Philadelphia Bulletin closes

Drip · Jun 3, 2009

Frank_Ridgeway said:

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.
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Daystreeet said:

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.
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Comparing the original Evening Bulletin to the now defunct Bulletin is like comparing an apple to an orange. The original was a solid fixture in the industry and won a few Pulitzers.
The latest edition at best could be thought of as an alternative publication that didn't catch on in the Delaware Valley.

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