with fraudulent business bankruptcies, phony stock deals, South Philly mafiosi, and a famed Philadelphian brought down. Only this time, the exposé writer was himself the subject of a damning tale of cons and coercion committed on the Inquirer's front page. Just before the story appeared in Philly Mag, the legendary reporter was fired; after it was published, a swarm of national media descended on the city. “Journalism in Philadelphia was put on trial,” the magazine wrote in a short epilogue the following month. “It was not acquitted.”