The Fight for the Future of Philadelphia’s Newspapers

In person, Marimow is anachronistic, as slow-talking, literal and polite as 1955. But he can also be intimidating. “He’s got the Pulitzers,” says one staffer, a fan. “And if he hears you’re stuck on a story, it’s kind of like a software program has kicked in, and the computer is whirring to life, and some of what he says will be so basic. It’s stuff like, ‘I would get a notebook, and a pen’ and then somewhere in there will be some incredible nugget of good advice. But some people won’t think of the basic stuff as, you know, just some quirk of Bill’s. They’ll take it personally.”

Marimow isn’t, as Hall seemed to imply, racist or sexist. Lots of phone calls to staffers who worked with Marimow over the decades confirm that. He is merely, well, Bill Marimow—with a sense of his own accomplishments. And in some fundamental way, that sense of self-possession leaches into the staff around him—as if they all won Pulitzers, too. The paper isn’t selling? Advertisers are departing? Well, it can’t be the fault of the editorial department. “What we do is rock- solid,” one staff writer told me. “The problem is how we’re marketed and sold.”

The Inquirer staff is still big enough, at around 250 people, that generalizing about it is unwise. Still, as I called around the newsroom for this story, numerous staffers expressed the same idea: The Inquirer’s revenue problem is purely a function of the business side. And their self-satisfaction is only compounded by their fear of the man pushing change.

Take, for example, this: George Norcross III and the board gathered data that the Inquirer’s ownsubscribers are rarely able to recall the name of a single columnist.

Pffft! goes the response. So what? Norcross is a political hack. The same firm that does his political polling gathered reader data. Never mind that the same company also conducts polling for the Los Angeles Times. The subject shifts from any kind of meaningful self-reflection on how the Inquirer might be better to Norcross: Is he secretly eager to cut editorial pages and columns only because he nurses a grudge against the sections of the paper that, traditionally, dole out the most severe beatings to guys like him?

Norcross’s history and his outside pursuits demand we ask this sort of question. And so the largest media organization in town, its revenues so low it was thought to be losing $50,000 per day, immediately fell into a damaging stasis. The guy pushing for meaningful change, George Norcross, enjoyed no one’s trust. And the guy everyone trusted, Bill Marimow, presided over a newsroom that saw no need for change.

THE DAILY NEWSreadied a redesign of its print product in about six weeks. The evolutionists at the Inquirer took nine months.

By February 2013, Norcross, and Hall, grew increasingly frustrated with Marimow. And meetings among the new company’s owners got bizarre. Norcross kicked into boardroom-brawl mode: “Lewis,” he said at one point, “why do I even talk to you? Shouldn’t I just talk to Nancy?”

That talk incensed Katz. But on most occasions, he seemed bent on calming Norcross’s growing fury. “Hey,” Katz said once, standing up from the meeting table and spreading his arms wide. “C’mon. Hug me. Let’s be friends again.”

By last March, the entire ownership group discussed a complete overhaul of the management team. By July, still locked in a stalemate, Hall told the board he wanted to fire Marimow.

“You can’t,” Katz warned Hall, telling him he would invoke his blocking rights.

The operating agreement they’d formed, in which Norcross and Katz had to agree on all major business decisions, had come to serve as a tar pit, trapping the company. The pair had failed to create a tiebreaker system, believing a total sharing of power would force them to resolve conflicts. In hindsight, it’s hard to imagine teenagers agreeing to run their fantasy football team by such unworkable rules. But Katz and Norcross succumbed to some tyranny of ego: “These are men who are used to getting their own way,” says one highly placed executive in town.

As time passed, the entire battle became hugely personal.

Hall even added Nancy Phillips to the list of staff members he wanted to fire. And Norcross’s daughter, Lexie, then a 25-year-old with no journalism experience, took on a supervisory role at Philly.com, where her greenness shows up like a grass stain. In May 2013, when the site launched a regular column by Governor Tom Corbett, she responded to criticism by knocking the newspapers across the hall: “Considering that the Inquirer and Daily News slam him every day,” she said, “I think it’s actually equal, giving him a chance to speak.”

Unable to conceal her political genes, Lexie tweeted a link to an article in which her dad backed Cory Booker’s Senate run, with the message: “Go @corybooker go!”

The general tenor of Philly.com’s original content also did her no favors, pushing the site further into vapid, celebrity-driven click bait. But whatever Lexie Norcross’s current merits and future potential, the two sides now had every reason to dig in for a corporate cage match. Katz sought to protect the interests of his girlfriend and the editor she idolized. Norcross needed to look out for the long-term interests of his daughter, who seemed to have found the career she wanted to pursue. Two of the region’s most powerful and politically connected residents didn’t have just money and ego at stake, but also skin, blood and love.