By Michael Shapiro
1. Phantom Menace
The events that would transform life at The Philadelphia Inquirer from the merely disheartening into the profoundly terrifying began to unfold shortly after 3 o’clock on the afternoon of last November 1 when Sandra Long, a deputy managing editor, appeared outside the glass wall of managing editor Anne Gordon’s office waving a small piece of paper. Long did not look well.
Gordon, who carries herself with an air of relentless purposefulness, was in the midst of explaining why the impending loss of 15 percent of the Inquirer’s editorial staff was not nearly so dire a situation as most everyone else in her beleaguered newsroom believed. “Putting out a great newspaper has nothing to do with numbers,” she was saying. “This is an idea game now.” Just then Long poked her head in the door. Above her hung a sign that read, “Fight the Good Fight.”
“There is,” she said, “an emergency.” Her voice possessed the gravity of someone bringing word of a loved one’s death.
Gordon excused herself and followed Long out into the vast and airy newsroom, where people were still caught between putting out the next day’s newspaper and deciding whether the time had come to apply for a buyout and leave.
Gordon returned a few minutes later and said, without obvious concern or alarm, that the largest holder of stock in the Inquirer’s corporate parent, Knight Ridder, was demanding that the company be sold in order to boost the stock’s sagging value. With that, she rose and strode back through the newsroom and into the page-one meeting to decide what the Inquirer’s 357,000 subscribers would read the following morning: an update on the stalled talks in the city’s day-old transit strike; analyses of a possible Jon Corzine administration in Trenton and a Samuel Alito term on the Supreme Court; and, tucked back on the business pages, the Inquirer’s story about the perilous turn in its own already unsettled fortunes set in motion by a little-known man from Naples, Florida, named Bruce S. Sherman.
By this time the story told and retold in journalistic circles about The Philadelphia Inquirer had assumed a familiarity that bordered on the monotonous: a once dreadful and then brilliant newspaper — seventeen Pulitzers in eighteen years! — that might have been great still had it not been for the endless meddling, cutting, and demands for ever greater profits from its corporate masters. The Inquirer, it was said in a tone used to describe a handsome friend who has not aged well, was not what it was. Where once it was sparky and filled with surprises — to say nothing of those great, Pulitzer-destined heaves — its pages were now too often filled with dutiful pieces relaying word of further steps in bureaucratic processes. Dispatches from overseas and from across the nation that once carried Inquirer bylines now came via the wires. No one was suggesting that the Inquirer had become a bad newspaper, far from it. But it had become duller — yet another newspaper whose occasional highs seemed to come at ever longer intervals. That judgment was rendered both from afar and from within the paper’s white tower of a home on North Broad Street.
The Inquirer had gone through three editors in the last six years, had by last summer seen its newsroom staff already reduced since 1999 from 600 to 500, and perhaps saddest of all, had gone from being perhaps the most alluring and electric place in the business to work to yet another newsroom where some young reporters wondered whether they would have been wiser to have gone to law school.
And the Inquirer was an economic disappointment to Knight Ridder. The paper was still profitable, and still posted margins in the low teens, and together with its sister paper, the tabloid Philadelphia Daily News, generated more revenue — $500 million, with about $50 million in profits — than any other papers in the chain. But that revenue was declining, and given a continuing drop in circulation and advertising, the Inquirer, the largest of Knight Ridder’s thirty-two daily papers, had become another drag on the company’s stock, whose value had fallen by 20 percent in the last year and a half.
So it was that weeks before almost anyone at the Inquirer heard the name Bruce Sherman, the paper’s editor, Amanda Bennett, had emerged from a meeting with her publisher, Joe Natoli, ridden the elevator down from the twelfth floor, and walked into a room where her senior editors had gathered to discuss, once again, how best to adjust to yet another round of cost-saving buyouts. Bennett looked ashen. The paper, she announced, would need to eliminate not twenty-five more positions, as had been expected, nor fifty, as had been feared. Seventy-five people — that 15 percent — would have to go, which, in all likelihood, meant not only buyouts but, for the first time, layoffs. The room fell silent.
And soon Bennett would do a curious thing. A few weeks later, on the day in September that she and Natoli gathered the entire staff to inform them of the cuts, she told NPR that the magnitude of that loss represented, of all things, “a gift for us.” Smaller cuts, she explained, could have been managed by stretching what resources remained. But not so in losing seventy-five people. “We’re going,” she said, “to have to reinvent ourselves.”
With that she established several committees charged with assessing where the paper stood, and where it might be taken. The Inquirer, she made clear, could no longer go on as it was. What it might become, however, was far from clear.
Reinvention was not a novel idea at the Inquirer. The paper had been reinvented time and again throughout its long history. This attempt, however, would be carried out in an altogether more difficult time for the American newspaper. It was as if a dark cloud had descended over the news business, a mood exacerbated by the journalistic inclination to see the worst in things. On the same day in September that the Inquirer announced its cuts, The New York Times Company said it was reducing its newsroom staff by forty-five and that of The Boston Globe by thirty-five. Though newspapers remained profitable, and great sources of cash, the coming of the Internet (and with it, free news and classified advertising), the declining readership among the young, and the feared migration of advertisers away from print, had left reporters and editors wondering whether they might be the ones left to turn out the lights.
The Inquirer could no longer afford all the many things it had once offered its readers — a meaty Sunday magazine, series and stories from abroad that no one else had, a seemingly inexhaustible stream of investigations. Fewer people felt compelled to subscribe, and those advertisers who still saw value in the Inquirer knew it. As more of its readers departed the city for the suburbs, the Inquirer could not seem to settle on a way to lure them away from suburban papers that offer all the local news any reader could want. Nothing seemed to stop the stock price from slipping and the profits from dropping and the mood in the embattled newsroom from darkening.
So the fall brought competing imperatives to the Inquirer. The staff — and that of the Daily News, which was losing twenty-five positions — had until November 4 to apply for a buyout, and those who applied had until the following week to change their minds. The last day of work for those who chose to leave would be November 18 and, with the gallows humor that invariably accompanies dark moments in the news business, the editors on the committee overseeing the transition joked about the prospect of preparing seventy-five farewell mock front pages. In the meantime, Carl Lavin, the deputy managing editor for news, and Nancy Cooney, the metropolitan editor, were dispatched to the newsroom and to the paper’s suburban bureaus to spread the word that good and important work could still be done at a stripped-down Inquirer. The paper, they were quick to point out, had weeks earlier seized upon and run with a grand jury report identifying predatory priests, devoting pages and many reporters as the story churned and grew — the way the Inquirer had done things in the good days. Still, people were anxious, Lavin later said, “about everything. About the paper — what am I going to do? About whether this is the kind of paper they want to work at.” He and Cooney did their best to be reassuring. Cooney felt that people wanted to believe them.
Meanwhile, the Sunday editor, Tom McNamara, conducted the grim head count, an assignment that he had actually begun in June when Bennett asked him to put together a report on possible staff reductions. McNamara, who also oversaw features, had come to the paper from USA Today five years earlier and brought with him ideas about story length, graphics, and content that at times stood in direct refutation to the ethos that had once made the Inquirer soar. His view of that ethos, which he believed existed in “a time warp,” did not make him especially popular — “I was sort of the devil,” he joked. But now, some people confessed to him that after years of late nights they wanted to be home in time to have dinner with their children, and that perhaps a buyout might bring the chance to start at something new. Others wondered whether all the cutting was a harbinger of ever-gloomier times for newspapers. As he walked along the long rows of desks that stretched almost a city block, he would find himself thinking: “he’s gone; she’s gone.” He did not believe that the cutting was at an end. He would pass people in the stairwell, say hello, only to be greeted with silence.
By the afternoon of November 1, McNamara was calculating that perhaps forty to forty-five people would apply for the buyout. If he was right, the Inquirer would have no choice but to fire thirty people. His section alone stood to lose an art critic, as well as his pop music, movie, and theater writers. Like every other editor at the Inquirer, he could try to find replacements from those who were staying, or simply let the jobs vanish.
McNamara’s calculations, however, proved well off the mark. By the end of the week ninety-four people would apply for the buyout. But then that was after the newsroom learned that Sherman, ceo of Private Capital Management LLC, was after Knight Ridder to sell. By the end of the week the chain’s second and third largest shareholders had joined him in demanding a sale; on the day Sherman’s letter was released Knight Ridder’s stock rose by $4.62 to $58 a share.
2. Blue Skies
Amanda Bennett had been editor of the Inquirer for almost three years and had yet to truly make the paper her own. She had come to Philadelphia from the Lexington Herald-Leader, where she had been a well-regarded editor. She had run investigative projects — and helped win a Pulitzer — as a managing editor at The Oregonian, and before that had spent more than twenty years as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where she had also been part of a Pulitzer-winning team. She had written five books. Bennett was fifty-one then and projected a buoyant eagerness. The staff of the Inquirer had greeted her appointment with great delight, having grown ever more disenchanted during the seventeen-month tenure of Walker Lundy, whose legacy included sitting in his office on the night of a primary watching not the news but Judging Amy. Lundy had left the Inquirer with the vague explanation that his financial planner had told him he was in a position to retire comfortably. Bennett was welcomed as a journalist of accomplishment and vision who might even lead the paper back to what it had been when Richard Ben Cramer’s return from the Middle East and his Pulitzer were celebrated by bringing a camel into the newsroom.
But that transformation had not yet happened. And though no one could reasonably blame Bennett alone for the malaise that afflicted her newsroom — her arrival was preceded by buyouts in 2000 and 2001 — the excitement that had attended her appointment had largely disappeared. Bennett remained an enigma to the staff. Though people did not question her journalistic skills, they nonetheless whispered to anyone who asked about her carelessness with her words, a tendency she was quick to acknowledge. (She had felt compelled, for instance, to explain to the staff that she had not intended to criticize the paper when, in a presentation to Knight Ridder executives, she used a series of cartoons, one of which showed a homeless man sleeping on a bench with a newspaper over his head; this was meant to show the executives what they thought of the Inquirer.) She was often absent, closeted in meetings with the business side, trying to manage the newsroom’s ever more difficult finances. The staff wanted more from her. By her own admission, she had not yetbeen able to give enough.
Yet now, at the darkest moment in memory, Bennett had emerged and declared that the time had come to be bold. She established nine committees in the hope that those reporters and editors who had chosen to stay might help devise a new path for the Inquirer. One committee explored the possibilities of the Web, and another considered the unpleasant task of stretching resources — deciding whether, say, the cuts in copy editors necessitated creating a universal copy desk, or whether it would still be feasible to send both a reporter and photographer to cover so many high school football games.
The most intriguing work, however, was being done by the committee mandated to envision the Inquirer of the future. The committee was chaired by Chris Satullo, the editorial-page editor. Satullo was fifty-two, bright, serious, and respected in the newsroom. Bennett and Anne Gordon had turned to Satullo after the staff cuts were announced in September, and asked him to preside over a retreat the following week at which newsroom managers could begin making sense of what was about to happen to the paper.
He was a logical choice; Satullo had been an advocate of civic journalism and, in addition to opening his page to debate among ever more “community voices,” he had presided over public debates on such issues as the future of school design. The weekend after the cuts were announced, Satullo devised a broad agenda for the retreat: What, he would ask his colleagues, should the Inquirer be in 2015?
The editors gathered on September 26. Bagels and coffee were served and Satullo, who had been nervous the night before, knowing how the mood would be, explained how the day would work. He understood that while it was important for people to air frustrations, extended venting would do little good. And so, he asked them to think about the future. He divided the forty assembled editors into small groups and charged them with two tasks: imagining a happy and successful Inquirer, and creating a narrative that told how this transformation took place. Most important, the groups would be asked to explain what values animated the newsroom of this new Inquirer. He asked that they be optimistic, not cynical.
Still, he could well understand the impulse toward the latter. As it happened, Satullo himself was not necessarily sure he wanted to stay, though he had a daughter who was thinking seriously of a career in journalism, which made him wonder what she might think if he walked away. He had arrived at the paper in 1989, and his tenure had coincided with the paper’s decline in circulation, as well as in reputation. This had not surprised him. “I’d been here six months,” he later said, “and I had this nagging feeling that this paper is not nearly as good as the people who work here think it is.”
The 1990s had been a period of dramatically fewer prizes as well as seemingly interminable discussions about how best to serve the core of the paper’s readers, who now lived in the suburbs. The Inquirer’s circulation map was an editor’s nightmare: one big city and two states — Pennsylvania and New Jersey — that included scores of municipalities and more than 200 school districts. Where once the paper had seen itself as a legitimate competitor to The New York Times and The Washington Post, it now struggled to do battle with some twenty suburban dailies, some of which were quite strong. At turns since the 1980s the paper had offered its suburban readers special weekly and then biweekly inserts, then four zoned editions, then five with eight on Sundays, before cutting back to three on weekdays. The staff felt ever more as though they were riding a pendulum, swinging back and forth between trying to offer the most localized coverage before reversing course and instead running broad pieces that attempted to capture the zeitgeist of the region.
Through it all, circulation kept dropping and the advertising dollars did not flow in sufficient numbers from all the many shopping malls that dotted that maddening circulation map. Although the population of Philadelphia’s Center City was growing, the future was not in the city but, as it was for big-city papers across the country, in the towns and villages that surrounded it. Two-thirds of the Inquirer’s readers now lived in those suburbs, which also generated two-thirds of its ads.
Forty percent of the newsroom budget was spent covering the suburbs — twice as much as was spent covering the city and far more than the 5 percent that went to the national, Washington, and foreign reports. The pressure to offer its many scattered readers local news was not a decision made exclusively at the Inquirer. Knight Ridder was a great believer in local news, so much so that when Maxwell King, the paper’s editor from 1990 to 1998, visited corporate headquarters he would be subjected to a review of his paper by Knight Ridder executives who wanted to know why he wasn’t running more local stories on the Inquirer’s front page. The executives explained that the readers the chain interviewed in its many focus groups said it was local news that they wanted.
This was true, but only up to a point. The Inquirer itself did a good deal of market research and what people who sat in on those meetings learned was that readers wanted not just local news; they wanted sports, fashion, dining guides, TV listings, and even news from faraway places. They wanted everything. Yet the mantra from Knight Ridder, heard by editors across the chain, was that if local was paramount it therefore stood to reason that other things were less important and certainly not worthy of the front page. The either/or framing sprang from an unintentionally patronizing view of suburban life. This view held that those who once lived in the city abandoned what interest they had in things that did not bear directly on their lives the moment they relocated to a split-level home with a two-car garage. It therefore stood to reason not only that foreign, national, and Washington stories were of lesser value, but that if the Inquirer was to have a local zoned edition in, say, Montgomery County, it was going to carry a Montgomery County story on the front page, no matter how mundane. It was the dateline that mattered because that’s what readers said they wanted, or at least what those doing the asking wanted to believe they had heard.
Covering Montgomery County in a way that might generate all that local news meant boots on the ground — reporters who knew the area. This highlighted a conflict: Knight Ridder was determined to keep profit margins above the industry average. But the chain did not present editors like Max King with long-range plans on how to achieve and sustain those lofty margins, other than vague talk about community service and quality journalism. There was nothing concrete — King uses the word “robust” — that would facilitate the budgeting and planning to develop and keep in place a suburban strategy. Years later, Max King would recall his tenure and his trips to headquarters, which were then in Miami. “It felt to me like a ceaseless pressure to help diminish costs and raise the profit margins,” he said. He was told that this had to be done “to satisfy the needs of the shareholders.” This assumed that the shareholders could, at some point, be satisfied. Knight Ridder looked at the numbers every month. And if the numbers fell short, Knight Ridder had one solution: cut. But that presented a problem: from a revenue-savings perspective, eliminating a foreign or national bureau was inconsequential. There was one place to cut where serious money could be saved and that was the suburbs. But the suburbs were the greatest potential source of revenue.
In 1999, the paper launched what at the time seemed a bold approach, worthy of the Inquirer: “the paper within a paper” — a daily section aimed exclusively at readers in Chester County. Eighteen reporters were assigned to the Chester County edition, and such was the excitement about the new approach that seasoned people asked to be part of the experiment. If the Chester County edition could succeed, the thinking went, the same approach could be applied elsewhere and the Inquirer could emerge as the definitive voice of the region. The “paper within a paper,” however, lasted only until 2001; it was dropped after the expected ad revenue did not materialize. In the view of the editors who worked on it, the business side gave up on the experiment far too quickly. Robert Rosenthal, who was by then the editor — and who tended to embrace story ideas with an infectious passion — wrote a memo announcing the section’s demise but assuring the newsroom that the decision would not erode the paper. With that he launched yet another reinvention, a review of all the paper’s many beats — his task force would eventually come up with 208 — so that a leaner Inquirer could begin producing stories “that transcend geography.” Rosenthal still believed the Inquirer could do big and important journalism, in the suburbs and elsewhere. Knight Ridder, however, made it clear to him that his ambitions for the paper were perhaps overdrawn.
“Well, you know, you created a Cadillac,” one corporate executive told him. “And we wanted a Chevy.” Rosenthal was fired nine months later.
The paper then embarked on yet another iteration of the suburban coverage, under Rosenthal’s successor, Walker Lundy. Lundy, who came from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Knight Ridder paper in the Twin Cities, was granted approval to hire more than forty reporters, whom he dispatched to the suburbs along with twenty-three city-side reporters. He added two new zones to the existing three, and even people who had worked on devising the defunct Chester County edition allowed themselves to believe that, at long last, the Inquirer had a plan for the suburbs. That was in 2002. Lundy quit a year later. Amanda Bennett inherited his plan, but no assurance that she would be able to keep all those people he had hired. For their part, the reporters in those suburban bureaus were not at all sure what their editors wanted them to be doing.
By the end of Satullo’s September retreat, people were offering practical suggestions such as how to better incorporate the paper’s Web site with its print edition, as well as recommendations that decision-making be less hierarchical. More important, the group was able to agree on what this new Inquirer would have to be. The paper would have to accept that there were things it could no longer afford to do. Yet for the Inquirer to remain the Inquirer, it would have to retain what Satullo called the paper’s “core values”: that it did investigations, served as watchdog, set the region’s agenda — all the while maintaining its commitment to accuracy, ethics, and fairness.
All of this sounded good, in the way that mission statements at the end of such gatherings often do. But there was one other point that the editors believed essential: that the paper have “a voice.” Not that the paper spoke in its news columns as one, but rather that it told stories in a way that compelled its readers to read on. Voice, of course, is a wonderful quality to possess but difficult to achieve in that it cannot be acquired by asking people what they want to read. Every editor in that room that day understood what it meant to have a voice, and understood that voice gives a newspaper the personality with which it can maintain a relationship with its readers.
Chris Satullo drove home that night feeling far better about the future of his newspaper than he had in days. “The people in that room were all pretty much committed to staying,” he said. “I feel as if I’m not a fool to stay. There’s no way what we’re going through is good or pleasant or intrinsically good for a newspaper. But there’s a chance if we can retain the spirit of that meeting we can redeem this moment.”
With that he set about conducting similar meetings throughout the newsroom. But when only five people came to the first meeting, he understood “that the staff is still in purgatory.”
3. Curse of the Golden Age
The Inquirer’s two-story newsroom is so long and its ceilings so high that conversation feels muted and restrained. The current carpeted newsroom had in 1997 replaced the old and storied newsroom where mice ran free and where the office intrigue unfolded in many corners and nooks. The floor was then linoleum, by decree; James Naughton, executive editor in those days, had banned carpeting in the belief that it would deaden the noise and with it the creative spirit of the place.
Such was life at the Inquirer at a time known in the newsroom as “The Golden Age.” The Golden Age began some time after 1972, when Gene Roberts was appointed editor, and is generally considered to have ended after 1990, when he retired. That occasion was marked by a very long and expensive party in a downtown hotel at which it was almost possible to forget that although Roberts was only fifty-eight years old he was carrying himself with the weary bearing of an older man.
Roberts had come to the Inquirer from The New York Times, where he’d been national editor. On his first day of work he entered the Inquirer building through a revolving door, only to pass an editor on his way out. The man paused only long enough to tell Roberts, “You’re making the dumbest mistake of your life.”
The Inquirer was, mercifully, no longer owned by Walter Annenberg, who had sold it to John S. Knight three years earlier. Knight had acquired a newspaper famous for very little other than the relentless way it covered the police blotter — a reporter in every precinct house — and the rare distinction of seeing its best-known reporter, Harry Karafin, sent to prison for extorting thousands of dollars from the subjects of his investigations in return for not writing about them.
Knight had spent a lot of money transforming newspapers in Akron, Miami, Chicago, and Detroit and was now prepared to do the same in Philadelphia. Before Roberts, he dispatched John McMullan, who had been executive editor of The Miami Herald, to edit the paper, and it was generally understood by the new reporters he hired that McMullan’s role was to rid the Inquirer of its worst offenders and offenses. He stayed for two years, all the while preparing the newspaper for his successor.
Gene Roberts might well have stayed at the Times had Knight not dangled before him a paper so sorely in need of an overhaul. “I thought it would be an interesting thing to do with your life,” he said, “to see if you could build a good newspaper.”
The Inquirer was then running a distant second in circulation and reputation to the The Philadelphia Bulletin, the dominant afternoon paper whose slogan — “In Philadelphia, nearly everybody reads the Bulletin” — was the theme of a series of cartoon ads in The New Yorker. Roberts understood that he was in no position to challenge the Bulletin as Philadelphia’s paper of record. But he could wage an altogether different sort of newspaper war, transforming his paper into the puckish upstart that, free from the constraints of having to cover everything, could pick its spots. Roberts had freedom, money, and time — he believed it would take years to reinvent the Inquirer.
He began to hire and, having briefly flirted with taking a desk in the middle of the newsroom — the better to get a feel of the place — also began looking for the paper’s untapped talent. Roberts understood that it was all well and good to talk about changing the culture of the newsroom — “you had to prove that excellence was possible on the paper,” he said — but quite another to impose those changes on people who had grown accustomed to the unfortunate ways of the past. The copy desk was a case in point: Roberts reasoned that adding a new editor or two would be counterproductive in that, human nature being what it is, those new editors would adapt to the desk’s existing culture. So he broke the desk apart, forming two smaller copy desks and on them installing his new people. They, in turn, were given the better stories to edit — the breaking stories and the trend pieces he wanted to see in the paper. As more editors came to the paper, they were assigned to the newly configured copy desks, where they were imbued with the culture of his Inquirer. “We developed a philosophy,” Roberts said, “that we’d zig when the others zagged.”
That is a refrain heard so often from veterans of the Golden Age that it has become a newsroom cliché — a pity, because the words once carried great power and meaning. The men and women who worked for Roberts talk, wistfully, of the possibilities that awaited them each day when they came to work. They were not guided, they say, by a journalistic sense of “should.” Their responsibility was not to be comprehensive but to be different, to be bold and, they admit without hesitation, to please the boss.
That did not happen easily. Roberts was both demanding and inscrutable. He said little — and at times, such as during job interviews, nothing at all. Still, he was very much the editor whom reporters wanted to please — “mostly we decided he was smarter than the rest of us,” said Steve Seplow, who came to the paper shortly after Knight bought it. That, however, is only part of it. Roberts understood what reporters needed to make them happy. He recognized that their sometimes-maddening combination of arrogance and insecurity could be harnessed and channeled. He chose not to edit by intimidation — the staff appreciated his refusal to run the Inquirer by fear as his old boss, A.M. Rosenthal, ran the Times — but by manipulation. He would dispatch reporters to the suburbs, say, not by fiat but by convincing them that the future of American journalism was, in fact, in the suburbs and that that future was very much in their hands.
By the late 1970s, the Bulletin had become yet another in a dying breed of afternoon dailies. It was losing readers and money, just as the Inquirer was beginning to post annual profits of $10 million and seeing its circulation climb. Roberts saw in this an opportunity to transform his paper further still. The death of the Bulletin would rob Philadelphia of its authoritative voice. Roberts intended to fill the void. And so he created the “Alpha Plan.”
The Alpha Plan was a year in the making and displayed both Roberts’s vision and his savvy. The death of the Bulletin, he reasoned, offered his paper’s corporate owners their one chance to prove to Philadelphia that they were serious about producing a paper of the highest quality. The chain was then still run by the spiritual heirs of John Knight, who had retired in 1976. Still, Roberts took no chances. He insisted that the wording of the plan be filled with military jargon, the better to please Alvah Chapman, Knight Ridder’s chairman and a graduate of The Citadel. The Bulletin folded on January 29, 1982, and that day Roberts, who almost never held staff meetings, stood in the middle of the newsroom and announced that the Inquirer would immediately hire seventeen reporters from the Bulletin and would double its number of foreign and national bureaus. He did not stop there: in the months to come he hired eighty-five people and continued expanding the paper’s suburban coverage. By 1984, Time magazine selected the Inquirer as one of the nation’s top ten newspapers — and on some days, Time argued, the best.
By the mid-1980s, the Inquirer’s profits had soared to over $100 million a year. The paper had so much money and freedom in deciding how to spend it that when reporters took leaves others were hired to take their places. For years Roberts came back from Miami with whatever he wanted. But in 1986 that began to change with the appointment of Tony Ridder, who had been publisher of the San Jose Mercury News, as head of the chain’s newspaper division.
Since the 1974 merger of the Knight and Ridder chains, John Knight and his lieutenants had dominated the corporation. But Knight’s son and heir apparent had died in World War II and his grandson, John S. Knight III, an assistant to the managing editor of The Daily News, was stabbed to death in 1975. While Knight was a chain run by newspapermen with journalistic aspirations, the Ridders owned many smaller newspapers of marginal distinction. The Ridders were regarded as prudent, perhaps overly so. The family, for example, owned the Journal of Commerce, whose circulation at the end of World War II matched that of The Wall Street Journal. In 1951, however, the Ridders, looking to cut costs, decided to drop the Journal of Commerce’s stock listings and to focus the news columns on stories of narrow interest — a move so short-sighted that, years later, the New York Times’s Floyd Norris would include it in his list of the century’s dozen worst business decisions. Fifty years later, the Journal of Commerce’s circulation stood at 17,000 — as compared to the Journal’s 1.75 million.
By the mid-1980s, it was no secret that Roberts, a darling in John Knight’s chain, had fallen out of favor with those who now ran the chain. Though Tony Ridder never criticized Roberts publicly, the view from Miami was made clear, years later, by Knight Ridder’s vice president and corporate spokesman, Polk Laffoon IV. “Our definition of what is good journalism here has evolved from the time Gene Roberts was editing The Philadelphia Inquirer” in the 1970s and ’80s, he told Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post in 2001. “We put a lot of emphasis on local news and useful or service-oriented features and news that readers tell us over and over that they want . . . health and nutrition, personal finance, personal technology.”
That would suggest that Roberts was not interested in such matters; to the contrary — he was, for just one example, a stickler about television listings. Still, by 1990, the legacy of the Alpha Plan was crippling the paper in ways that could not have been envisioned in 1982. Producing a newspaper of record requires a commitment from those holding the purse strings to the quality of the content. To be perceived as trying to do it on the cheap, to second-guess the vision and the approach, risks jeopardizing the fragile nature of the enterprise.
By 1989, when Ridder became president of the chain, the staff had grown accustomed to seeing Roberts trudge into the newsroom after his monthly budget meetings in Miami. After one especially draining trip, an editor spotted Roberts and asked, “Who won, the Christians or the lions?”
“The Christians,” Roberts replied, in his low and languid drawl. “But the lions only have to win once.”
By 1990, he had had enough. “God knows I tried,” he now says. “But in the end I wasn’t going to change anything. And there were forces bigger than me that were propelling the company.”
On November 18 last year, the Inquirer was preparing to bid farewell to seventy-five people, fifty-five of whom were veterans of the Golden Age. Six had even worked for Walter Annenberg. They were people who had been young together, who, before spouses and children and the inevitable desire to make it home before bedtime, had played cards and gone drinking together and come to see themselves as part of something grand, though ever more distant. It was still possible to find pockets of the Golden Age at the Inquirer, such as the investigative team, which was housed in a room in the farthest reaches of the newsroom with a door that the staff could close to keep the darkening mood from seeping in.
It was getting close to 5 o’clock and Amanda Bennett was in her office, preparing to make a formal farewell. She seemed uneasy. She tucked herself in the corner of a long, blue couch and admitted that she had taken the job knowing that a day just like this one could come. “It would have been naïve of me to think it was impossible.”
But would the cutting stop?
“I hope so,” she said. “I don’t know.”
She excused herself, the better to prepare for the task to come. She emerged a few minutes later and made her way to the distant corner of the newsroom where the business staff had gathered to bid farewell to Patricia Horn, a reporter who was leaving after only seven years. Bennett approached the gathering but stopped before making her presence felt. She stepped away only to circle back, as if she was not sure where to stand.
Meanwhile, people began moving slowly to the front of the room, where tables were being set up for a buffet dinner. As they drew closer, they began whispering to one another: Gene Foreman is here. Foreman had been Roberts’s managing editor, and people crowded around him, shook his hand and hugged him.
Bennett stepped forward to speak. She held her arms across her chest. “This is such a sad day,” she said. She spoke of all the “great journalism from all of you who are leaving,” of all the extra phone calls and late nights. “We wish you joy and luck in your new lives.” Then she stepped aside to let the publisher, Joe Natoli, speak.
The staff did not blame Natoli for the buyouts. Many, in fact, spoke with admiration of the way he had come down to the newsroom after they were announced, stopping at people’s desks to chat and offer what answers and reassurances he could. He came quickly to the point. “I wanted to spend time talking about growth,” he said. “But events have overtaken us and we are where we are today.” The great room was quiet. “We’re in a time of uncertainty unlike any other than I have ever faced in my thirty years in the newspaper business.”
And then Natoli said what those who were staying later admitted they very much wanted to hear: “I’m convinced the world needs what we do.”
Now it was Bob Martin’s turn. He had been at the Inquirer for nineteen years and, it turned out, was something of an amateur songwriter. Martin opened a manila envelope and took out a thick sheaf of pages, enough for everyone. On it were the lyrics to a song in which Martin had managed to condense the history of the Inquirer. The name of the song, and the refrain the staff sang together, was “We Didn’t Miss the Deadline.”
Martin stepped to the microphone and turned on his boom box. People smiled at the words and everyone was singing.
4. The Lions’ Den
Knight Ridder’s executives had been scheduled to appear at the annual UBS Global Media Conference, but with the company in play the presentation was canceled. Still, the fate of the chain was very much on the minds of the analysts who gathered on the morning of December 7 in a ballroom at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in midtown Manhattan.
For thirty-three years the nation’s most important newspaper executives had come before the analysts, whose standing had grown dramatically since the days when John S. Knight could say with impunity that no one was going to tell him how to run his company. When he took his company public, however, Knight issued only a single class of stock, unlike the Sulzberger and Graham families who maintained for themselves a separate class of stock and with it voting power over their companies. Knight’s banker, Goldman Sachs, had recommended that a single class would be more attractive to investors.
From the often-limited perspective of journalists — who assumed that mere profitability would suffice — the relationship between the analysts and the media companies had become an unseemly one in that the power now resided with men and women who appeared not at all interested in the quality of the content but instead looked at the quarterly numbers as evidence of those companies’ worth. Every quarterly statement, in turn, was an occasion for a conference call between the heads of those companies and the analysts, who asked many questions about earnings, revenue streams, and cost-containment.
For instance, in the October conference call that took place a few weeks after the Inquirer announced its job cuts, Tony Ridder and his chief deputies made clear that they understood that while the chain’s small-market papers were showing strong growth in advertising revenue, Philadelphia, in particular, was a problem. Advertising was slipping for movies, airlines, and telecommunications. The fourth quarter did not look promising. Still, steps had been taken to boost ad revenue and to contain costs, especially in San Jose, where the Mercury News was losing fifty people, and in Philadelphia. This prompted Frederick Searby of JPMorgan to pose a more cosmic question:
“Do you think there’s a rethink in terms of the newspaper model that will continue and how much you really can support at this point from an editorial perspective?”
Tony Ridder offered a narrowly reasoned response. “Well, I think that after we have the staff reductions, I think we will still be generously staffed,” he said. “So I think we were overstaffed in those two places and I think this is just bringing them back into line.”
Until the afternoon of November 1, it was possible to stand in the newsroom of the Inquirer and believe that Tony Ridder was the worst person in the world — but then, that was before people heard of Bruce Sherman. Ridder, the refrain went, cared not a lick about the quality of the papers his chain published, and was so lacking in imagination and the capacity to look into the future that his one solution to all financial difficulties was to cut the payroll.
Ridder had gotten off to a bad start. In the spring of 1987, not long after he became head of Knight Ridder’s newspaper division, he came to visit the Inquirer. The paper had just won three Pulitzers. Ridder told the assembled editors and managers that while he wanted to congratulate them on the prizes, he wanted to speak with them about “something more important.” “Next year,” he said, “I would like you to win a Pulitzer for cost cutting.”
He had preached this ethic ever since, adhering to a business strategy that focused on the moment. He sold off such ventures as Knight Ridder Financial, which accounted for 20 percent of the chain’s revenue but only 5 percent of its profits, and the Information Design Laboratory, where the chain had conducted some of the earliest work on electronic publishing. He became known in his newsrooms as “Darth Ridder.” All the while he clung to his arguments that even though his newspapers were jettisoning reporters and editors, they were still staffed above the industry standard — one reporter for every thousand subscribers — and that his newsroom spending had, in fact, gone up. He was said to be deeply hurt when in 2001 his friend, Jay Harris, resigned as publisher in San Jose to protest the cuts Ridder was demanding — just as Harris’s counterpart at The Miami Herald, David Lawrence, had done three years earlier.
Tony Ridder was now sixty-five years old and enjoyed sailing, outback skiing, and driving expensive sports cars. He also possessed a knack for the leaden touch with the public gesture: at the end of 2005, for instance, his company’s compensation board voted to increase his annual bonus from 85 percent to 95 percent of salary. Still, it was hard not to feel a bit sorry for Ridder, who, like so many newspaper executives, was caught in a quandary that was not, strictly speaking, of his own making. Whatever desires and hopes he had for maintaining the high standards of his newspapers were eclipsed by powers greater than his own: the analysts, the shareholders, the money managers like Bruce Sherman. Jack Knight had taken his company public because he wanted the shareholders to invest in his newspapers. Those investors, in turn, were now like those on the staff of the Inquirer still pining for the Golden Age — longing for the days when profit margins exceeded 20 percent, and the foresight they had displayed in identifying newspapers as undervalued stocks had proven correct. And like the journalistic veterans of the Golden Age, the shareholders were disappointed with the man they now held responsible for their diminished fortunes.
But where Ridder’s fall assumed a tragic quality was, ironically, in his expressed desire to produce newspapers of quality. Granted, papers like the Inquirer were not what they once were. Yet even among the increasingly embittered staff of the Inquirer, there was the understanding that good work could still be done. Now, with the company up for sale, people spoke of the possibility of things getting worse, which for many meant Gannett. In journalistic circles Gannett represented a newspaper world of vastly diminished ambitions, of short, shallow stories and the overuse of the word “us.”
As more and more names of potential bidders emerged, people at the Inquirer began talking, almost prayerfully, of the paper’s being rescued by private investors, wealthy enough — the Newhouses, say — to not be Wall Street’s slave. It was easy to forget that Walter Annenberg had been just such an owner and had driven the paper well past the point of ridicule.
Bruce Sherman had gone to San Jose last July, at Knight Ridder’s invitation. Sherman, as it happened, liked to visit the headquarters of the companies in which he had invested. He believed it important to get a feel for the men and women who ran the companies, to broaden the knowledge he systematically acquired in his exhaustive review of the numbers. Sherman was fifty-seven and was one of the nation’s most successful money managers. In the story of Knight Ridder’s fall, he emerged as a marvelous counterpart to the patrician Ridder: the accountant from Queens — the “streets” of Queens — who had displayed an early gift at assessing stocks. He told the story of how, after reading the annual report, he calculated that the time was right to sell the ten shares of Polaroid stock that his engineer father had bought at $20 a share for his Bar Mitzvah; Sherman sold at $180. Sherman’s firm, PCM, now had $4.3 billion of the $30 billion it managed in newspaper stocks and had strong positions in, among others, Gannett, Media General, McClatchy, Journal Register, and the New York Times Company.
Whatever questions Sherman put to Ridder, the answers did not please him. He made his disappointment clear in the November letter demanding the sale. Granted, he wrote, the board had taken steps to boost the stock’s value — “so far as they went.” But Knight Ridder was still burdened by the loss of advertising, and “unexceptional operating margins.” The company’s “break-up value,” he concluded, is “substantially in excess of the current share price.”
Sherman was doing what he was paid to do, which was to make sure the companies in which he had placed his clients’ money performed. It was not his brief to ensure that Knight Ridder’s newspapers were places of great journalistic accomplishment. By taking Bruce Sherman’s money, Tony Ridder — and every other media company in which Sherman held stock — had assumed a subservient role in a culture whose values they did not necessarily share.
Tony Ridder had become a metaphor for American newspapers — the man who in trying to please everyone, pleased no one. And for his all trouble he now stood very close to losing his company.
Knight Ridder had set a December 9 deadline for the first round of bids for the company. In the days after Sherman’s announcement, analysts were setting the odds at no better than fifty-fifty that someone would want to buy Knight Ridder — given the problems that had led to shareholder revolt. Yet a month later, by the morning of the UBS conference, the names of several prospective suitors had begun to surface, among them two private equity firms, the Blackstone Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. Among the analysts at the conference was Eugene H. Gardner Jr. who lived and worked in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a town on the very edge of the Inquirer’s circulation map. He was not a subscriber. He read The Wall Street Journal as well as The New York Times online. He also subscribed to the two Lancaster dailies. He saw no need to add a “regional” paper to the mix. He lived too far from Philadelphia to be interested in, say, the listings and restaurant reviews the Inquirer carried. There was very little that the Inquirer, as it had been conceived in its series of reinventions, could offer him.
Gardner had sympathy for Joe Natoli and Amanda Bennett, and he also had sympathy for Tony Ridder. He was careful to avoid criticizing him, even though he believed that “you cannot cut and cut your way to quality.”
As he spoke, Gardner sounded more and more like a man politely declining a dinner invitation. “I can’t name a single Inquirer journalist for you right now,” he said. “That’s too bad.”
But could the Inquirer do anything to make itself appealing to him?
“I want a regional newspaper to appear on my doorstep . . .” he began, thinking out loud. “What would it contain?”
He paused. He took a minute before replying.
“Opinions,” he said at last. “And not just regarding what’s happening in the city.” He wanted writers who compelled him to read. If the Inquirer was going to lure him, Gardner went on to explain, it would have to acquire what it now lacked: a voice.
The UBS conference offered a snapshot, of sorts, of the state of the industry. Dennis FitzSimons, the embattled chairman of Tribune Company, assured the analysts that the company was cutting to keep expenses flat: nine hundred jobs had been eliminated in the past year, mostly on the publishing side. Dow Jones followed, but with its profit margins having slipped into the single digits, many of the analysts left the room. Then came Gannett. The analysts flooded back in, as if the exotic dancer had just arrived at a bachelor party. One of them, fairly bursting, asked Craig Dubow, the company’s chairman, whether it might be possible for Gannett to boost its margin from its stellar 25 percent to a stratospheric 30 percent. Dubow made no commitments.
With that another analyst asked whether Gannett might make a bid for Knight Ridder. Dubow replied that Gannett would, as always, take a “hard look” at all potential acquisitions.
5. Indian Summer
After years of 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, and lunchtime budget meetings, after months of planning the reorganization of a staff with seventy-five fewer people, after a fall of endless speculation and dispatches on the latest turns in the Knight Ridder sale, Amanda Bennett was ready, as she put it, to “do journalism.” She could barely contain her excitement.
In December the various committees had submitted their reports on the Inquirer’s reinvention, and Bennett had celebrated their work with a champagne toast. Changes began almost immediately. Editors were reassigned. The investigative staff moved from the seclusion of its corner office to a cluster in the middle of the newsroom. And now, in mid-January, Bennett was bringing the newsroom, desk by desk, into the page-one meeting room to hear the long and detailed PowerPoint presentation that Anne Gordon, the managing editor, had prepared on the future of the paper.
It was a moment unlike any other at the Inquirer. The potential sale of the chain had, at once, left the newsroom in limbo and effectively removed Knight Ridder from the everyday business of the paper. Bennett had been freed to proceed without corporate interference. She had solicited the collective wisdom and the sensibility of her staff and had discovered, much to her delight, a view of the Inquirer’s future remarkably similar to her own. It was, in fact, a vision that she had brought with her from Lexington to Philadelphia three years earlier and that now, arguably in the darkest and most unsettled time that anyone could recall, she at last had her chance to try to make happen.
The business desk’s turn came in the second week of presentations. The staff arranged themselves around the long conference table and, when that filled up, the chairs around the edge of the room. The lights went dim and on the screen appeared a headline “Newsroom 2006.”
For the next forty-five minutes, Bennett and Gordon outlined a plan that called for, among other changes, cutting the number of zones from five to three, and placing an ever-greater emphasis on disseminating the news online. Those and many smaller changes they detailed were in service of a larger goal: the Inquirer could not and would not continue trying to be Philadelphia’s paper of record. That, in turn, meant that the shrunken staff was now free from the burden of covering everything, and given that freedom, the paper would begin to be filled with the boldly conceived and written pieces that had once been its hallmark. The readers, too, had spoken. The Inquirer had conducted yet another round of focus groups in the fall, and the report back confirmed what people had been hearing for as long as they’d been asking: readers turned to the Inquirer to read national and foreign stories almost as much as they wanted local news.
The new Inquirer, Bennett and Gordon explained, would work to satisfy those readers, though it could not do so in the ways of the past. For one thing, 750,000 people now read the Inquirer either in print or online. There was little crossover between the two markets, which meant that it was necessary to satisfy both. The paper itself would no longer be merely reactive to events, filled with news that was, for practical purposes, stale by the time it appeared in the Inquirer. Bennett and Gordon wanted the paper to break news — in print and online. The Inquirer’s Web site, Philly.com, would become the destination for news breaking throughout the day. The site, which as Gordon put it was now filled with “cul-de-sacs,” was being redesigned. Each desk would be given control of its own online content.
As for the newspaper, Bennett and Gordon wanted stories that anticipated events, pieces ready to run when things broke. They wanted intelligently imagined angles. The day’s front page offered a case in point: rather than cover the president’s speech defending his administration’s secret domestic spying, the Inquirer instead fronted a story about the competing uses of the Fourth Amendment by the program’s supporters and critics.
“We want you to select for ambition,” Bennett said. “We want you to select for quality.”
The operative verb, of course, was “select.” The implication was that, in the absence of being aggressively selective, it was easy to slip into making the default choice of reporting what, in Bennett’s view, everyone already knew. In fact, she had felt this way about the paper even before she arrived. “I found the paper very dull,” she said. “We were still doing a lot of institutional coverage. We were still clinging to the newspaper of record, and the newspaper of record thing was a noose.” There was, she went on, “a lower-than-I-would-have-liked level of storytelling.”
She believed that the Inquirer was “not tremendously engaged” in the region; it was missing too many stories it should have seized upon, such as strong coverage of the area’s extensive medical and pharmaceutical industries. The Inquirer, she explained, “was still a very good paper,” but one that went about its work guided by “deep and profound habits. We run ourselves ragged to cover everything.”
But all this raised the question of what she no longer wanted her paper to cover. It was a question very much on the minds of her staff, as had become clear when Bennett and Gordon made their presentation to the metro desk. Tom Ferrick, a columnist who had been at the paper for thirty years — and who largely agreed with their vision — asked if Bennett and Gordon weren’t, in fact, outlining a plan that would mean more work for fewer people.
What precisely, he asked, would the staff no longer cover? Was it to be the case that the young city hall reporter sitting next to him would be expected to file repeatedly to Philly.com several times a day, all the while leaving him ever less time to report and write the more ambitious pieces that the new Inquirer was to carry?
Gordon replied that “tough choices” would have to be made. Ferrick was not satisfied. He and Gordon soon ended up in a heated exchange. Ferrick returned to his desk and wrote a memo to Bennett and Gordon, apologizing for his outburst but then pressing for the explanation he was not alone in wanting. “If we try to do everything, we won’t do anything particularly well,” he wrote. “The message I got was: we are going to do it all. In fact, we are going to expand into online in a major way. The problem with this is that this doesn’t give the necessary guidance to reporters. By telling them to do it all, you cede the decision on triage to the people in the field. (If the generals won’t make the decision, the corporals will.)”
Which, ironically, is precisely what Bennett wanted. She wanted to believe that as she articulated a vision her staff would understand what she wanted and would, in turn, themselves make the very decisions that Ferrick was demanding of her.
She could, if she chose, edit by command. “If I say, ‘run over there’ they’ll run,” she said. “But you’re not going to get what you want. I could make a Delphic pronouncement and see it happen and not want it to happen. When you’re trying to make a really fundamental change you’ve got to make sure that people understand what that change is. That people have the tools and have the support of their colleagues. And that they want to make that change.” She began sending Friday memos to the staff on what had worked that week, and, without saying it in so many words, what had pleased her.
She could already see the change coming, in spots. She had been happy, for example, to read an e-mail exchange in which a reporter challenged a metro editor who was asking for a crime story. The reporter argued that that was precisely the kind of story the paper was not going to cover anymore. Some editors, Bennett said, had grasped the concept more quickly than others. Among them was Bob Rose, the business editor.
She had hired Rose from her old paper, The Wall Street Journal, whose culture was very much one of leaving some stories untold — or briefed — in return for pursuing the larger piece that others had not even thought of. As it happened, that morning, Rose was presented with a story that necessitated his choosing between the paper’s traditional ways and Bennett’s vision of the future. Ford had announced that it was shutting fourteen plants and laying off 30,000 people, a big story. Tradition would have called for pulling a reporter off one piece — perhaps a time-consuming enterprise piece — and, in the absence of an auto writer on the staff, asking him to cobble together something for the next day’s paper. Rose considered doing just that, and then changed his mind. Without a large piece already conceived and reported about, say, the decline of the American auto industry, without a writer in Detroit or someone in-house with real knowledge of the industry, and without any Ford plants in the area, he decided to leave it to the wires. Instead, he concentrated on two local stories — a scoop on Donald Trump’s plan to build a forty-five-story luxury condominium on the Delaware waterfront, and the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to allow the sale of prescription diet pills over the counter, one of which was manufactured in Philadelphia. Both stories ran on page one.
Still, it had been one thing for Gene Roberts to edit in his often-inscrutable way, leaving his subordinates to decipher his meaning. Roberts had hired 400 people who had come to his Inquirer because he had detected in them an understanding of what he wanted. Bennett had inherited a staff hired by Roberts and his successors. Roberts himself had some sympathy for her predicament. “Say you come up with a plan,” he said. “My experience is that it’s going to take you five years to implement it. You can’t implement it without hiring flexibility. After all, your staff has given you your existing newspaper.”
Bennett could not hire, and she had set in motion a process that could only be achieved with time. Time, however, given Knight Ridder’s imminent sale, was an unknown quantity.
It was not the Golden Age that Amanda Bennett wanted to reclaim — she had neither the money, the large staff, nor, it was now clear, the inclination. But the plan she had envisioned, which even her critics in the newsroom thought a good one, could bring to the Inquirer not another reinvention but something far more satisfying: a restoration.
Bennett’s Inquirer soon displayed a willingness to, as it were, zig when others zagged, when in February it published the cartoons from a Danish newspaper that had so inflamed the Muslim world, and which so many of the big papers chose not to print. The newspaper that Bennett had in mind had existed once before: it was the Inquirer before the Alpha Plan, before the death of the Bulletin, before the days when it could reasonably challenge the Times and Post. The Inquirer of the mid-1970s was a renegade. It ignored things. Its stories ran long. It indulged its reporters; it made so many of them so happy that they pushed themselves to do good work and did not want to leave.
Now there were people, especially the newer reporters, who had come to the Inquirer from other places, who did not want to believe that they had made a mistake in coming to Philadelphia. They were surrounded by older people who had decided not to leave, and who had known what it was like to work at a great newspaper and wanted to experience that particular joy again. Chris Satullo felt it was important that Bennett and Gordon appreciate just how corrosive the past fifteen years had been to the staff of the Inquirer and to be aware, as he put it, of the “scars people carry on their backs.”
Meanwhile, in San Jose, Knight Ridder was hosting its suitors. Gannett had tendered a preliminary bid along with McClatchy, Providence Equity Partners, Texas Pacific Group, Madison Dearborn Partners, Spectrum Equity, Thomas H. Lee Partners, and Media News Group although it was still difficult to tell which firms might actually be secret partners.
The sale and the future were out of Amanda Bennett’s hands, and that brought her a certain comfort. “There’s nothing I can do about it,” she said. She sat on the edge of the long blue couch in her office. Two parakeets chirped in a cage next to her desk. “I’m going to do journalism here. I’m going to try to change this paper into something alive and vibrant and thoughtful.”
Anne Gordon appeared at her door. Gordon looked concerned, unnecessarily so. She had brought to Bennett what was, at the moment, the most welcome sort of problem: a question about a story.
Michael Shapiro teaches journalism at Columbia. His most recent book is The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together. CJR gratefully acknowledges support for this article from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
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