BRIAN TIERNEY, AS CEO AND PUBLISHER OF THE DAILY NEWS AND THE INQUIRER, WAS IN THE FIGHT OF HIS LIFE. THE COMPANY WAS NEARLY $400 million in debt, with the economy, advertising sales, and newspaper circulation in a tailspin.
It wasn’t just Tierney’s money on the line. It was his reputation, his image. What Tierney had once visualized as a Hollywood script about a champion of a man who saved a dying business was turning into a story of doom. His dream was just that—a dream, almost a fantasy. Tierney loved the challenge of being the underdog in a business brawl, but this appeared insurmountable.
Tierney’s group failed to reach a deal with senior lenders, led by Citizens Bank, to restructure the debt load. And Tierney emerged as the protagonist in a Greek tragedy, playing out in US bankruptcy court, that would determine the fate of Philadelphia’s two largest newspapers.
He was also under fire for taking a 37 percent raise, which boosted his pay from $618,000 to $850,000 just two months before the bankruptcy filing. Leaders of the Philadelphia Newspaper Guild, the union that represented reporters, were furious because they had convinced union members to give up a $25-a-week raise to help stem the company’s financial hemorrhage. Tierney, who had put $10 million of his own money into buying the papers, argued he got the raise because he was doing two jobs—CEO and publisher—which effectively saved the company $1.25 million over two years. Still, Tierney rescinded the raise amid the outcry.
Barbara and I weren’t worked up over the whole Tierney raise controversy. Tierney had saved my job, and I was grateful. As long as our paychecks covered the bills and mortgages, Barbara and I were happy. We didn’t wish for Friday or watch the clock, willing it to 5:00 p.m. Journalism defined us. Our identities were so entwined with our work that when we were on a good story, everything else in our lives seemed rosy. My marriage was perfect, my kids were headed for Harvard, and Barbara went on dates with a confident zing and sang Rolling Stones tunes—off-key—while driving to work.
Even while home with the kids, I was still in work mode. I talked to Barbara so often that when my cell phone rang, Brody would say, “I hope that’s not Barbara wanting a playdate.” Each summer Karl and I took the kids to a weekend-long YMCA family camp on a lake dotted with cabins. When I told Brody that I wanted to be in the camp talent show, he said, “What’s your talent? Work? Are you going to get up there and work?”
For the first time in her journalism career, Barbara could work twelve-hour days whenever she wanted. When Josh and Anna were younger, she often had to race out at 6:00 p.m.—literally sprinting to her car—to shuttle Josh to hockey practice or Anna to dance class, and pick up the slack at home when her husband left for one of his many business trips. She had more freedom now that her kids were in college, but she felt alone. She missed the chatter and chaos of family life, and work filled a void.
As syrupy as this sounds, on most days Barbara and I saw the job as a privilege, and the Tainted Justice series affirmed it. A tidal wave was cascading over the newspaper business, with Tierney atop the peak in Philadelphia, yet Barbara and I were still on a journalism high.
Under Tierney, the Daily News was a favorite child. Even on Tierney’s darkest days, when his boyish, contagious enthusiasm was hard to muster, he walked through the Daily News newsroom, a flurry of energy, wisps of hair fluttering over his ears, to catch an elevator to his executive suite. He could have avoided reporters and taken the hallway to loop around the Daily News, but it seemed he needed to siphon the spirit, zeal, and zaniness of the newsroom. Barbara and I thought all the chatter about stories gave Tierney a daily reminder as to why the battle was worth it.
“Love that story today about . . . ,” he shouted to reporters. If not too rushed, he stopped to chat about the big story of the day.
From the jump, Tierney and the Daily News staff got each other. Tierney was a “bare-knuckles player in a bare-knuckles town and the Daily News was a bare-knuckles kind of newspaper.” That’s how Zack Stalberg, a Daily News editor for twenty years before Michael Days took the helm, summed up the relationship. Tierney also liked the fact that the Daily News was able to do a lot more with a lot less than the Inquirer. We were like a cheap date; we were low-maintenance—content to grab a Bud Light at a dive bar.
When creditors wanted to shutter the Daily News, not because we were bleeding money but because they thought our demise would help the Inquirer’s bottom line, Tierney refused. “As long as I’m running the place, the Daily News will never be closed.”
By spring 2009, media analysts were writing print journalism’s obituary. “It’s the end of the newspaper business right now, this point in time,” pronounced longtime media watcher Michael Wolff.
Tierney wouldn’t hear it.
“We,” he told CBS News, “are the originators of the investigative work that needs to be done.”