You Know, It Just Wouldn’t Be A Late Summer Megabummer Without A Visit From THE BRIAN TIERNEY PENTAGRAM OF DOOM!
You know, we’d been sitting on a bunch of Philadelphia Media Holdings links for like a week now — primarily because we are still wholly unconvinced that anyone cares at all and increasingly, we are loathe to bore you with this shit — but another memo leaked this morning, the tea kettle whistled, and suddenly, it’s B.T.P.O.D. time, baby! SO LET’S DO THIS. First, as always, there are the money woes — as time goes on, the bank note that the loan to buy the Inquirer, the Daily News and Philly.com was written on is gradually getting even more fucked up than your student loan. There’s missed payments, forbearance agreements (think of a more genteel, polite version of a “vig”) and a general, very loud, sense of uh-ohhhhhh. Then Boscov’s went out of business. Since you’re not your weird aunt who buys you fugly sweaters there once a year, you’re probably thinking, “So what?” Well, Boscov’s owed PMH close to a cool million, which could have probably come in handy right about now. (Q: How does a big Old Lady Department Store go out of business? A: By taking out a million dollars’ worth of ads in an Old Lady Newspaper. Groan.) And at this point, it’s like fuck buyer’s remorse, because Tierney and the gang could not even sell this mess if they wanted to. And always, the Inky staff continues to inspire. Back to that leaked memo:
Colleagues – Beginning today, we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won’t post those stories online until they’re in print. We’ll cooperate with philly.com, as we do now, in preparing extensive online packages to accompany our enterprising work. But we’ll make the decision to press the button on the online packages only when readers are able to pick up The Inquirer on their doorstep or on the newsstand.
Now, it’s not so much that this is a bad decision — it’s just that it SHOULD HAVE BEEN MADE IN FUCKING 1996. Or, not at all. And maybe, just maybe, not at a time when the Inky knows damn well that more eyeballs see it online — which should also be translatable to advertisers if anybody at this fucking rag had a goddamned clue about what is going on — and that this is where they should be throwing their weight, instead of some desperate nickel and dime bullshit. On the other hand, I guess nickels probably come in handy, too.
