Brian’s Stinky Inky Birthday Bash

Has it been only a year since Bruce Toll, Brian Tierney and Philadelphia Media Holdings L.L.C. took over the Philadelphia Inquirer, thus beginning quite possibly the slowest and most deliberate execution of a once-proud newspaper that anyone has ever seen?

Oh, I’m sorry – forgive me; I forgot to note that the newspaper has experienced a whopping daily circulation gain of 0.6 percent this year, thus initiating the paper’s childish “When Pigs Fly” ad campaign (only slightly less infantile than Kevin Ferris’ column today; I confess that I was too busy laughing at it to muster a response - it was such a shameless piece of freeper agit-prop that I'm not even going to link to it).

And this note of self-congratulation from Tierney refers to an unnamed Inky reader who he met on Walnut Street, who of course had good things to say about the new ownership.

Well, if Brian is going to bring the cake, then please allow me to bring the acetylene torch, as it were, to light the candles.

This notes how the Inky has basically sold its business section to Citizens Bank, thus ensuring “fair and balanced” coverage, no doubt (and not really a good sign in a paper that continues to shrink anyway – I’m waiting for the day when the “nation and world” section matches the size of the Express edition).

This notes the complaint (legitimate as far as I’m concerned) by the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists about the disproportionate number of minorities laid off by Tierney last year, which is particularly bad for a paper that still needs work if it ever hopes to see the day when its newsroom somewhat approximates the demographic makeup of its audience (and I know of no formal reply by Tierney or anyone at Philadelphia Media Holdings to this letter).

And regarding Tierney’s recent ravings that he was trying to put a group together to make a bid for Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, I thought this was spot-on…

"I'm tickled pink that Tierney has apparently found a mother lode of money coming from [the two newspapers] and I look forward to him sharing it with his employees," Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky said yesterday. "I look forward to him welcoming back 75 people who lost their jobs because he said he couldn't afford to keep them. I'm looking forward to our pension being restored now that he's got enough money to be throwing at the Wall Street Journal. I'm looking forward to having our sick pay restored now that we know he's so flush."

So Happy Birthday, Brian! Good luck with those Sunday circulation numbers.