For those that remember its relevance, former Inky reporter Ralph Cipriano is doing yeoman’s work at BigTrail.net covering the saga among the battling Democrats who own the publication regarding the firing of editor Bill Marimow.
It’s fascinating writing and shows that straight reporting can be far more interesting than the entertainment garbage that now passes for news in the dying dinosaurs. Cipriano makes the implicit case that the dinosaur may not be dying — at least as certainly — if they actually did its job rather than be a mere mouthpiece for the union-backed establishment that runs — and corrupts — the City of Philadelphia, and by extension the state.
Did you know that the Carpenters’ Union dumped $45 million of its pension fund into the Inky when it was sold to a group led by Brian Tierney in 2006? You wouldn’t if you depended on the Inquirer for news. It lost most of it. On the other hand, it kept a crusade from being launched to reform things at the city’s miserable failure of a convention center.
“They don’t hand out prizes for
pissing people off,” Cipriano notes. “And that’s what the job of journalism often is. To
create a newsroom that Ed Rendell wouldn’t feel comfortable in.”
For a scorecard as to who is on what side in the Marimow fight — owners Lewis Katz and H.F. Lenfest want to keep him and owner New Jersey Democrat boss George Norcross with Publisher Bob Hall want him gone — visit here. Tidbits include that the rage aimed at Marimow is based on a claim that he leaked a plan to cut the paper’s editorial pages by 50 percent and the paper has lost 24 percent of our readers in the last year. Free clue, maybe normalizing homosexuality is not as popular as you guys seem to think it is.
Hat tip Bob Guzzardi