Philly Locals Want Green Bay Packers-Style Ownership For 2 Papers

By: Mark Fitzgerald A former high-powered Philadelphia advertising executive has received commitments "well in excess of $100 million" to buy The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News in an ownership structure similar to the community-owned Green Bay Packers pro football team, he told E&P Wednesday.

Brian Tierney said he has lined up 20 "super-successful" Philadelphia businesspeople in an investment group ready to partner with others, including the Newspaper Guild, to buy the papers. The Inquirer and the tabloid Daily News were sold Monday by Knight Ridder to The McClatchy Co., which immediately announced they and 10 other papers were for sale.

In a telephone interview, Tierney said the group was committed to long-term ownership. "We're looking at this as partly a good economic investment, and partly as good community involvement," he said. "It would be a sort of Green Bay Packers kind of ownership."

Tierney said the papers had "suffered from corporate ownership, which was a good thing in the 1960s and 1970s...but at the same time, we've seen that corporate ownership has been no panacea (when) you're looking at things just quarter-to-quarter."

While the two papers have often been portrayed as the most troubled of the former Knight Ridder papers, Tierney said that as a former advertising executive he knows they have present strengths and future potential.

"What they have uniquely, what I love about the Inquirer and the Daily News is that they're the only mass media in town, and I know there's a real value in that having been on the other side of it," he said. Tierney created Tierney Communications in 1989, and grew it into what was regarded as the biggest ad and public relations firm in Philadelphia known for commercials such as the Verizon wireless phone spots featuring actor James Earl Jones. He completed the sale of the agency to InterPublic Group of Companies in 2000.

Tierney said the papers were not exploiting their advertising strength. "I know guys who spent a million dollars in the Inquirer every year--and never had a salesperson call on them," he said. "It was like, can you just fax the order in?"

He also said the newspapers' Web site, philly.com, suffered from corporate ownership. "It doesn't look like Philadelphia," he said. "It has the same template as the rest of the KR (Real Cities network) site, and that's a problem."

Tierney described his fellow investors, whom he did not name, as "a diverse group, diverse ethnically, but also diverse in including some of the old civic association types who write checks to open new wings of the museum...a who's who of Philadelphia: new business wealth, old civic wealth. Everybody in our group is worth (from) a couple of hundred million up to a billion."

Last year, Tierney lined up investors to buy the magazines Inc. and Fast Company, but the group later dropped the bid.

The Newspaper Guild, which represents newsroom employees in Philadelphia and six of the other papers up for sale, has the backing of Yucaipa Companies of Los Angeles, and has engaged Duff & Phelps Securities LLC and Ownership Associates for a bid that could include eight or more of the papers.

A Pennsylvania state senator from Philadelphia, Vince Fumo, has confirmed that he is seriously considering making his own bid. The Inquirer also reported this week that Chris Harte, the former publisher of the Knight Ridder papers Akron Beacon Journal and Centre Daily Times in State College, Pa., was putting together investors for a bid.