This fall, The Inquirer will undergo more change, at a faster clip, than at any time since The Bulletin folded in 1982.
Editor Walker Lundy upended the chessboard, unveiling a new strategy that will assign three dozen more reporters – a 60 percent increase – to cover the Pennsylvania suburbs and South Jersey.
At the same time, the paper will add more space for news across much of the paper, and improve its city neighborhood, business, sports and investigative coverage. Forty journalists will be hired.
In a shift in strategy, some traditional coverage, including national politics, will be thinned. The national and foreign desks will be combined, but more reporters will be dispatched from Philadelphia to cover spot national and foreign stories.
To put more muscle into local newsgathering, Lundy will replace two-year intern reporters in the suburbs with experienced journalists, and furlough some support staff.
“The staff deployment was not aligned with what the mission of the newspaper ought to be,” he said at a staff meeting July 30.
From a journalism standpoint, there is much that is fresh in the new direction. For the first time, there will be environmental, poverty and immigration beats in the suburbs. More attention will be paid to suburban sprawl and the paper will nearly double the number of reporters covering suburban education.
Lundy said the plan was intended to boost circulation and “get more feet on the street” to report stories where most of the paper’s readers live.
But because the changes will be made within the newsroom’s current budget, there was personal pain attached to the plan, troubling many staffers.
Ten part-time editorial assistants, most of them working more than 30 hours a week, will lose their jobs. The Newspaper Guild, a union representing the support staff and journalists, vowed to fight the newsroom’s first layoffs in recent memory.
In addition, 23 positions, many of them held by veteran editors in the main newsroom, will be eliminated. They will be redeployed as part of 80 new reporting and editing assignments, most of them in the suburbs.
Here’s what readers can expect to see, beginning about Oct. 1:
The daily “B” section will be larger, with up to three more pages of space for news. It will be zoned five ways, based on geography. The paper currently zones the section three ways.
The largest zone, with the most readers, will be made up of Philadelphia and older, adjacent suburbs. It will focus on news of the city, the Main Line, Delaware County and as far north as Abington in Montgomery County. The four other zones are Chester County; Bucks County; Upper Montgomery County, and South Jersey.
Each zoned section will contain a complete metro report. But the farther readers live from the city, the less Philadelphia news they will receive.
High school sports coverage will increase, and will move back into the sports section. Death notices will continue throughout the full run of the paper, while obituaries will continue to be zoned.
The Thursday Neighbors sections in Pennsylvania will be eliminated. The eight Sunday Neighbors will have a very local focus: community voices; a dining out feature; lists of community events; arts and history columns, and real-estate transactions.
Based in the city, reporters will work new beats – including small business; sports business and investigations.
Four neighborhood beats – covering South Philadelphia; North Philadelphia; West Philadelphia and the Northeast – will be added. A fifth neighborhood reporter will continue to cover Center City.
The financing for the plan comes from collapsing the suburban reporting internship program; the layoffs; the redeployment of 23 positions, and a cut in expenses.
The suburban plan was conceived over four months by a committee of 13 editors and reporters picked by Lundy for their suburban experience.
“When we met, it was a true wrangle, a daily fistfight” over different approaches, said Metro editor Matt Golas, who chaired the task force. It was Lundy alone who decided which positions would be cut.
In early September, when samples of the new zoned “B” sections are created, I will invite members of the readers’ roundtable to review them and help us fine-tune them.
Meanwhile, get ready for a paper with more room for news and a much richer local report.
