Philadelphia Bulletin closes

Was never a major player like its predecessor, which I worked for, but it's worth noting that another paper is shutting its door.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003978540

 

It was an awfully nice try. Good luck to all

 

They kept dropping it on my mother's doorstep for free, even though she never subscribed and never really read it. To be honest, it was a painfully inferior product compared to nearly everything else in the area.

 

Again?

 

It was even more painful for those of us who worked at the old Philadelphia Bulletin to see the same name on such an inferior product.

 

I still have a copy of the final edition of the old Bulletin, dated January 29, 1982. Amazing how it was once the largest p.m. paper in the country.

Publisher N.S. Hayden wrote a front page editorial titled "What's left to say? We did our best" that read, in part:

It's over.
And there's very little left to say, except goodbye.
... to those thousands connected with The Bulletin - who leave today because of nothing that they have done or not done - so long, peace and God bless you. You did your best, but dinosaurs don't live here any more.

That last line has stuck with me for years. Unfortunately, every day it seems like we're watching history repeat itself.

 

I was there when the Bulletin kicked ass and took names. I was also there when the bottom fell out. Yes, I'm afraid history is repeating itself in so many ways.

 

I worked for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, which is the predecessor to the current Philadelphia Bulletin which has just closed its doors. And yes Ragu, I am that old.

 

the original Bulletin dated back to the 1840s, lasted 135+ years and was a mighty newspaper for generations

this new paper started up in 2004, lasted 4 1/2 years and shared nothing with the real Bulletin except the name

 

My impression is that the owner never intended it to overtake the Inky or even the Daily News, or to be a re-creation of the old Bulletin. It was a little conservative boutique paper, like the defunct New York Sun (which also borrowed the name of a dead paper).

The times I saw it in print or online (including PDFs of Monday's finale on the Web site), it was usually 28 pages. Considering there wasn't much advertising, that wasn't a horrendous news hole and I've certainly seen less comprehensive coverage of world and national news in larger newspapers (but smaller markets) than that one. But still, it was small and incomplete compared with the competition.

What it boils down to is that the business plan apparently was to attract people who'd read it out of spite, just because they deemed the Inky and Daily News as too liberal. If I were a conservative, I'd have been offended that the owner thought it would be that easy and inexpensive to gain my business. It's a cynical view of his own kind.

 

I used to read the old Bulletin and subscribed to the new one. I never understood how it was able to stay in business; I figured it was a vanity project by the publisher. While it clearly had an agenda politically, it was a welcome voice in terms of culture coverage (especially the theater and museums) and picked up some comics which the Inquirer and Daily News had no room for (For Better or Worse, Hi and Lois). The sports (at least for pro teams) was mostly wire service game stories from the AP with locally written and decent high school coverage of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania suburbs sports (something I found hard to get now that I live in NJ); most of the locally originated pro sports consisted of columns by the sports editor. It also, beyond the AP, carried stories from Bloomberg and UPI. I am surprised it lasted this long; at 25¢ a copy, it could be an impulse buy just for the features or sudoku and comics, something a $2.00 paper is unlikely to be. It also filled in a blind spot in news coverage with disinterested coverage of the PNI bankruptcy and other internally embarrassing matters (although the PNI chairman claimed the bankruptcy coverage contained unspecified inaccuracies). That was something we had to depend on the weeklies to do prior to the Bulletin and now will have to do so again. It doesn't seem to me that, page wise, either the Philadelphia Weekly or the City Paper are in good shape.