We’ve been paying attention to the wholesale changes taking place at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and they added another new employee in the sports department:

Prince has prior stops at the Chicago Tribune, Sports Illustrated, and Sporting News. 

I was talking to somebody the other day, somebody who is pretty credible and ‘in the know,’ and they said the Inquirer is going with this “ESPN approach” (their words) where there’s going to be an editor on each of the major sports. So I guess DeAntae is the NBA guy, they’ll have a Eagles person, a Flyers person, and a Phillies person. And for the Union, who are actually the only team in town that has their shit together, Tannenwald will continue to do that himself while contributing via his other duties.

This “source,” if you want to call them that, also thinks the Inquirer might be pulling back significantly on high schools, or not covering them at all, moving forward. Rick O’Brien was one of the main guys doing that, and he took a buyout in 2020. He did a lot of local football and basketball, so he handled stories involving St. Joe’s Prep, Imhotep, Archbishop Wood, etc. Stuff like that. I’ll sniff around and see if I can confirm that.

(Edit – I forgot to mention that Phil Anastasia was a big high school guy, and he took off in November. I don’t think they’ve had anybody dedicated to high schools for a few months now, so this might be the end.)

Also, you see the Inquirer getting more diverse. The five sports department people who took buyouts this summer were all white men. They’ve since hired an Asian reporter, an Asian editor, and a Black editor. They’ve made a concerted effort to become more diverse after that newsroom revolt resulted in an Inky-commissioned study revealing that the paper really needed to address the issue, so they’ve taken steps with their recent hires to correct that.