At the Inquirer, Shrink Globally, Slash Locally?

Tierney boasts that he and his partners are pouring $20 million into the organization this year, from upgrading printing presses to boosting the tiny marketing budget to repainting the lobby. But intensive negotiations with the Newspaper Guild and other unions have both sides preparing for a possible strike, a daunting prospect for those who recall the bitterness surrounding a 45-day walkout in 1985.

Ticking off union work rules that he regards as archaic, Tierney asks: Why should he have to pay overtime to ad salesmen to take a client to a Phillies baseball game? Or to fly to Chicago and take an advertiser to Morton's steakhouse? He also wants to merge certain Inquirer and Daily News departments, saying it's absurd to have a photographer from each paper at the same event or two fleets of trucks delivering the papers.

"I believe I've replaced the selfish, self-centered, short-term focus of Wall Street leadership with the selfish, self-centered, short-term focus of the Guild leadership," Tierney says.

Stu Bykofsky, a Daily News columnist and spokesman for the Guild, calls the accusation "laughable," saying the union hasn't even asked for an employee pay raise. "We're trying to protect our jobs and our pensions," he says, citing Tierney proposals to cap contributions to the pension plan and curtail sick pay. Other work rules are negotiable, says Bykofsky, but Tierney doesn't understand that the Inquirer and Daily News "don't cover news in the same way."

With a combined staff of 525, Tierney says he will lay off between 50 and 150 employees. These days almost all stories inside the Inquirer's A section come from the Associated Press, with a handful from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times or other wire services, and that suits Tierney just fine. The Inquirer, which already lost 85 staffers in the past year through buyouts and attrition, has only three reporters beyond its home base, one in Israel and two in Washington.

"I don't see us sending 25 people to do me-too coverage of Katrina," Tierney says. "I can get what's going on in Iraq online. What I can't get is what's happening in this region."

After Tierney bought the papers in June, he staged a celebration featuring Eagles cheerleaders and catered hoagies. Now he is losing the newsroom's allegiance, and columnists began criticizing the new owner last week in Guild-financed radio ads.

"People are beginning to doubt his veracity," says metro columnist Tom Ferrick Jr., who recorded one ad. "The people who bought the paper may have paid too much for it, and so were less able to withstand what appears to be a large drop in advertising revenue." Tierney dismisses that argument, saying: "We have to have a vision of living with the resources that are there."

Tierney ousted the top editor, Amanda Bennett, three weeks ago and handed her job to William Marimow, a former Inquirer reporter who won two Pulitzers at the paper, in 1977 and 1985. Marimow, most recently National Public Radio's ombudsman, was fired as editor of the Baltimore Sun two years ago after battling Tribune executives over budget cuts.

When Marimow described his plans for beefing up coverage, Kinney told him: "That sounds great, but we can't do those things with the staff we have now." Marimow has said he can revive his hometown paper despite the painful cuts ahead.

Kinney, a 10-year veteran now worried about being laid off, says she "can't even fathom this place with 50 fewer people." It's getting harder to put out the paper, she says, because "everybody's out looking for work."

Multimedia Men

American Journalism Review Editor Rem Rieder calls it "a crushing loss" for The Washington Post and "a dramatic manifestation of the ongoing shift from old media to new." Washingtonian's Harry Jaffe says a bit breathlessly that the paper "barely can field a team in the political arena."