Pigs weren’t flying around The Philadelphia Inquirer’s historic white deco tower on North Broad Street—not yet anyway. But this was a gleeful day for Brian P. Tierney, even if he’d forfeited the element of surprise. For months, the chief executive officer of Philadelphia Media Holdings had been telling anyone who would listen that the spring Audit Bureau of Circulations figures would show an increase in Inquirer circulation. The rise—the first since 2004—would be small, he knew, but symbolically significant after years of plummeting readership under the penny-pinching management of Knight Ridder, which had budgeted for another 7 percent decline. And it would contrast nicely with continuing circulation drops at other major metro dailies and the Inquirer’s suburban competition.

It would make one hell of a story—and one hell of an ad.

So on April 30, when news broke that average paid daily circulation was up 2,136 (to 352,593) for the year ending in March, the former advertising and public relations guru wasn’t waiting in his twelfth-floor office. He was standing by the elevators, impatient to spin a triumphal tale about this modest 0.6 percent hike. “Who’s having our success right now? Nobody!” he crowed. “Go look at the numbers.”

Only ten months before, Tierney and a consortium of local investors had taken control of the Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News, their Web site, philly.com, and several smaller properties from the McClatchy Company. Now, after some nasty detours, the fifty-year-old Tierney had achieved at least the beginning of the turnaround he’d promised. “It’s about setting out an optimistic vision, it’s about focusing on quality in everything that we do—first and foremost journalistically,” Tierney said. He’d hired a stellar management team, he said, and rousted his employees from their chronic malaise. And he was pouring $22 million into the...

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