After years of a culture of warring newsrooms that once seemed quaint and maybe a little silly but now — like so much at Philadelphia Media Network and the corporate entities that preceded it — seems completely pathetic, staffers at both the Daily News and the Inquirer are reeling today from the news that their newsrooms will be merging. After all that has gone before, once PMN completes its move to the Strawbridge & Clothier building this summer, the chocolate will be in the peanut butter and the peanut butter will be in the chocolate; and if this reactions piece in City Paper is anything to go by, the flavor will be an acquired taste at best. Many see this, along with various cutbacks and buyouts at PMN over the last year or so, as PMN paving the way to close the Daily News altogether eventually. (Conspiracy theorists will note the running parlor game that this is a plan that has been in place at least since Larry Platt was hired to helm the DN.) Others see it as a way to kill off redundancies where, as is currently often the case, writers from both the DN and Inky are chasing the same story in cases where it’s just not necessary to have two reporters on a story. No matter what, we can fairly assume everyone’s tightening up their resume while old rivals (like Dan Gross and Michael Klein, who’ve loathed each other for years) fervently hope that, at the very least, they don’t get assigned the same lunch period when Broad & Whatever finally morphs into Hang ‘Em High.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2011 at 4:22 pm.