Normally, when media companies are forced to make layoffs, they self-report them. As we noted a month and a half ago, that’s what The Washington Post did. The Philadelphia Inquirer? Not so much. While Kevin Kinkead of Crossing Broad reported, on December 6, 2022, that “Philadelphia Inquirer ‘Will Need to Consider Layoffs’ if New Buyout Number isn’t Reached,” a site search for Inquirer layoffs, last conducted at 8:06 AM EDT this morning,, yielded nothing at all about impending layoffs.

But now, there’s this:

Despicable, disgraceful layoffs at The Philadelphia Inquirer (@PhillyInquirer).

A message from our president, @dmastrull:⤵️

— The NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia (@PhillyNewsGuild) January 27, 2023

In a series of eight separate tweets, beginning here, Diane Mastrull, President of the NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia, told us this:

It is with a mix of disgust and outrage that I report that four of our members, three from the newsroom and one from advertising, were laid off this morning.

We hear over and over how our ownership here at The Inquirer “is different,” that ownership by a nonprofit does not involve the same financial pressures as ownership by for-profit companies and greedy hedge funds.

And yet, look at us, doing the same unimaginative, inhumane thing as all those other owners: putting committed employees out of work.

What a dark day this is, coming on the heels of company meetings touting the excitement of the new office we’ll be opening next week. The nourishment stations! The chairs! The views!

None of it makes a damn bit of difference when you are a company sending employees to the unemployment line.

We sold a printing plant and got a $10 million forgivable pandemic-assist loan from the government, and still our leadership can’t figure out how to run this company without layoffs.

Cuts that follow the other kind: buyouts.

But what a view the new offices will have!

Just sayin’.

My heart breaks for our four members. Keep them in yours today — and prepare for a fight to get what we deserve at the bargaining table.

In solidarity,
@dmastrull

We have previously mentioned the begging letters that we receive from the Lenfest Institute for Journolism^[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading, oops, sorry, Journalism, asking for donations above and beyond the subscription price. The Leftist Lenfest Institute is the non-profit organization which owns the Inquirer, and not only do they believe we should contribute, but they also want the federal government to subsidize reporters’ salaries.

As a supporter of newspapers, of print journalism, due to my poor hearing, the last thing I want to see is newsrooms shrink and reporters and staff laid off. That said, The First Street Journal has been very critical of the Inquirer’s biased coverage, based on publisher Elizabeth Hughes stated goal of making the Inquirer an “anti-racist news organization,” because in the application of that, the newspaper has resorted to censoring the news.

The Inky went so far as to tell readers that it was a “white paper” in a “black city,” and would have to change, even though the 2020 census found that only 38.3% of the city were non-Hispanic black. If the Inky were trying to drive away white subscribers, this would have been an excellent way to do it!

The very #woke^[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading Inquirer, under Miss Hughes and Gabriel Escobar, the Executive Editor, does not want you to know about the daily bloodbath in the city’s streets. Instead, the publisher, the editor, and probably much of the staff want you to believe that the greatest threat of sudden death in the black community comes from a radical fringe of white mass killers, rather than from inside the community themselves. It suits their political agenda, but it has nothing to do with the truth.

The newspaper’s editorial slant is very heavily toward the left, the hard left actually. The Editorial Board have been all-in on homosexual and transgender activism, and former President Trump has been living, rent-free, in their heads for over six years now. The newspaper is pretty much a dedicated Democratic Party mouthpiece.

I’ve said it before: if I had Jeff Bezos’ money, I’d do what he did with The Washington Post: I’d buy the Inquirer and rescue it from its financial problems. But I would also clean house, I would make sure that the newspaper really did cover all the news, and publish all of the news, letting the chips fall where they may, regardless of whose feelings might get hurt. That’s what real journalists are supposed to do. With newspapers moving heavily toward digital rather than on-paper publishing, the space limitations of the past are mostly gone now, so newspapers really can publish all of the news.

Is the failure of the Inky to do that at least partially responsible for its financial woes? Did the four people who were laid off on Friday lose their jobs because America’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, the newspaper of record for our seventh largest metropolitan area has chosen not to report politically incorrect news?

Well, who can say, but the newspaper under its current leadership has not done much to make itself relevant to the majority of both city and metropolitan area residents. Yes, the advent of the 24-hour news networks and the internet have cut deeply into newspaper readership and subscriptions, and concomitantly into advertising revenue, but the Inquirer has managed to do a bang-up job of alienating more readers than some. As NewsGuild President Mastrull noted, the paper is owned by a supposedly non-profit journalism institute, but can’t even manage to break even.