October 21–28, 1999

cover story

Sinking Ship, part 2

by Frank Lewis

Howard Goodman left the Inquirer in May after 14 and a half years. "It wasn’t the paper I had joined and served," he says now, from the Princeton office of Bloomberg News Service, where he is an editor. "That paper was disappearing right before me."

Goodman left after being transferred from the Philadelphia police commissioner beat, which he feels he handled well, to the Cherry Hill, NJ, office. He won’t discuss the move, except to say that in his opinion, it was made for "unwise and irrelevant" reasons.

"I would have been more than happy to stay at the Inquirer a very long time," he continues. But in New Jersey, covering suburban communities, "I felt this was where I had come into journalism 20 years ago.… The Inquirer was pretty much giving over its B section to the Courier Post [a smaller daily covering South Jersey]. I didn’t think that was smart."

The suburbs are where the Inquirer has taken its fight for survival. But that in itself is not the issue. Everyone at the paper recognizes that if it can’t appeal to suburbanites — who make up two thirds or more of the region’s population of 4 million to 5 million (depending on how you define it) — the Inquirer cannot survive. But how to reach them is the question that, in some ways, is tearing the staff apart.

In 1996, Rosenthal, who’d recently been promoted to executive editor by then-editor Max King, told Philadelphia magazine that when it came to suburban coverage, he knew where to draw the lines. Local newspapers, he said, "will print the school lunch menus, and we won’t do that. We’ve learned that we can’t out-local the locals."

That’s exactly what the Inquirer has been attempting to do since April, however, when PNI launched the Paper Within a Paper concept in Jersey. The intent was to give suburbanites the equivalent of a community newspaper — with reports on township and school board meetings, petty crimes and the like (though not including school lunch menus) — within the Inquirer. As an internal memo put it, the plan "provides a method to compete with the coverage produced by local dailies. We will cover suburban towns with intensity."

Many veteran reporters, even those not affected by the change, despised it from the start. One scoffed at the time that the concept was made up of "elements that have little to do with journalism.… Sort of a USA Today style thing, with little blurbs that aren’t even news." Said another: "My understanding is that the concept involves filling the paper with lots of charts and tables and schedules of events, and where you can go to shop for antiques — a bunch of bullshit." (To prove his point, he faxed a blurb about a fifth-grader winning a coloring contest sponsored by the American Legion.) An editor watching from the relative safety of the main newsroom at 400 N. Broad St. called Paper Within a Paper "repackaged garbage."

More disturbing to many, however, was the new — indeed, unprecedented — alliance between editorial and the business side on which the plan was built. The introductory memo stated it quite bluntly: "A key element of this plan is cooperation between News and Circulation to identify key towns for circulation growth, and to ensure that those towns get reliable levels of local coverage."

The memo even labeled this arrangement: "The news and circulation handshake." Morgan points out that the paper hasn’t stopped covering communities with low or no circulation growth, like Camden and Pennsauken, nor does it plan to (and if it did, "I would be the first one to write a column about it!"). But reporters found the very notion of making coverage decisions based in part on economics unsettling. One used the phrase "editorial redlining."

"It’s a painful, painful thing for people who care about the newspaper, for people who care about journalism at all," says one longtime reporter. And like salt in the wounds is the fact that it doesn’t seem to be working. Even a promotional videotape mailed to prospective readers earlier this year, at a cost of about $60,000, failed to generate interest. Sources say no one claimed the prize described at the end of the tape, and that the whole effort resulted in six new subscriptions. (PNI’s spokeswoman did not respond to requests for information about promotions and circulation before press time.)

Just as Rosenthal noted three years ago, the Inquirer isn’t adept at out-localing the locals.

"They tell us the reader wants local news," a reporter says, "but I don’t think they want Granddad’s birthday [in the paper]. They want to know why they’re paying $4,000 a year in property taxes. They’re smarter than the Inquirer gives them credit for."

Zack Stalberg, editor of the Daily News, says part of the Inquirer’s problem is that it hasn’t gone far enough in its suburban coverage. Narrowly focused coverage may appear inside the paper, but the front pages still tend to trumpet city, national and international stories.

"It no secret that I feel that the Daily News is PNI’s city newspaper, and that the Inquirer has to get more and more suburban," Stalberg says. He concedes, however, that it’s an "immense" challenge — not just because it means covering an area much larger than the city and no less diverse, but because… well, they’re the suburbs. And to most journalists, especially veterans, that ain’t where the action is. So doing what makes sense financially feels, to journalists, like selling out.

story continued here