Philadelphia Daily News gets a little closer to rival

By: Tom MacDonald

The Philadelphia Daily News will soon be printed as an edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Daily News will be published as an edition of the Inquirer effective March 30th. The papers will remain separate for now.

By: Tom MacDonald
tmacdonald@whyy.org

The Philadelphia Daily News will soon be printed as an edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Daily News will be published as an edition of the Inquirer effective March 30th. WHYY’s Tom MacDonald reports the papers will remain separate for now.

Script:
Newspaper officials say the Inquirer and Daily News will maintain their separate staffs and compete for stories. Rick Edmunds of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies doesn’t see anything to worry about for now, but has seen mergers come out of similar moves in the past.

Edmunds: “Example would be the Atlanta Journal and Constitution operation as separate papers for a number of years though there was quite a bit of duplication in the stories they ran and then eventually they made it into a single paper, the Journal-Constitution.”

Zack Stalberg, who was editor of the Daily News for twenty years before moving on to head up the Committee of 70, says a consolidation would affect what he calls rowhouse Philadelphia, the group of people who he says the newspaper targets.

Stalberg: “I think the town suffers and some viewpoints never get expressed, and some candidates never get endorsed.”

Managers say the move could boost advertising revenue for the company, which is currenty under bankruptcy protection.

Listen:
Click on the play button below or right click on this link and choose “Save Link As” to download. [audio: reports20090303paper.mp3]