The Philadelphia story: PRSA member Brian Tierney takes pride in running his hometown daily newspapers

October 12, 2007

Copyright © 2007 PRSA. All rights reserved.

The following article appears in the October issue of PR Tactics.

When Brian Tierney, Esq., succeeded in taking control of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News in June 2006, journalists pounced.  As a former PR practitioner, he had sometimes been at odds with his hometown papers on behalf of clients. As chief executive of Philadelphia Media Holdings, the company he formed with local investors to buy the papers, he pledged to become a “zealous advocate” for the dailies.

In this interview with Tactics managing editor Alison Stateman, Tierney spoke with considerable pride about the apparent turnaround he has begun. For one, circulation, which, along with marketing he heavily invested in, were up at the Inquirer — the first time since 2004 — according to the spring Audit Bureau of Circulations figures, and so was company morale. “Of the top 20 newspapers in America, we’ve gone from 19th in terms of year over year sales momentum to No. 3, behind Houston and Seattle for the first six months of the year,” Tierney said, sounding especially pleased given the challenges he has faced since assuming leadership. Among those challenges: a national decline in print advertising, contentious labor negotiations that almost led to a strike and a round of layoffs at the Inquirer. Tierney, a longtime PRSA member who is a keynote speaker at the PRSA International Conference in Philadelphia this month, talked about the obstacles he’s faced and the pleasures to be had from running a print news operation today.

In coverage surrounding the creation of Philadelphia Media Holdings and your acquisition of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, much has been made of your PR background and how it might not be conducive to running a news organization. As a newsmaker, how do you perceive how others view public relations and what do you make of it?

Well, you know, it’s interesting, because I started in public relations. By the time I stepped out of my role [at Tierney Communications], we probably had 50 PR people and close to 200 advertising people. But when somebody wanted to put up a flag of concern, they didn’t say I was a lawyer or an advertising person or anything like this, they talked about my PR background.

I think that it’s just how [the media] put together a shorthand on it. I understand that. One of the things that I said when we took over is, I am, as a lawyer, trained to be a zealous advocate for my clients, and now I’m going to be a zealous advocate for this paper and this news organization, and totally respect the editorial independence. I think people have seen that 100 percent, that the integrity of the newsroom has actually never been stronger than it is right now.

I’m a businessman who happens to have an expertise in marketing, communications and public relations and advertising, and in direct mail.
So, what I’ll apply myself to are business skills and negotiating the labor contracts, which was an important thing for us last fall. We’re one of the few papers in America that had an increase in circulation in March, and I believe we’re going to have a nice increase in circulation in the fall as well because I’m a marketer and we’re emphasizing marketing. We’ve created a new role of chief marketing officer, which didn’t exist at the company.

I noticed that you have been investing heavily in circulation and marketing. Why that focus over content, first?

Because we already had a terrific newspaper. If the answer is to turn this around, to add 500 journalists, I would do that. But when you have a $480 million company, and we were spending $300,000 on marketing, that was a pretty easy decision.

Do you think that your background in advertising and communications helped you see the need for more marketing and promotion?

I don’t know. I think anybody should have seen this. My whole business, the core of the financial health of the news, of our media company, is based on the promise that I make to an advertiser that if you market yourself and you use my vehicle, my newspapers, you’ll grow your business.  And yet we weren’t doing that ourselves.

I told our folks that we’re not going to cut the marketing dollars. That will be the last thing we cut. We’re going to find other efficiencies, but we’re going to invest back in.  And we’re spending $14 million on marketing and circulation this year.  And lo and behold, when all the other newspapers around this region are off, our audience is up. Our advertising sales people have a terrific story to tell, which is at a time when, in this marketplace, the local evening news is off 12 percent and all the other newspapers around this region are off, but our audience is up. There’s this boost of morale and excitement about being part of a growing company that’s out there in the community, that’s locally owned.

Our research is showing — and it’s clear to everybody who’s in this marketplace if you talk to people, from CEOs to cab drivers — that the papers are better today than the day we walked in. The papers are better journalistically. The circulation is up. So, not bad for a PR guy.

What attracted you to investing so heavily in the newspaper business at a time when so many people are saying the format is dead or dying?

First of all, I would not have done this in another part of the country. I did this because I knew these papers very well, having been the [city’s] largest advertising agency.  And I knew that the core of the problem here — and I don’t want to say that I’ve got some answer for the entire industry, because I don’t, and I would never want to run one of these huge companies that is in 38 markets. That’s a big challenge. But here I saw the gem . . .  you know, this is the fourth-largest market in America. It’s a healthy market. It’s not growing like a weed but it’s also got [industries like] pharmaceutical, health care, professional services, education. We have the second-largest concentration of college students in America.

So, it’s a nice, growing market with a good paper that could be made even better, and with an advertising sales capability that I knew could be greatly enhanced. They weren’t responsive to advertisers, they were slow to move, and that’s where we’re really leaning in, and that’s where I guess I saw the opportunity here. So would I want to buy a chain of newspapers? I don’t think so, but maybe.

I also think the problems of the newspaper business are being way overplayed. Newspapers as a business have more revenue right now than all of television combined. We have more revenue than all the TV stations combined in this market. We have the most newspapers and have the No. 1 Web site by far.

What’s often forgotten is that a well-written, well-designed newspaper is the most efficient way to find a variety of information.In 10 or 15 minutes you can go through our paper or The New York Times and get much more information than you can by going online in the morning. It’s not an RSS feed where you’re getting exactly what you want. Instead, it’s a chance to travel through areas and read about things that you wouldn’t have thought about. And I think that is way undersold by newspapers.

You wouldn’t really get that sense, though, from some of the forecasts.

You wouldn't get it from reading the newspapers. The problem is print journalists are so incredibly, some would say honest about the situation, others would say they beat themselves up unnecessarily. I read something just recently. There’s a headline: “Newspaper predicted to go below online audience.”  Well you know what? Broadcast is predicted to be off even more.

Do you think that newspapers, as they are now, are still going to exist, or do you see them moving completely online?

I think that the printed product will be around 10 years from now. It may be that instead of being 50 cents a day, it’ll be $2.50 a day because I think the price of the product is very low.  We may have fewer people reading it, but you know, I really don’t care if people get it on a little reader or PDA. The thought of someone holding a device with a 4-inch by 3-inch screen and reading a long editorial in The New York Times — I don’t see that happening, to be honest with you. I certainly don’t see this mass of people who are over 35 years or 40 years of age doing it because it’s just cumbersome to read it like that.

Could be, though. I always tell our people that a key for us is, in this market, to be the No. 1 source of news information. So, who might be having problems? The smaller papers that don’t have the resources that we have, that don’t have the credibility that we have.

A problem of the business has been that newspapers, up until 2001, 2002, could live kind of a fat and happy life. They were making so much money, and you had advertising sales people who could basically wait for the order. You sometimes had folks running them from a business side who weren’t the savviest people around, whereas now, we’ve got people who get it and are progressive.

There have been concerns raised about your takeover of news concerns and, more recently, that of Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal, about how Murdoch in particular might be too involved in the news, in manipulating coverage.

If he starts manipulating the news he’s going to devalue the [paper]. We faced that a little bit, people saying, “Oh, well you guys manipulate the news.” And I said, “We have several billionaires in my group. I’ve had a certain amount of financial success as well. We’d be pretty stupid to take the asset that we have, which is the editorial integrity, and screw around with that.” In fact, people have seen clearly that that’s the case. There’s a tremendous asset here, tremendous opportunities.  And I think that’s why you’re seeing guys like Sam Zell and Rupert Murdoch and some others looking closely at it.

How did you go about changing company morale, which was low when you took over?

You just communicate. I just talked and talked and met with small groups and  with large groups. Now the morale is terrific because people see we’re up. Circulation is up. People love that. They’re hearing the radio ads; they’re seeing our marketing campaigns. Advertising sales were third best among all the newspapers in the country. We’ve added things like the “Inquirer Express,” which is the entire back of a section, with the whole paper kind of in synopsis form.

We’re focusing on customer service, too. We now track every complaint about a paper being wet. If you call, I always tell people, “If you have a problem with your paper, call my office. Don’t call an 800 number.” Because we have a publisher’s hotline, we track it every night. Every night I get a report of complaints that we have. It gets an ID number. Because we live here. I’m not just some corporate suit who hopes I get transferred to Miami or San Jose. I’ve got my money in the game.

How involved are you in the day-to-day operations?

I run it. I’m the chief executive officer.

In terms of the news division?

Oh, I don’t make the editorial decisions. I make sure that they have the resources. I’ve hired an editor who I have complete confidence in. And I will get involved by saying things like, “Gee, I’d love to see a more vibrant business section, what do we need to do it?”

You know, it’s a big organization, 2,500 employees. We’ve got capital decisions to make. It’s a big operation. I don’t get involved with the day-to-day, with the labor discussions. The idea of the CEO is to hire the most talented people, who do things that you couldn’t possibly do yourself, and set a tone, a strategic vision for it, and then kind of get out of the way. I do get very involved with advertising sales. I’ve been to California twice in the last month. I go out with major pitches, yeah.  And people are amazed. When I went out to Hollywood, we met with all the studios. And I got meetings with senior folks. You don’t see many publishers who do it. Well why wouldn’t I do it? That’s where I can really do the most. It’s a good time. It’s a lot of fun.

And you know what the other part of it is? It’s important work. If what we do here, if we don’t do it, my community, this region, the fourth-largest region in America, suffers. It’s our folks who investigated and went through 11,000 death records and found that 20 children in the care of the Department of Human Services of Philadelphia had died while under [their care]. We’re the ones who find out that the city of Camden [N.J.] is cheating on its test scores, trying to make the schools look better than they are. We’re the ones that find out that the day-care center is being built on the contaminated site, and on and on and on.

What has it been like personally running these two papers in your hometown?

It’s terrific. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done with passion.  And this is the hardest job I’ve ever had. This is very challenging.

What about it makes it so?

Well, it’s a big organization, and you’re trying to change a culture, which is a culture of the past. These news organizations were big and powerful and they didn’t have to be really aggressive on advertising sales or customer-service focused, so changing that culture is hard work. But it’s super rewarding. It’s important work. When I pick up the paper and I see our folks have broken a story, that’s pretty cool. I used to get a real excitement when my clients would get a great story, or when an ad campaign broke and you’d get the results of the sales. But this feels more important at this point in my life.

So, what do you hope to ultimately achieve?

I want us to continue to grow. I want us to continue to build, particularly online; I want us to become even stronger and larger. We want to create new things online that start from Philadelphia and that go nationally and internationally as well. We’ve looked at a series of acquisition opportunities.  And I hope that 10 years from now Philadelphia Media Holdings is not a half-billion-dollar company but a $2 billion company.

But the key to doing all those things is going to be doing what we do today and tomorrow extremely well. It’s every single day. It’s like how I built my agency. I never said, “Gee, I hope we’re really large.” I just said, “We’ve got to focus on being really great.  And if we’re really great at what we do, we’ll grow.” And we sure did.

So that’s the same way here. If you focus on being the absolute best today, tomorrow’s paper, tomorrow’s customer service delivery, the billing, how we handle issues online, attracting the smartest people, if we continue to do those things, I think we’ve got a terrific future.

Celebrating 60 Years of Leadership and Legacy —
In Collaboration with 
Tuesday Luncheon
2007 PRSA International Conference
Oct. 22, 11:45 a.m. — 1:15 p.m.
Keynote Speaker -
Brian Tierney, Esq.
Chief Executive Officer
Philadelphia Media Holdings and publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News

 

 

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