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Les Bowen Talks Philadelphia Inquirer Departure, Among Other Things
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It’s a summer of change at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where a half-dozen veteran sports writers decided to take buyouts and move on.
You know the story by now. The paper experienced an employee revolt, asked Temple University to conduct a study on operations, and the resulting ‘audit’ showed that the company was too white/male/not diverse enough. So now the Inky is hiring women and journalists of color in an effort to more credibly represent the region.
One of the guys who took the buyout was longtime Eagles writer Les Bowen, and he spoke about it with Kyle Pagan on the Everything’s Phine podcast, with that part of the discussion picking up around the 39:00 mark:
https://youtu.be/PSMgej0N6HA
Les, in part:
“The financial model is broken. They’re trying to build it back with digital subscriptions, but there’s still an awful lot of people that work there, frankly, and the other thing is that half of them got older. A lot of us are boomers and came in the 80s, to the papers, not our fault, but we were young then. We were the new breed, and so they hired a whole bunch of people during that very flush period for newspapers. They hired us all then we all got old.
Another thing happened in sports, where Pat McLoone was our assistant managing editor, in charge of the whole sports operation. They kind of eased Pat out at the beginning of the year because they wanted someone younger with more of a digital outlook. I think really he was a scapegoat for, they haven’t gotten the levels of digital subscriptions they would like, and Pat was wonderful editor and person… so that affected me because I’d known Pat since I got there in 1983.”
This is a sentiment shared by a lot of people I’ve spoken with in recent weeks. They liked working for McLoone and were bummed to see him go. His job was always safe under former editor Stan Wischnowski, but when Stan resigned following the Buildings Matter, Too debacle, McLoone was exposed.
That’s how it was described to me.
Anyway, good interview with Les. He also talks about the Jeff McLane punching incident.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com