The Inquirer and Daily News are Merging and People Will Lose Their Jobs
The newsrooms of the Inquirer, Daily News, and Philly.com will merge, the publisher of the papers told reporters today, part of a radical restructuring of parent company Philadelphia Media Network that will include job reduction in “every area” of the company, the city’s biggest news organization.
The Inquirer and Daily News will continue to publish as separate newspapers, however. Stan Wischnowski, the vice president of news operations for PMN, will reportedly be in charge of the combined newsroom.
This sucks for anyone who is about to get laid off. But unfortunately, it was a long time coming and makes a lot of business sense. The fact that one media organization had three separate or partially separate staffs – Inquirer, Daily News, Philly.com – covering virtually the same topics was not a sustainable business model in and of itself. Add in the fact that two of the outlets were newspapers, and… well, yeah.
What doesn’t make sense here is why they’ll even continue bothering to print the Daily News. Once the staffs merge, the Daily News loses its voice anyway. It still makes no sense to me why they don’t just take the best 60% of people from all three publications combined and turn them into one kick-ass newsroom that publishes the Inquirer and its website, Philly.com. All content, in both places. There’s a way to make money doing that. Anything else is just a distraction or redundant.