In resigning Monday as executive sports producer at
Philly.com, one of the three most senior positions with the website affiliated
with the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, Matt Romanoski said he was
exhausted — physically, emotionally and mentally.
He grew tired of the infighting between ownership factions
and the criticism of Philly.com, but is proud of the work he did there for
almost three years.
In an interview Tuesday morning, Romanoski offered a
spirited defense of Alessandra “Lexie” Norcross, the 26-year-old daughter of
former co-owner George Norcoss who has been criticized, largely anonymously by
Inquirer newsroom sources for her efforts as the company’s vice president of
digital operations and corporate services. Lexie Norcross left the company
earlier this month after an ownership faction led by her father failed to
submit the highest bid in an auction for the Interstate General Media, the parent
company to the Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com.
“If the industry is indeed dying, it is via suicide,”
Romanoski wrote in his resignation letter. “And its being committed by a
faction of old ideas trying to smother new ones without even realizing that the
clock ticks closer to midnight with every one of their perceived victories.
Those new ideas should be cultivated and built upon no matter their source — be
they from an incoming octogenarian owner [H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest] or an outgoing
`20-something’ daughter of one.”
An IGM spokesman said the company has a policy of not
discussing personnel matters.
Romanoski, 48, has spent 25 years as a journalist, working
at The Star-Ledger and AOL’s sports website FanHouse before joining Philly.com
as executive sports producer in August 2011. He oversaw six full-time and three
part-time Web producers and spent 90 minutes commuting to the job from his home
just north of Princeton.
As Romanoski describes it, since Philly.com editor Wendy
Warren left nearly two years ago to become editorial manager for
NBCWashington.com, three executive producers led editorial efforts for the
website: himself (sports), Robert McGovern (news) and Leah Kauffman (lifestyle
and entertainment). Romanoski said Lexie Norcross filled the void temporarily
with plans to replace Warren. He admits she made some mistakes, but Romanoski
said Norcross never interfered with the editorial process and focused largely
on advertising and marketing efforts. He said nepotism might have been a factor
in her landing the job but Norcross earned her keep.
“Because of who her father is, she could have mailed it in
but she didn’t,” Romanoski said. “She came in here and fell in love with the
business and became a news junkie. She would suggest things and often we would
turn them down and she would walk away and it would be the end of it. I’ve
worked for people who would say, “I don’t care. It’s my idea. Do it.” She was
not a seasoned journalist and she made some mistakes when she started, but I
found a lot of the criticism of her to be sexist and ageist.”
Romanoski said the ownership battles over the last year were
extremely detrimental to the editorial process and product. The late Lewis Katz
was seen as a champion of the newsroom. His longtime companion was Inquirer
City Editor Nancy Phillips and the ownership feud that Katz and Lenfest had
with George Norcross, William Hankowsky and Joseph Buckelew was over plans to
fire Inquirer Editor William Marimow.
“We were run by Lexie, who’s father was on one side,” Romanoski
said. “And then you had [Inquirer City Editor Nancy Phillips], who was dating
Lewis Katz, on the other side. It caused untold headaches.”
When Romanoski and his team began to manage Philly.com’s
editorial side, he said he took a “stagnant collection of that day’s Inquirer
and Daily News stories and turned it into a living, breathing entity with
stories that people wanted to read. The problem is some people wanted it to be
a newspaper website and didn’t take to it.”
On the sports side, Romanoski formed partnerships with
Bleacher Report and the Sporting News and brought in bloggers with
sophisticated analysis of teams and sports. For example, he hired blogger Jimmy
Kempski to cover the Eagles. Earlier this year, Kempski wrote an article saying
the Eagles were seriously considering parting ways with star wide receiver
DeSean Jackson.
“Jimmy broke the DeSean story,” Romanoski said. “He said the
Eagles were seriously considering cutting him. And he got hammered. [Readers]
said he should be fired. The Inquirer wrote a story that basically said `stop
the madness, DeSean’s not going anywhere.’ ” That’s fine. People have different
sources. But Jimmy had the story right.”
He also noted that one of his producers, Jonathan
Tannenwald, started a soccer blog called The GoalKeeper, where he delves deeper
into the sport than reporters at the Inquirer and Daily News do.
“Jonathan took essentially a fringe sport and made it his
own by creating one of the best blogs in the region while also working the
desk,” Romanoski said.
But there was also much criticism directed at Philly.com,
which was accused of downplaying hard news in favor of fluff and tawdry
stories, establishing a Philly.com newsroom that competed against Inquirer and
Daily News reporters and giving Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett his own column.
Norcross took the brunt of that criticism, which Romanoski believes is largely
unfounded and came from Inquirer newsroom management.
“The Inquirer was the crown jewel of the company for years
and is still a great newspaper, but you are not going to stop progress,”
Romanoski said. “Sometimes when you would ask why that story was important,
someone would respond by saying that it won awards. Well, people don’t always
read stories that win awards. But there are stories written just to win awards.
There is all of this criticism of click bait. But I’ll take click bait over
awards bait any day of the week... We do rely heavily on metrics. I remember
one person referred to things we did as click bait and the example he gave was
actually an Inquirer story.”
When asked about the company’s future. Romanoski said IGM
needs a companywide digital plan and he was concerned that Katz and Lenfest
said after the auction that they did not have a plan but were looking to hire
someone who did. He is concerned that Lenfest might not value the website.
“The plan was to bring in one editor to oversee Philly.com,”
he said. “I still think that’s the plan, but we’ve never really been told.
There should be one person who has enough juice that they can go to bat for
Philly.com with the rest of the company.”
Source: Philadelphia
Business Journal
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