Tierney's task at Inky, Daily News: Selling the perfect widget

Selling newspapers these days is a little like selling widgets. If the ones in your bag are designed to fit into round holes, they won't fit into square ones. If most of the people you are trying to develop as customers need widgets for square holes, you'd better get some square widgets.

So, too, it is with the challenge facing Brian P. Tierney's new ownership group running the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. For too long, those papers have sold round widgets and the customers, increasingly, have needs for square ones.

There is a little green sticker many of the employees are wearing in these final days of contract negotiations.
'We deserve a fair contract.'

Uh, no. At least not when the business is dead. Or at least hooked up to a defibrilator. Businesses change and the demand for product changes. That's the free enterprise system. The work force must change, too.

Fixing the Inquirer is a harder task than The Daily News, but doable. The Daily News' business model for some time has been closer to where the Inquirer needs to be. Sell local news and sports. Then sell more local news and sports. Let's look at sports, so important to the fabric of Philadelphia.

Give people content, both in their hands and on the internet, that they can't get on CNN, Fox News, KWY-TV or even Action News. Cut the three national sports columnist the paper has now to just one. Do you really need to read five opinion columns after every Eagles' game? Do you really have the time to read five opinion columns after every Eagles' game? We didn't think so.

Cutting two national sports columnists saves a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. That savings adds up.
On the other hand, there is an increased demand for local sports, particularly high schools. Look at Thanksgiving Day, for example. There are hundreds of games played in hundreds of stadiums in the Philadelphia area alone. Those stadiums, about 10,000 capacity, are either packed overflowing on that day or 90 percent filled. That's a lot of customers with a unique demand. And the high school season isn't just a one-day thing.

There's a demand for those widgets.

For too many years, the widget the Inquirer has been selling doesn't fit. Too much invested in out-of-town, out-of-state, out-of-country, bureaus. Too many journalists hired with no connection, no sense or feel about the city of Philadelphia or what its people care about. Too much of an attitude of both entitlement and smugness. 'This is the news you SHOULD read, whether you like it or not.'

That entitlement is reflected in these final days of negotiations: 'We deserve a fair contract.' Well, you know what 'fair' is? Fair is selling stuff that people want and then making money off that enterprise. Fair is creating a business model where more money flows in than flows out.

A good way to start would be building a widget that fits the target market.