Ownership concerns be damned, the publisher of the largest news organization in one of the largest markets in the country needs to make a major shake up in company structure and output or face a continued decline.

The Philadelphia Media Network, owners of the city’s two daily newspapers and most trafficked news site, announced almost 40 more editorial layoffs and buyouts this month, prompting speculation of another sale. The perception of leadership at the paper has been seriously damaged with a growing number of reports of editorial interference, particularly around coverage of the potential sale, though they’ve happened before.

Fears have risen that an investor group led by former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell could be a biased fifth owner in six years for the company. News of what damage bias could do the organization has clouded the root frustration that the company is failing.

While ownership bias has dominated the coverage, I’m most concerned that no one whose news innovation vision garners much contemporary respect is at the organization’s helm. That’s what is most keeping rhythm to the slow drumbeat of expectations for failure that has been heralded for a decade.

Below, find some initial, broad thoughts on how the organization might be reshaped.

Remarkably in the less than a decade I have been in Philadelphia, I have watched four ownership structures come with brief periods of excitement and no bold change. Anything that has been announced this go-around has either been underwhelming — a sports-focused weekly edition, a suburban hyperlocal — or has looked not much more than a good press release — a stalled tablet initiative or a foundation-subsidized incubation effort.

[As always with Philadelphia media, there are too many disclosures to offer here. Just assume I have close relationships with people involved in all of these organizations I mention here.]

Even with more layoffs and further brand decline, institutional structure keeps PMN’s properties as among the most important in the region, but it cannot be overstated that without a dramatic shakeup, their relevance can and will continue to lessen.

Looking elsewhere in corners of the media landscape that have always been an afterthrought to the dominant daily newspapers, innovation stirs.

At public media outfit WHYY, its editorial team is trying to build a collaborative and hyperlocal space with its 18-month old NewsWorks initiative. At Philadelphia magazine, the century-plus-old city glossy is bolstering its web presence with the Huffington Post model — as many high profile contributors as it can manage. At the local NBC affiliate, its web and mobile strategy has earned it the largest online audience shy of philly.com. Circling its wagons in suburbs surrounding the city is the digital first effort at the Journal Register Company, and so a major partnership there could impact the region profoundly. Most other city-wide efforts fall far short of innovative, particularly among the local TV affiliates, though the co-ownership of CBS3 and news radio KYW has always been an opportunity.

In short, the ecosystem is evolving and no one can bet on the existence of a robust daily newspaper here forever.

The reason why Rendell’s PMN bidding-rival developer Bart Blatstein’s plans to launch a news organization to combat PMN seems a short-term fight, if plausible at all, is because with so much else already happening, the real strength of the daily papers and its dot com is longevity. Even if he already bought the building, Blatstein would not only have to compete with the daily newspapers but — lest he forget — the growing list of region-wide news efforts. PMN’s properties stay out front because they’ve been here so damn long that inertia alone has kept them relevant.

But that can’t be PMN’s defense forever.

In 2006, the Inquirer had an editorial staff of roughly 400. The Daily News was always considerably smaller, perhaps fewer than 100 at that time, and they went through another recent round of buyouts in October, with increasingly small perks. Staff numbers are hard to come by today, but with the continue decline, it may be fair to suggest that the two share a combined staff of fewer than 300. For comparison, the Inquirer alone, I’ve been told, had more than 600 reporters and editors as recent as the late 1990s, though I allow for some exaggeration.

There’s some understandable hand-wringing about the impact of these falling numbers and an imploding company, but the reality remains that sheer legacy will sustain this company’s properties for a time. And other efforts abound.

Without a dramatic change, it is without question that the organization will eventually die, or, to be more precise, cease to be the clear news leader in Philadelphia.

To shift that course, this is what the Philadelphia Media Network should publish:

• Philly.com: Run a lean hub site, as I’ve previously suggested, serving as an editorial fire hose, but also being home to compelling video content and content from the below sources.
  Staff of 50: Community managers, sales representatives, video producers, data specialists, web analysts
• Daily newspaper: Folding the staffs from both dailies and maintaining the Inquirer brand, the newspaper should further shed staff and focus on core areas (local and state politics, investigative, crime and business), in addition to heavily vetting and copyediting contributions from various independent and partner news outlets, in addition to individuals. The big voice still looms large, so they have an opportunity to be filled with rich content from a variety of sources, and profit against that. Reporters are plentiful, editors scarce.
  Staff of 150: Reporters, editors, copyeditors, designers, community managers, sales representatives
• Sports Weekly: Continue to publish and grow the sports-focused weekly paper that may likely sell well and drive longer-form sports reporting. If sensible, perhaps fold this and a broader feature push into a more robust Sunday paper product.
  Staff of 20: Reporters, columnists, editors, copyeditors, designers, community managers, sales representatives
• Incubator: Sure, they’ve launched it, so they should bolster their efforts to house and receive some revenue back from mentoring and partnering with media innovation startups.
  Staff of 5:
• Administration: managing the actual company, its building and staff.
  Staff of 20: administration, security, leadership, accounting, HR,

Of course, this would require significant bloodletting, major union concessions and reorganization, forced buyouts of older staff who have not evolved, a completely new vision of what its content looks like, who its partners are and what groups do what. In short, they are all things that won’t happen.

In 1947, a staff strike crippled a daily paper here called the Record and forced its sale. It wasn’t the first time in the long history of daily newspapers in Philadelphia. And I would expect it to happen again before something so dramatic were to happen today.

I am not predicting the collapse of the Inquirer. That would still surprise me. I am not predicting that the paper will become completely irrelevant. That would surprise me too.

If nothing bold happens, though, I do predict a slow, sad, muffled trend downward in impact, something most would argue has been happening for 20 years.

Big stories will still come out. But among all the outlets in the region, more and more of them will from time to time share the lead story of the day.

At a recent event at the NBC affiliate here, I asked a few of their staff members whether they thought the future would be more competitive — because media convergence would put everyone on the same playing field — or less competitive — because everyone will find a niche and largely partner. None had an answer, nor did they appear to have ever thought about the subject.

One can envision a PMN that looks more like a TV affiliate with much more serious reporting and resurgent impact. My fear is that no one involved in the actual ownership negotiation of the company even thinks to do so or has the will to ever make that happen.

The importance, sway and influence of one of the world’s most dominant 20th century newspapers was the focus of the 1998 collection of essays about the once powerful Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, edited by its former education reporter Peter Binzen, who also wrote Whitetown USA.

Dubbed ‘Nearly Everybody Read It,’ a riff off the paper’s legendary slogan, the 163-page book has nearly 20 essays from former Bulletin reporters and editors, including its first female and black correspondents. For 135 years, the family owned paper was a powerhouse among a rich daily newspaper tradition in Philadelphia.

A central story line of the book was the Bulletin’s battle with the Inquirer, its chief rival, and how, in the end, the Inquirer, considered by many to be the chain response to the family-owned operation, won. Through all the bluster, I thought there were four primary reasons that rang most true to me:

1. The Bulletin fundamentally failed to innovate, remaining an afternoon daily as circulation fell with growing TV news audiences, increasing transportation costs due to traffic and changing news cycles.
2. The Bulletin failed to develop the revenue to stay competitive, including a premature sale of its nascent TV station, denying alcohol advertising and other funding methods that kept it lagging behind the Knight-Ridder funded Inquirer.
3. The Bulletin resisted aggressive editorial reconfiguration, following the investigative spirit of the 1970s that soared the reputation of the Inquirer behind editor Gene Roberts, and pushed out its own innovative editor George Packard.
4. The Bulletin came up short in following the suburban trend, having its 1947 purchase of the Camden Courier Post denied by the U.S. Department of Justice for anti-monopoly concerns was a large blow.

As I often do when reading something relevant to the news and innovation conversations I so adore, I wanted to share some choice thoughts from the book.

• “…streetwise reporters like Bill Storm, who taught me it was important to always have two kinds of gin: the good stuff for martinis, and lesser brands for fools who might want to mix it with tonic.” (p. ix)
•  ”I was based in the City Hall press room of 212, a place where there was always a pinochle game in progress.” (p. xii)
• In naming the colorful cast of reporters around him, Rem Rieder mentions Harry Karafin, the Inquirer reporter who was later convicted in 1968 of blackmailing sources and died in prison. (p. xii)
• The Bulletin was so focused on its family-friendly image that it was known to have its three-pages of comics airbrushed of any potentially suggestive material, squashed coverage of the much hyped Kinsey sexuality reports and refused liquor ads longer after its competitors gave in to accept the ample resources. (p. 2)
• A claim of 13 daily newspapers in 1905, something I’m trying to confirm. (p. 2)
• The Bulletin’s circulation went from 600,000 in 1942 to 700,000 in 1946 to an all-time peak of 773,943 in 1947, all under the McLean family. (p. 7)
• Part of a 1947 deal to purchase the Philadelphia Record for $13 million, the Bulletin also bought radio station WCAU, which had recently started broadcasting TV to the merely 14,000 televisions in the country. By 1957, WCAU-TV was making more profit than the Bulletin, yet was sold to CBS for $20 million, considered now to be ‘dirt cheap.’ (p. 7)
• In an effort to push into the burgeoning suburbs, the Bulletin also acquired in the deal the then-small Camden Courier-Post, but the U.S. Justice Department forced its divestiture under anti-monopoly policy. (p. 7)
• Robert ‘The Major’ McLean was a legend, leading the Bulletin to being the best selling afternoon newspaper in North America into the 1950s and beyond. (p.
• “In 1951, the newspaper was thriving and the City of Philadelphia seemed to have a lot going for it too…three decades later, virtually all of those institutions had moved out of town or gone out of business. Philadelphia became a different, less inviting place.” Binzen’s entire description of the city is compelling. (p. 9)
• “…the Bulletin’s policy was to cover every aspect of life in the Philadelphia region. It covered every nickel holdup, every grassfire, every meeting of the city’s zoning board and its park commission. It covered the courts very closely as well as the Register of Wills.” (p. 10)
• In 1964, McLean family bought the News-Press in Santa Barbara, Calif. for a westward expansion (p. 11)
• A 1964 expose series on police corruption, directed by city editor Earl Selby, won the Bulletin and Philadelphia its first Pulitzer. (p. 11)
• Inquirer was changing; new editor Gene Roberts earned the paper its first Pulitzer in 1975, starting a streak of 17 before 1990, though they occasionally overreached being sued for libel often, including a $30 million award, the largest libel award in the history of American journalism eventually settled out of court in 1996. (p. 13) As an aside, two years later, the Inquirer was sued by its own reporter Ralph Cipriano in a wild story.
• Great story about sending a copy boy to New York to send a letter back to Philadelphia (also, apparently the Bulletin Almanac existed) (p. 15)
• “Bruno Richard Hauptmann has kept, at long last, his rendezvous with death.” This begins a beautiful Bulletin story from reporter Harry Proctor on the Linbergh baby’s killer’s execution. (p. 21)
• FDR nominated for second term in Philadelphia and gave speech at the University of Pennsylvania, where newspaper extras were sold. (p. 22)
• Bulletin reporters submitted letters to encourage real reader submission, including mentioning fertilizing gardens with dead cats (p. 24)
• Coverage of a Charles Bailey heart surgery under a compromise that if it didn’t go well, it wouldn’t be reported on. Is that an ethical concern? (p. 28)
• In 1953, the Bulletin refused to publish a reporter’s account of the Kinsey sexual story. (p. 30)
• Thorazine story: ethics questions and innovation on Philly (p. 31)
• Chick Coop, surgeon general who recommended cigarette warnings was University of Pennsylvania doctor (p. 34)
• Summer of 1954, progressive Mayor Joe Clark fluoridated the city’s water (p. 34)
• Features editor Paul Cranston was among  (p. 38)
• Lucille Ball offered to buy the Bulletin film critic a TV, as she refused to take on the technology, though the reporter refused. (p. 40)
• In late 1940s, the paper had 750,000 in circulation across 7 editions between 64-96 pages, including a process that could see a 9:20 a.m. story on the newsstand by 10 a.m. (p. 47)
• Homing pigeons were used to take photo negatives from sporting or other distant, ongoing live events to the newsroom. (p. 48)
• In a sign of the future of reader interaction, the Bulletin editors tried to drum up more reader letters. (p. 49)
• Reporters making sure to go out into the field with plenty of dimes to call the newsroom from a pay phone. (p. 56)
• Newsroom rewritemen who took phone calls from in-the-field reporters and turned in beautiful copy but never got bylines were unsung heroes, including Fred McCord, who once wrote that “the soles of Depression-era job seekers were worn so thin they could feel the difference underfoot between a nickel and a dime.” (p. 57)
• “Let the story sing and put the facts in the sidebar.” (p. 58)
• To get through to the Governor about a controversial execution, Paul Cranston landed in a balloon in his front yard. (p. 68)
• Dennis the Menace comic strip was first bought by the Bulletin and Cranston (p. 69)
• Sending a reporter to the Assembly, a fancy Main Line dance referenced earlier (p. 70)
• Like in Harrisburg and other newsroom, PR agents would bring liquor around Christmas to the reporters and ‘the Divvy’ would divide the liquor among the most senior reporters. (p. 76)
• A source threatened suicide if a story ran, the editor said ‘if he jumps, we’ll have  second day story’ (p. 82)
• In 1947, the Philadelphia Record closes because of strike by its union and the paper is bought by the Bulletin (p. 83)
• A reporter hid in a closet to a railroad scoop (p. 83)
• Transit authority gave a fifth of whiskey to all transit reporters in good graces (p. 84)
• The Bulletin was so locally focused, that a newsroom joke was that when World War III started, the lead of its story would be the impact on Kensington. (p. 85)
• The Bulletin was so notoriously fearful of taking a strong stand editorially, that when it endorsed Joe Clark for mayor, he was quoted as saying ‘How could you tell?’ (p. 87)
• Editorial page writer Don Rose, author of eight books, was the father of 12 and, at his death in 1964, 74 grandchildren. (p. 87)
• The Bulletin’s first female Philly editorial writer came in 1969 (p. 91)
• Overall from editorial to news to cartoons to advertising, it was a restrained paper timid and losing ground to a resurgent Inquirer
• April 12 1847 Bulletin first launches by Alexander Cummings, known as the Cummings Evening Telegraphic Bulletin (p. 93)
• The Bulletin was last in circulation of 13 dailies in Philly with 7,000 daily papers, when bought by Robert McLean in 1895. 10 years later it was number one. McLean family owned paper until 1980 (p. 94)
• Bulletin headquarters were at Juniper and Filbert from 1908 to 1955, when the Bulletin moved to the building across from 30th St, Then the Bulletin had 2,500 employees and 720,000 circulation.
• In 1951, at a party at the Pen and Pencil Club celebrating a reporter leaving, she was given a clock with the engraving ‘Her copy is always on time.’ (p. 94)
• Bulletin reporter George Staab went to Horatio Hackett School at York and Frankford near where I live, though he never graduated high school (p. 94)
• More stories of the city editor submitting letters to the editor (p. 98)
• The Virgin Mary’s figure is spotted in West Fairmount Park and tens of thousands come to see her (p. 101)
• In 1963, Nicaragua President Samoza knew the Bulletin and its slogan (p. 107)
• One reporter was covering a fatal stabbing. Said editor Toughill: “Is it black? Then fuck it.” Black crime was ordinary. (p. 112)
• That same editor used a secret phone in a courtroom to call in the results of a a controversial crime to beat everyone else. (p. 112)
• Philadelphia Record owned the New York Post. (p. 112)
• Controversial law-and-order mayor and police commissioner Frank Rizzo, before that, the primary police informant on the 1964 cop corruption series that gave the Bulletin and Philadelphia its first Pulitzer
• Though black communities were often ignored in the 1940s and 1950s, that started to change in the 1960s, including a big feature on the black community (p. 117)
• In covering the Civil Rights movement in the South, a Bulletin and Washington Post reporter sat together in first class, but the New York Times reporter sheepishly admitted his paper would only pay for coach (p. 122)
• The Penn Central Railroad bankruptcy was the country’s largest (p. 123)
• “Part of the tension [in news writing] comes from the irrational fear that maybe you won’t be able to bring it off this time.” (p. 130)
• How Martin Luther King Jr. changed in the course of a few years as one Bulletin reporter covered him (p. 131)
• In representing the distrust and disdain Bulletin reporters had for the Inquirer, one reporter tells the story of sitting next an Inquirer reporter at an event and afterward the Inquirer reporter saying ‘let’s get together and we can go over your notes.” (p. 132)
• One reporter’s story of surviving Nazi-held Vienna (p. 138)
• “Bad idea, kid. You’re thinking big. This is Philadelphia — think small.” an editor tells a reporter (p. 140)
• “If it ain’t local, forget it” (p. 143)
• An old-timer on leave came in to keep the Newspaper Guild out of the Bulletin 1975 (p. 143)
• “To some, all this is no big deal. For me, it was close to everything. A dream made real by a rumpled press card.” said Hans Knight (p. 145)
• One editor told a woman applicant that the Bulletin didn’t need a female reporter because ‘we already have one.’ She made it in and eventually covered Israel Prime Minister Golda Meir (p. 148)
• “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” said New Yorker writer AJ Liebling (p. 150)
• If bulletin didn’t have a story, it didn’t happen p150, claim staff bigger than inqy and daily news together
• Orrin Evans was the first and only black Bulletin reporter when Claude Lewis came in 1967 (p. 153)
• Evans was moved that Lewis was offered the Harrisburg bureau, something Evans could have never gotten when he had started because of racial prejudices (p. 155)
• Story of Lewis taking advantage of an off-the-record conversation with a prosecutor (p. 157)
• One reason black reporter hires went up in the 1960s was that leading black celebrities would only be interviewed by black reporters, so many younger, less experienced blacks were hired over whites, which caused resentment. (p. 157)
• Lewis was beaten by police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention (p. 158)
• Lewis became the first black columnist (p. 159)
• Reporters fought Editor George Packard, who was making many changes to the Bulletin, eventually, he became too divisive and was asked to leave, another way that Gene Roberts and the Inquirer continued to innovate and win the battle (p. 161)
• The 20th annual Association of Black Journalists conference was held triumphantly back in Philadelphia (p. 163)

This Philadelphia daily newspaper family tree is framed in the Inquirer editorial board room at 400 N. Broad Street. Photo by Russell Cooke. Click to enlarge.

There were a dozen or more daily newspapers in Philadelphia at one time, I hear. Trouble is, I couldn’t seem to find anyone who could name what all of those papers were.

So I went and did some good old fashioned research — with some great direction from representatives of the following institutions.

Below, find a historical timeline of daily newspapers in Philadelphia, or at least what I could decode using four sources: primarily the Pennsylvania State Library newspaper collection [call number: Philadelphia] and the archives of the University of Virginia, with some help from a 1997 collection of essays called ‘Nearly Everybody Read It,’ edited by Peter Binzen (whose other book I recently read) and an essay from Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia member Gerry Wilkinson. (I compiled some other notes on the Inquirer here.)

Check it out below and offer any criticism or comment — I’m certainly expecting that this is incomplete, so any other leads are appreciated!

This goes from most recent to least recent, and if anyone can follow all the openings, rebrandings and mergers enough to get an accurate count of daily newspapers at a variety of times, I’d love to hear it.

• October 2010: Philadelphia Media Network announces plans to leave the Inquirer Building for the former Strawbridge Building at Eighth and Market streets.
• February 2009: Philadelphia Daily News is made ‘an edition’ of the Philadelphia Inquirer, then owned by Philadelphia Media Holdings, which went through bankruptcy and was eventually bought by a group called Philadelphia Media Network.
• November 1995: Philly.com is launched
• Jan. 1982: Philadelphia Evening Bulletin closes
• Late 1977:  Quebecor-owned Philadelphia Journal launches, focusing on sports coverage and a tabloid format, but was squeezed out, closing in 1981.
• December 31, 1969: Inquirer and Daily News bought by the Knight paper chain, merged with Ridder in 1974
• 1957: Walter Annenberg purchases the Daily News, becoming the Inquirer’s sister paper
• Feb. 1, 1947 Philadelphia Record, owned by J. David Stern and facing a ‘crippling strike,’ bought by Evening Bulletin for $13 million, adding a Sunday edition and picking up radio station WCAU, which had recently launched a TV station.
• July 31, 1936: Moses Anenberg (Walter’s father) purchases the Inquirer
• April 16, 1934: Inquirer absorbs the Public Ledger, adds a Sunday edition
• March 31, 1925: Philadelphia Daily News launches
• 1925: Inquirer moves to its longtime location at Broad and Callowhill streets, costing $10 million.
• 1920: The Philadelphia Press is bought by the famed Curtis Publishing Company, which renamed the formerly Ben Franklin-owned Pennsylvania Gazette to the Saturday Evening Post.
• 1918: Evening Public Ledger absorbs the Evening Telegraph.
• 1902: Public Ledger absorbs the Philadelphia Times.
• 1900: Public Ledger absorbs Taggarts’ Sunday Times.
•  1885: Public Ledger absorbs Philadelphia Press.
• 1884: Philadelphia Tribune begins printing.
•  June 25, 1882: Philadelphia Record begins publishing daily.
•  1876: The Philadelphia Public Ledger absorbs the North American, briefly publishing as “The Public Ledger and North American.”
• 1875: Times begins publishing daily, continuing Illustrated and continued in 1902 by the Philadelphia Times.
• 1866: Evening Star begins publishing daily, halting in 1900. (not sure if merged).
•  1864: Evening Telegraph begins publishing daily.
• 1863: Daily Age begins publishing daily.
• 1862: Daily Constitution Union begins publishing daily, becoming the Evening Union in 1867.
• April 1860: Inquirer rebranded as the Philadelphia Inquirer.
• 1857: The Press begins publishing, continued as the Philadelphia Press in 1880.
• 1850: the North American absorbs the American Daily Advertiser, the frequently renamed ancestor of the Pennsylvania Packet.
• 1847: American Sentinel rebranded as the Evening Telegraphic Bulletin.***
• 1847: Spirit of The Times and Daily Keystone begins publishing daily, continued as the Spirit of The Times in 1849.
• February 15, 1845: “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe first published in the Inquirer

• 1845: The Inquirer is called “The Pennsylvania Inquirer and National Gazette.”
•  1845: North American absorbs the United States Gazette, rebranding as the North American and United States Gazette.
•  1844: The American Advocate begins publlishing daily except Sunday, until 1845.
• 1840: Charles Dickens novels run serialized in the Inquirer
• 1839: Inquirer merges with the Daily Courier, briefly known as “The Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier.”
• 1839: North American absorbs American Daily Advertiser to form the North American and Daily Advertiser.
• March 25, 1836: Philadelphia Public Ledger begins printing, soon after absorbing the Philadelphia Transcript.
• 1835: The Daily Transcript begins printing.
• 1832: Pennsylvanian begins publishing daily except Sunday, continued as the Daily Pennsylvanian in 1855.
  
• 1829: the North American begins publishing.
• Monday, June 1, 1829 — Pennsylvania Inquirer launches**
• 1828: The Daily Chronicle begins publishing daily, except Sunday, continued as the Daily Courier in 1834.
• 1824: Franklin Gazette absorbs the Aurora General Advertiser.
• 1823: United States Gazette continues merged Union, United States Gazette and True American.
•  1820: National Gazette and Literary Register begins publishing daily except for Sunday, followed in 1841 by the National Gazette and Literary and Commercial Register.
• 1820: American Sentinel and Mercantile Advertiser begins publishing daily except Sunday, which launched as a weekly in 1815 and was shortened to the American Sentinel in 1824.***
• 1817: United States Gazette merges with True American to form Union, United States Gazette and True American.
  1812: Star of Liberty begins publishing daily except Sunday, though it doesn’t survive the year.
• 1807: Democratic Press begins publishing daily.
• 1804: Political and Commercial Register begins publishing daily, ending in 1820.
• 1802: Independent Whig, and Philadelphia Commercial Gazette begin publishing daily, though it folds soon after.
• 1801: Gazette of the United States is the rebranded version of the earlier Gazette properties.
• 1800: Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser is rebranded daily of Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser.

• 1799: Constitutional Diary and Philadelphia Evening Advertiser begins publishing daily, only to fold a year later.
• 1798: True American, and Commercial Advertiser begin publishing daily, continued by the True American in 1815.
• April 24, 1797: Porcupine’s Gazette begins publishing daily following a weekly version, ending in 1800.
• 1796: Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser begins publishing.
•  1796: New World begins publishing daily, continued as the Universal Gazette in November 1797.
• 1794: Philadelphia Gazette and Universal Daily Advertiser begin publishing daily.
• 1794: Aurora General Advertiser begins publishing daily except for Sunday, following the weekly General Advertiser.
•  April 5, 1790: Gazette partnership rebranded as the Federal Gazette and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser.
• 1788: Federal Gazette and Philadelphia Evening Post begin publishing daily except for Sunday.
• Oct. 7, 1786: Independent Gazetteer begins publishing daily, rebranded as the Independent Gazetteer on Jan. 9, 1790.
• Tuesday, September 21, 1784: The Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser begins publishing daily, the first paper to do so in the country, after first being launched as The Pennsylvania Packet on Oct. 28, 1771 by John Dunlap, who printed the Declaration and the Constitution.

Smart people are making calculated investments in Philadelphia’s journalism community.

• The local NPR affiliate here is getting attention for its NewsWorks online news campaign.
• The William Penn Foundation is moving ahead with its mission-orientated drive toward increasing public affairs journalism in the region.
• New ownership for the Inquirer crew can mean some fresh ideas.
• Independent publishers are always trying to find new ways to come together.

It’s clearly something about which I am passionate and devoted. It’s also something I put a lot of thought into. This weekend, I found myself returning to a thought process of the past, just free associating everything I would invest in if money was no object toward growing Philadelphia journalism.

Of course, money is a big object, but the brainstorm can help. I share my thoughts below and would love to hear what I am missing or what I seem to be paying too much attention to.

Again, this is nothing but stream of consciousness brainstorming. Take it as that, but give me your thoughts.

• OVERALL: It’s a bottom line-focused nonprofit that houses, supports and promotes for-profit ventures in news and information, in addition to public affairs-oriented nonprofit journalism. It has branding and a major landing page focused on data warehousing and partnerships.
• We’d be based off an open-source platform.
• We’d work with independent publishers and any legacy media partner who wants to get on board.
• By my (very rough) math, I figured about $4.5 million the first year, including a lot of initial startup costs, so that would fall to $2 million in annual operating costs the following year and increase from there.
• Physical space — ($1 million) A big, fat, expensive, renovated warehouse space with office space, retail front-end to bring in average citizens, maybe some art space to recognize the proliferation and variety of media. There would also be a kick ass museum documenting Philadelphia’s vibrant history of news, innovation, information and journalism. This would be near enough to Center City, but partner sites would be encouraged to offer office hours at coffee shops or wherever else in the city is relevant to their coverage. Oh, and there would also be a bike rack, roof deck and pool table.
• Incubation — ($50,000 in overhead) Using that physical space and a business services hub that might look like this and will be detailed a bit more below, I’d house young niche news sites, promising technology and development startups and other young players in the media space. I’d offer bonuses for collaboration.
• Public media space — ($50,000) Working off the promise of what WHYY has done, I’d have some shared-use space — perhaps integrated in the retail space noted above — to offer organizations, school groups and citizens. I’d hire a pack of smart college kids to sit around and answer questions and learn.
• Hub site — ($50,000) Yes, I think I would want a landing page, but while it would serve as a clearing house for featured content across all of our partners, pushing and highlighting the best of the best, it would be home to important tools, as noted below. So, anyone who creates content and is housed in my physical space or any other vetted, meaningful content producer — whether legacy, startup, community, print, online, organization, nonprofit, for-profit or other — who wants to be part can take part.
• Directory — ($70,000) A public reporter’s notebook, a local Wikipedia or Crunchbase or whatever other metaphor you need to understand it, but the biography, photo and primary personal details would be buffeted by tagged content from a core group of independent publishers and just about every and any legacy media player who can summon the technology, workflow and interest in collaborating. I was just involved in an application for Knight News Challenge money to accomplish this. While that hub site will highlight daily featured content, this directory serves as the real editorial meat connecting all the partners.
• Spiderweb of influential relationships — ($20,000) That directory would have an incredibly interactive map of personal and professional connections updated with meta information like family ties, co-sponsored legislation and other relationships. This would require upkeep but would become part of the workflow of our journalists, tracking how the relationships change in power.
• Data warehouse — ($200,000) Pushed to from the directory and partnered with the City of Philadelphia, organizations and companies, meaningful GIS, demographic, crime and other data would have a home and a place to live and be found. We would also encourage the sharing of documents to play that role that everyone is talking about, (and, please, forgive the comparison), to be something of a watered-down local Wikileaks. (Yes, I’m sorry)
• Application development — ($200,000) Using the development team noted below, we would create products that citizens can use, could be shared and, additionally, could create profit.
• CEO — ($200,000) A public face of some stature who can chase money (lots and lots of money), speak at events and look pretty. Yes, I suppose he or she should also provide meaningful vision for the future. Did I mention that this person should have to bring in lots of money in every way possible?
• Kick ass advisory board — ($50,000) Feed them well and treat them kindly, but otherwise, using the prestige of what we’re building, I’d assemble a collection of business, startup, journalism, academic, community, political and business leaders to have quarterly meetings on the sustainability, focus and direction of this entity. These people would also help bring money in, speak on our behalf and push the conversation on the future of news.
• Managing Editor — ($100,000) Someone who oversees the day-to-day management, including, perhaps, final say on what content is pushed on the hub site, though that actual work might be managed by someone lower.
• Other executives — ($300,000) To handle insurance, liability, accounting and other management.
• Sales team — ($500,000) I’d hire a business development officer and a few young, hungry, strong ad sales representatives who are web native. I’d give base salaries and offer lots of commission, performance bonuses and creative incentives to sell, not just advertising, but memberships, events, product sales and broader partnerships.
• Marketing staff — ($100,000) I’d hire a couple young, wildly creative recent graduates from the city, give them a budget and have them rotate through our partner sites, working to conceive, promote and put on inventive, inclusive events to grow knowledge, community and, likely, revenue.
• Design and development — ($400,000 ) Give me a pack of experienced engineers, developers, designers, coders and data geeks to create innovative ways of collecting, keeping, maintaining, promoting and visualizing data. Because, as old Tim Berners Lee keeps saying, the future of news is data.
• Copy editors — ($100,000) I’d have a couple of smart, young recent graduates to proof top tier content (i.e. break content into different tiers so only the most important/controversial content requires heavy editing and proofing).
• General assignment reporters — ($150,000) I want in my network a few shared reporters who would be dispatched to different partner sites depending on level of interest, importance, vacation time, etc.
• Pen and Pencil Club V 2 — The oldest journalism group in the country is in Philadelphia. I’d want to work with them to get an entire slew of new, younger journalists involved to talk to the more experienced and develop a new clubhouse for journalists and off-the-record events.
• Investigative Reporting Fellowships — ($200,000) We’d offer sweet year-long fellowship opportunities to two aggressive, respected, wildly successful journalists to spend an entire bloody year on a single project, with updates along the way.
• Reporter blogs — ($5,000) Any damn reporter, editor, designer, developer, executive or freakin’ janitor who doesn’t already have a personal site but wants one, gets one. YOURNAME.HUBSITE.com and you blog about the process of doing whatever it is you’re doing. Create a brand, develop an audience, share your work, push out to other ideas and, hell, if we can your ass, I’ll personally export your archives and hand deliver them.

How I’d return my investment:

• Equity stake — in each individual company we incubated, which includes niche news sites, hyperlocal communities and, as noted above, technology companies to help them all work better.
• Fiscal agency — In one way or another, I’d serve to physically and financially host damn near any relevant project, grant or research initiative I could find, skimming money off the top of each major grant-funded activity that came through.
• Application development – Using the data we’d collect, our development team would create applications that would also have  monetary gains, whether for consumers or, more likely, other commercial and entrepreneurial enterprises.
• Advertising network — In addition to cutting costs on lots of shared services, yes, I’d have an advertising network across all my partner platforms that would start by looking something like this.
• Commission on everything — I’d sell underwriting, advertising, event sponsorships, trainings, tutorials and every damn service any of the partners would conceive of across the entire network and take a cut on every solitary dime.
• Membership services — Using the directory described above, I’d sell memberships to edit profiles, in a way that we are moving toward doing at Technically Philly, and give a small kickback one way or another to the partner sites providing content. This membership would offer reduced-price services and event attendance for all of the partnering sites.
• Some limited rent — Reduced-rate rent for the more advanced, incubated companies, in addition to some limited retail space.
• God damned gift shop — It’d be a low-margin, profitable loss leader to bring people into another part of the physical space but we’d sell schwag from all of our partnering and incubating companies, that could get a cut, in addition to Philadelphia-centric merchandise.
• Consulting and publishing services — We’re good at things as journalists. Check back with me.

Who I’d partner with:

• A very fine line needs to be drawn between competition and avoiding redundancy, both of which are important but both of which can come into conflict.
• Anyone who would get stuff done — It doesn’t have to be perfect but it has to be done and developed and moved. I will take people who get shit done over any aspiring perfectionist or brilliant star any damn day.
• Temple University Philadelphia Neighborhoods Senior Journalism Capstone class – Half of your students are in year-long internships with our partner sites or on broader research projects and the other half are on-the-ground handling our North Philadelphia coverage.
• WHYY and Newsworks — If their hyperlocal movement continues, I’d happily push, promote and support in anyway. I’d hope they’d be a partner generally, so we would push their way. I’d hope to create co-branded podcasts, so this region could have some meaningful, regular audio content of power.
• KYW 1060 Newsradio – Handle any need for us to offer traffic updates, please, ’cause I don’t wanna.
• TV news — Whoever jumps on board first would be our TV partner. TV news is great for quick hits, so we’d partner around reducing the need to hit breaking coverage of fire, crime and the like.We get multimedia content and don’t have to waste resources.
• Metro — I’d leverage all of my partners and say, hey, let us take over one day of the week your print issue.
• Inquirer and Daily News — We’d share content for suresies, if they wanted some of our longer-form research and reporting. Also, naturally, if they’d want it, I’d want them in the tent to push from our hub site. We also would shoot to come together for events. Our sports coverage would be limited, so we’d push their way.
• Philly.com — Any revenue models they have, we’d want to support. Maybe unique incubation ideas.
• Comcast SportsNet — If we could find a partnership around sports coverage, I’d happily leave that much aside. So we’d just push their way also.
• Independents Hall — Around development, incubation or whatever. I just want them in the tent.
• Every incubation and VC in the region — Anyone who knows the business and startup scene should be involved here in one way or another.
• Philadelphia Business Journal — Events. Listings, the directory perhaps.
• Every neighborhood newsweekly who cares — If you don’t have a website or bad one and want a better one, we’ll give you one at NEWSWEEKLY.HUBSITE.com. Either way, a la the Newseum, I’d want the front pages of every print newsweekly (and print product of any kind, actually) on my site to then push their way.
• Every college news outlet with a pulse — Join our network, use our tools, hang out at our events, learn and get in the pipeline to becoming the future of Philadelphia news. (Note, I care more about college newspapers, radio stations and other extra curricular groups because, in my experience, these are the kids who succeed, not the schlubs who just show up for class).
• Spot.Us – I would want to be the East Coast hub for David Cohn’s baby. Rather than citywide coverage, I’d want to make this an integrated part of a specific niche, like city hall coverage, perhaps a partnership with one of the groups below.
• Meaningful mission-orientated nonprofits — The Committee of Seventy, the National Constitution Center, the Economy League, the Chamber of Commerce and any other large, mission-orientated nonprofit should have a role in content creation and partnership.
• Pen and Pencil Club — As noted above, there is huge knowledge here. I would want to preserve it and celebrate it.

See this and other 2007 crime maps at http://www.philly.com/inquirer/special/violence/

I’m pretty passionate about the web allowing greater public affairs accountability journalism, not worse.

I was reminded of this while skulking around the Internet searching for a column I remember reading back in 2007.

Noted Philadelphia Inquirer scribe Tom Ferrick — who has since launched politics coverage site Metropolis — crunched the numbers on the shootings of young black men, a trend in all U.S. cities but one that was particularly timely amidst one of the bloodiest years in the city’s history.

Though it was written just back in 2007, it was gone. I couldn’t quite find something that fit its point, so I reached out to Ferrick. He warmly shared some of the details of the now somewhat dated piece, as he said he’s working on revisiting the topic.

If for no other reason than for my own ability to link back to it in the future and to prove how valuable the web can be in making available so much powerful knowledge and information, below, with Ferrick’s permission, I share the notes he sent me.

Again noted, these figures and research is from 2007. From Ferrick, who called this piece a follow up to something he wrote in the 1990s:

• In 2006, 52 percent of all shooting victims in Phila. were black males aged 15 and 29, as were nearly 50 percent of all homicide victims.
• The percent of YBM’s shot and killed is rising.  In the 1970′s, for instance, 29 percent of all homicide victims were black males 15-29 and now it is averaging 50 percent.
• Also, it said in the last five years (this would be 2001-2006), 4,700 black teens and men in their 20′s has been shot.
• The surprise is what a small group is it.  In a city of nearly 1.5 million, there are about 66,000 black males between 15 and 29. Yet, 5,000 of them have been shot or killed.  That’s a rate of nearly 8 percent.
• I also looked at data about ybm’s in control of the criminal justice system and found (in 2007) that numbered 20,000 ybm’s.  That meant that three out of 10 young black males in the city (at the time of this article) were in jail serving times, on probation or parole, or awaiting trial. Three out of 10. (it was 23 percent in the 90′s)

He writes: “I also tried to answer the question: Why do they shoot one another? I quoted a 1996 Phila. study that examined every youth homicide — for kids 13-21 — that found:”

“Basically, the point is that the problem of violence in Phila. is basically concentratred in a relatively small subset within the population,” Ferrick writes, “And that if you are going to devise ways to lower the violence, you have to concentrate on this subset.”

I look forward to the possibility of Ferrick handling a follow up — if only so I have somewhere to link and return to more easily than clipping out a column.

“Let me just say that if 7.5 percent of the total population of a particular community has been stricken with, say, diptheria or small pox, it would be considered an epidemic,” Ferrick writes. “What we have among this young subset is an epidemic.”

Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Page Editor Harold Jackson, at right, interviews Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter about his latest book on the first year of the Obama presidency, as depicted at the National Constitution Center on June 22, 2010.

Riding into the White House, the angle was that Barack Obama would be a president whose celebrated communications skills would work to balance his governing inexperience.

But Jonathan Alter, a Newsweek senior editor and author of a new book chronicling Obama’s first year as president, says Obama has instead taken to private, dispassionate discourse on the issues, which he has struggled to liven up to connect with American people.

“So he seems aloof,” Alter said last night in front of a paying crowd of nearly 250 inside the Kirby Auditorium of the National Constitution Center. “And that has hurt him.”

Alter was interviewed by Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Page Editor Harold Jackson on the same stage that Obama gave his celebrated 2008 campaign speech on race. The hour-long conversation included mostly Alter sharing anecdotes from his book, which brought me back the old ethos behind the journalist, being a storyteller.

Alter’s second-hand accounts of private interactions between those who govern — like Obama separating a near physical altercation between Hank Paulson and Bernie Frank — give us a better sense of their personalities, mettle and capabilities. His books and articles and recordings will be source material for future generations to evaluate what our country is doing now.

So the historians and research aides and professors and the like are all journalists, just on a slow burn.

For his day job, Alter works on a weekly print cycle — Jackson, on daily — but for the book, Alter had months — and that was rushed. But like the newspaperman, Alter drew on years of knowledge — he had written the first cover story of Obama, right after his noted 2004 Democratic National convention.

It was right the event was held at NCC, charged with keeping the memory of a foundational document and chronicling its impact today — telling the story and already working with journalists.

More and more people are collecting those stories, so the next battle will be about getting the most authority, a familiar battle indeed.

[Full Disclosure: My Technically Philly colleagues are collaborating with the National Constitution Center, which we will announce more formally in the next month or so].

Go here for the financial details of the auction of parent company Philadelphia Media Holdings, which was taken over by debt-holding lenders, not the existing local ownership led by Publisher Brian Tierney.

Such large daily newspapers going on the chopping block at a time of continued media fracturing makes for national news, meaning intellectual conversations have ranged from how Philadelphia now compares to other big cities like Minneapolis and why the conversation around this city is so prevalent in media circles.

It’s also meant that the Hitler film parody meme that had a swift death this very month, has been brought back in — I believe — wonderful, insider hilarity. (Aside from the missing ‘been’ on the first subtitle.)

As was tweeted by professors, many practitioners of all stripes and players and then shared by Philebrity and the Clog (and, yes, Phillyist and Phawker),  raw video of Hitler discovering the results of the PMH auction results.

Updated 4/13/10 @ 8:50 a.m.: Regionally-specific hyperlocal is just part of the broader system

WHYY, the public media station for the Delaware Valley region, is hoping a $1.2 million hyperlocal news initiative for the northwest region of Philadelphia will be the first successful bold Web-first journalism effort from a legacy media player.

Updated: That northwest hyperlocal is just one very large, very expensive trial vertical within a larger rollout.

But will “NewsWorks” go the way of a handful of its predecessors?

BIG WEB JOURNALISM TRIALS IN PHILLY

If you talk to the big players in Philadelphia media, you’ll find that there have been more than a few starts and stops in launching Web-first journalism outposts here.

In 2006, during that tumultuous year in which the Inquirer’s then-parent company Knight-Ridder divested its newspaper catalog to rival McClatchy and that giant cleared the 12 most under-performing dailies from its holdings, one of the largest conversations took hold.

While the Inquirer was bought by an investor team led by PR magnate Brian Tierney, there was real concern leading up to that purchase that Philadelphia was going to become the first major city to lose its paper of record.

Former Inquirer Editorial Page Editor and current WHYY content honcho Chris Satullo

The William Penn Foundation and Pew Charitable Trusts — the two biggest nonprofit funders with interest in media in the region — sat at a table with some serious industry leaders from within the city like former Inquirer columnist Tom Ferrick and Editorial Page Editor Chris Satullo and, I’ve been told, big names as distant as Entertainment Weekly founder and CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis.

As the Tierney era has soured, Temple University’s journalism department has continued to toss its young journalists into neighborhoods throughout the city as part of its much heralded Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab. In January, the Penn Foundation held a summit of sorts, the public culmination of more than a year revisiting the subject of how best to create the future of public affairs journalism in Philadelphia. Last month, Philadelphia magazine made a new, cautious step into a daily, content stream — steps that have also been taken by alt-weeklies CityPaper and Philadelphia Weekly, in addition to any number of angles from the Inquirer and others.

Small pieces, loosely connected — to paraphrase Web developer and community organizer Alex Hillman — are floating in the ether, like Technically Philly and NEast Philly, with which I participate, and conversations are ongoing to try to connect them and the aforementioned legacy media forays.

Yet, Philadelphia remains a city without any big, bold forays into innovative Web-first journalism from an existing industry leader. WHYY hopes very much to change that, and it’s about to go public about it.

NEWSWORKS: THE WHYY INITIATIVE

The northwest part of Philadelphia. Click to enlarge.

In February, I was invited to sit in on the first advisory board meeting held for a long-rumored hyperlocal initiative from WHYY, currently being called NewsWorks and pitched as a hyperlocal testing grounds for the northwest part of Philadelphia — much in the model of NEast Philly for the Northeast.

That northwest vertical is the first of what could be many in the NewsWorks network.

The meeting was a diverse collection of nearly two dozen bloggers, journalists, community members and WHYY big wigs — yes, including Bill Marrazzo, who has managed to develop a reputation for little more than perhaps being the highest paid CEO in all of public broadcasting, despite, as former Inquirer columnist and Philadelphia Weekly editor Dan Rottenberg wrote, “WHYY has never been mistaken for a world-class organization.”

This new project could be Marrazzo’s legacy, and it’s been long in the making.

As far back as December 2008, there was talk that the public media company was itching to dive into a big Web journalism push, after the 2006 initiative from Penn and Pew died after the local Inquirer purchase and ensuing financial collapse.

WHYY had looked to hire staff for this initiative — then dubbed in-house as “Y-Factor” — as far back as last May. But, as multiple sources had mentioned to me, they were waiting a fat check from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Simultaneously last spring, WHYY’s senior producer of Web news and information left — Dan Pohlig  [Full Disclosure: he's a friend] — and soon after the network of blogs he had maintained were taken down, going with it many a link and the public media company’s only serious Web journalism outlet.

Updated: New Web content has found a home at WHYY.org, but the public media organization is looking to start a surer foundation.

Starting next Monday, WHYY will go public with NewsWorks, Y-Factor’s developed cousin, and using the motto “For You. With You. By You.”

WHYY will be sponsoring four neighborhood forums for the project, hoping to garner further community support — after already reaching out to leaders in the region.

Led by the Penn Project for Civic Engagement, the workshops will give residents a preview of what’s to come, input on what stories to cover and solicit recruits for contributions and a tease to the multimedia training that WHYY hopes to offer residents.

Update: So goes this hyperlocal start, will go the broader WHYY initiative.

Labeled a pilot project with CPB funding, WHYY’s NewsWorks — led by the aforementioned former Inqy scribe Satullo who jumped ship for the greener pastures and sure footing of public media — just might be the big splash that no other major player in Philadelphia has been able to make.

Most important here is how slowly WHYY is moving. They’re not projecting full launch of the northwest vertical until the fall — though Satullo has said they’ll begin content creation as early as this spring.

With as many major false starts as we’ve seen in Philadelphia, it comes as no surprise that NewsWorks will move carefully.

Well that was a lot about nothing, no?

A Web site, Fire John Yoo is tracking all the news of the now dying coverage of John Yoo, who wrote controversial legal notices on torture during the Bush administration, and the virtriol surrounding his being retained as an op-ed columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

There were protests across the country calling for Yoo to be fired. He wasn’t. And, as news is want to do, it seems to have all but quieted. That’s how John Yoo became a household name and will soon be forgotten.

Inquirer Editorial page editor Harold Jackson, if not perfectly, did, I think, correctly assess the situation and why the controversy may not have been worth it all.

As Jackson wrote:

The decision to publish Yoo monthly came at the suggestion of The Inquirer‘s publisher, Brian Tierney, who cited Yoo’s mutual roots in Philadelphia as well as his legal scholarship — he is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley

…

In the past two years, The Inquirer has consciously added other conservative voices to our daily op-ed page and Sunday opinion section to counter criticism that our editorials and columns always lean left.

Adding more conservative commentaries to our mix doesn’t mean we have become right-wing in our editorial positions. It means we aren’t afraid to let people hear what the other side has to say.

We think most of our readers aren’t afraid either.

Our editorial board strives to take distinct positions on every topic we write about. But we also want to make sure our pages present alternative points of view. [Source]

I think there may be real value in an argument of, though the media is derided as media, voice is more often given to right-wing extremism than their left-wing counterparts, a case made by Paul Krugman of the New York Times. That’s  a case that Daily News columnist and blogger Will Bunch argued well, too — that his problem wasn’t necessarily with dissenting voices but that Yoo wasn’t a voice of dissent but rather a voice of illegal extremism supporting something he considers immoral and unjust: torture.

What do you think? Are you surprised the coverage has dragged?

Now a bit of a review of much of the Yoo coverage:

• Attytood blogger Will Bunch led the charge by writing on Yoo’s retention, and he continued on.
• Bunch and Tierney debate on Radio Times
• Democracy Now coverage
• NPR coverage
• American Journalism Review notice
• Huffington Post coverage
• WHYY coverage and intervention
• A Philly Weekly blogger followed it, repeatedly.
• Philadelphia blog Phawker coverage
• Philadelphia blog Philebrity coverage and his following call for a boycott
• New York blog Gawker coverage and follow up
• Young Philly Politics coverage
• McJawn note of Philebrity coverage

All you need to make a journalist is pressure and time.

Those same elements can disrupt a writer. Under pressure and no longer feeling the same need to impress someone can make even the most capable of scribes turn a phrase that shouldn’t be turned anymore.

Hell, I may be one cliche away from a lifetime achievement award myself. Still, it’s worth noting a few that just shouldn’t be done anymore, and other mistakes that are so commonplace they themselves have become something of a cliche:

• What: Just another day on the job
  How To: Lede with something sensational and transition to an over simplified or surprise relationship by vocation or involved person.
  Crime: It’s too easy and so now too frequently-used way to hinge from a soft lede to a nut graf.
  Examples: “Just another day in the life of a ballerina,” I wrote for the Inquirer.
  Culprit: Me

• Example: Saving Lives one Haircut at a Time
  Culprit: NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams (even if he’s one of my favorite journalists) among others
  How To: Take a mundane, obscure or seemingly unrelated subject that is somewhat related to something more grandiose — e.g. saving lives, making a difference, affecting the world, etc. –and give a sense of the impact growing with a phrase like the most common, “one at a time”
  Crime: It’s simply a tired attempt at irony, suggesting the large degree something is, in this example how simple, yet beneficial this service is. Of course, this segment was part of the Nightly News’s Making a Difference segment, too.
  Other examples: Saving animals one at a time; Solving future problems one at a time;

• What: Butchering of the use of “literally”
  Crime: Seeing the word as an exclamation point, not what it is, a tool to cut through any sarcasm or hyperbole to suggest that, no, really, what I just wrote actually happened
  Example: “Think riding shotgun, literally,” Smerconish writes, talking about a student riding along with a cop. I suppose because cops carry guns, but, no, the student is riding on a shotgun so, of course, in no way is it literal.
  Culprit: Michael Smerconish, among others

• What: Overdone foreign phrases
  How To: Don’t open up a foreign phrase book, but rather rack your head for the only foreign phrases you already know and think most readers will too. It’s the struggle between pushing your reading, without losing him or seeming pompous.
  Crime: Some recognizable foreign phrase — almost always Latin, French or another European language — can be a fine way to give your story a cosmopolitan feel when it needs it, but the variety of those phrases has become stodgy.
  Example: Carpe diem
  Culprit: Sacramento Bee, and of course it’s in a graduation story. Bah. Here’s another.
  Other examples: C’est la vie; Sacre bleu among others

• Example: Awkwardly referencing online sources
  Culprit: most old media
  How To: Take seriously something from the Web that isn’t really meant to be that serious
  Crimes: Sounding dated, inauthentic
  Examples: That recent display of high-powered journalists using Wikipedia without a second source; The Urban Dictionary, even if it was called “snide” and used by Tom Ferrick, whom I call one of the best Philly newspaper columnists

There are some journalism cliches that have become so overdone that criticizing them seem cliche itself. I recently wrote about a friend who set off the Zunegate scandal, but can’t we drop the -gate suffix for whenever that was born of Watergate and surfaces whenever a one or two-syllable controversy comes about?

I feel like I could go one with things like asking the reader a question (something else I’ve done) even when you can almost always rewrite to put it in your own voice.

But there are also so many cliches that vary by city and region. Some comparisons and phrases have become so tired in some area’s that they just shouldn’t be used anymore.

Philadelphia newspaper cliches

• It’d have to be one Hell of a good reason to put cheesesteak in a lede in Philadelphia ever again. I cringe every time the steak puns come out from national media when some Philly story goes big.
• If something is broken or damaged or, God forbid cracked, don’t reference the Liberty Bell. Don’t do it.
• Rocky came out in 1976. If you need an allusion to boxing or overcoming or an underdog, please go elsewhere.
• I am irked by all those Italian-American and Mafia stereotypes when South Philly crime or corruption makes news. New episodes of the Sopranos haven’t been on TV for years, and it took place in North Jersey anyway, but those references still make it in Philly print today. I’ll also add that while Joey Bagadonuts and Badda bing badda boom is supposed to be borne of Philly comedian Dom Irrera, I could live without reading those and Fugghedabouit used as an easy shorthand for a writer to give voice to an otherwise dead story.

What other media cliches are you tired of? They can be regional or national. Any you’ve done that you regret or defend?