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Newspaper Wars
by Laura Coxson
November 2004
Last May, Knight Ridder Inc. did something it does every few months—it bought up a string of neighborhood newspapers, paying an estimated $1.5 million for Jonathan Stern's Star publications, which had long brought the news of births, anniversaries and upcoming community meetings to a chain of seven Philadelphia neighborhoods from Port Richmond to Fairmount. What had once been a rubber cement and graph paper operation in a shabby office near the Girard Avenue El would now be run out of Knight Ridder's suburban office park in Trevose and printed at their plant in Conshohocken, along with the company's flagship Philadelphia properties, the Inquirer and Daily News.
Within a few weeks, however, something odd happened. The readers rebelled. They would not read this revamped Star, with its strange new flag and typeface, its new office too far away to drop their first Holy Communion announcements in person. They would start a new newspaper. And lo, a new newspaper, the Spirit, was born on Girard Avenue. But this is not just the story of a community rising up to defend itself against a multibillion-dollar corporation. It is the story of a neighborhood coming to terms with its own changing identity, the story of a place where people still pay attention to who owns their neighborhood newspaper.
Throughout the 1990s, Fishtown had year after year of the status quo—the same dozen corner taverns, the same static real estate prices—and it wasn't especially thrilled with that, either. But things started changing around the time that Standard Tap owner William Reed bought a house in the neighborhood and scores of young people began biking across town for a midnight pint at his remodeled Johnny Brendas. Soon, men in gray turtlenecks started showing up at every open house. Then came the pilates studio, the coffeeshop and the vintage boutique. And all of a sudden, a big media company took interest in a little weekly newspaper.
“They like traditions, they like things to stay the same,” says Maryanne Milligan, born and raised in Fishtown, of her old neighbors. Milligan, 43, lives in New Jersey, but has kept up on neighborhood goings-on through her older sister. The sale of the Star was a major going-on, and Milligan had heard talk in the neighborhood of starting a new one. Milligan and her husband, a Fishtown native just retired after twenty-four years in PepsiCo management, decided to learn more, and soon met Carol Denker.
The Milligans had long left Fishtown by the time Denker arrived. A Brooklyn native, Denker had come to Philadelphia with her first husband and two young daughters in the late 1970, one of those wiry young creative types whose life would be a constant struggle for balance.
“I was born with a lot of talents; writing and music and art,” she says now. “But I was always trying to find something more normal, not as intense.” She worked as an art therapist, a portrait artist and schoolteacher; she married three times, but each one ended sadly.
“In 1998 I was flattened emotionally and physically. I had to turn to myself and say, who am I?” She walked outside her door and found a copy of the Fishtown Star with a large advertisement inside seeking new writers. A few days later, she was hired to write at the old office on Girard Avenue. In those days the Star was edited by Debbie Szumowski, who worked eighty hours a week on the Star and somehow inspired the same dedication in others. Szumowski put Denker to work on writing about “pancake breakfasts and oyster dinners” in the River Wards. Fishtown, Denker found, was a place of captivating contrasts. There were geriatrics living next door to rock musicians, philosophers next to general contractors, philosophers who worked as general contractors. The neighborhood's burgeoning creative side was balanced by a backbone of tradition and domesticity and warmth. There were also bullies and trash-strewn lots and occasional undercurrents of racism, but Denker, like Szumowski, was the type to see the promise in things, and she saw promise on every one of Fishtown's diagonal streets. She bought a house on Montgomery Avenue. “Basically I'm an optimist,” she says. “There are all of these little pots of gold.”
In 2001, Szumowski was stricken with ovarian cancer. From a phone next to her hospital bed, she directed Denker on how to edit and lay out the paper, an image that remained with Denker even after the paper unceremoniously moved to Trevose. Denker knew the spirit of the old Star was missing, and soon realized that would be the name of her own paper—the Spirit—where she could give Fishtown the kind of paper Szumowski had taught her to run. Denker met with the Milligans alone at Silk City in mid-June.
“We were very impressed,” says Maryanne Milligan. Within a week, they agreed to fund the newspaper, and Denker quit her job at Fishtown's Hackett School. Now Denker hopes to carry her mentor's legacy forward.
“She was amazing, because she only did what she believed in. Watching her, I realized that it was possible to do more than just pander to the worst in people,” she says, “but to give them something better.”
Denker wanted to carry her young newspaper into the future as much as she wanted to root it in the past. She rented an office from Reed, by now a staple of the new Fishtown. She bought six computers and a layout program, and sought new contributors on the online bulletin board Craigslist. She went before the neighborhood associations and social clubs to tout the Spirit as a paper that would never lose touch with its community and its roots.
Denker wrote an editor's letter on the front page of the first issue, describing the Spirit as a “celebration of old and new” in Fishtown. The issue ran pictures of Catholic school kids, a story about the pilates studio and a side-by-side profile of two neighborhood activists, one 91 and the other 28. It was twenty pages long and took three near all-nighters and one bona fide all nighter to get to press.
“I went home thinking, this was not a good decision,” says Denker. “It was scary, and we were so tired ... and the next day I walked outside wishing I had my safe school job back.” But then the stream of phone calls, and emails, and old-fashioned letters began to arrive, washing away her doubts. The newspaper was a success, with Fishtown old and new. An Irish Catholic fraternal organization, sent the Spirit a letter praising the newspaper for being “not willing to accept what the new owners [of the Star] print and drop in front of their doors once a week.”
The staff of the Star, a mixture of old Girard Ave. veterans and new Knight Ridder administrators, soon began reacting to their new competition. One day in early October, a man showed up at the Spirit offices and said he was looking for a job. A Spirit employee recognized him as a writer for the Knight Ridder-owned Northeast Times, which shares an office with the new Star. (The writer in question, John Lowry, confirmed in a brief phone conversation that he had visited the “small and dingy” Spirit office, but would not elaborate. “I don't really think it has anything to do with you,” he said, and refused to answer further questions.)
Patty-Pat Kozlowski, a longtime Star writer has continued writing for Knight Ridder's Star because its editor, Matt Pettaccio, is a friend. Kozlowski, a neighborhood fixture for her stories, her sense of humor and her (once-450 pound) girth, had worked for the Star newspapers longer than anyone, and she felt compelled to help out her old colleagues. When she had a barbecue to celebrate the one-year anniversary of her stomach stapling surgery, Pettaccio attended; when the sale was announced, she thought it would open the door for the men's fledgling journalism careers.
But the sight of the new Star newspapers, which come out on Wednesdays, still stacked up on the weekend, made her sad. “People used to wait on their doorsteps on Wednesday afternoons to get the paper,” she remembers. Now people were waiting to see the new Spirit. Kozlowski, who works as an aide in City Hall by day, thought about moving her freelance journalism career to the Spirit, where her knowledge of and contacts in the Port Richmond neighborhood could extend their geographic reach. Star editors, in turn, began suggesting the paper could up Kozlowski's pay if she continued to write for their newspaper. Kozlowski confirmed the existence of a “bidding war” over her work. And then there were the rumors. Kozlowski was having a beer at a neighborhood tavern when she first heard that “people at the Star” had been “telling people” that if she left the Star for the Spirit, it would be the death knell for her occasional gig penning opinion columns for the Knight Ridder-owned Philadelphia Daily News. “Nobody at the Daily News told me that,” she says. “But when you hear something enough times … ” she trails off.
For now, Kozlowski says, she's staying with the Star. Some advertisers, on the other hand, have made the switch, like Jim Lee, owner of Fishtown's Philadelphia Beer Company. “All the customers had complained when the Star was sold to the Inquirer and moved to Trevose,” he said. Lee had advertised in the Stern-owned Star and gave Knight-Ridder a shot. But, he said, they weren't very attentive. “[The old Star] had a guy come in every week, but with the new company, they just came once in a blue moon. One holiday I forgot to put an ad in, and the next week, the guy from the Star came in. I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? Why would you come the week after?' Holidays are very good days for beer distributors.” He gave up on the Star and has been running an ad in the Spirit ever since. The Star, he says, was quick to take notice.
“Ever since they saw my ad in the Spirit, they've been coming in every week, lowering the price.” He has no plans to return to the Star, no matter how low the price gets. “That's not the point anymore,” he said.
Pat Buzine, who's has been selling ads for the Star for over twenty years, said she was unaware of any price wars, but did say that some longstanding Star advertisers were experimenting with running ads in both papers. “It's a new product,” she said. “Competition keeps us fresh.”
But to Denker, the experience of creating the Spirit was much more than making a new product. “The first issue was very hard,” she remembers. “It was almost like having a baby—you don't want to remember the pain afterward. But the response! In this day and age, there's that feeling that you never got more than what you pay for, that there's nothing human. But our writing and our graphics are full of extras. We give you a lot. We love doing this: that's the feeling we put across. And now, we're in a groove.”
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