Philadelphia Weekly

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Photographs by Jeff Fusco

On the first day, the announcement was greeted with relief.

More than a hundred people crammed into a conference room at 400 N. Broad St.-headquarters for The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News-to meet the city's unlikely new media king: Brian Tierney.

For the occasion, Tierney didn't wear the halo of a savior-though he'd just returned the city's newspapers to local ownership after years under the crusty boot heel of Knight Ridder, in recent years a media monopoly that never met a reporter it didn't want to lure into retirement.

Neither did he wear horns-though some remember him most for his aggressiveness as an ad man and public relations executive for some of the city's wealthiest and most powerful institutions.

On this first day, Tierney ascended the dais in front of a phalanx of reporters, editors and business types and became something else entirely-namely, a Man Out of Time, an identifiable face to associate with newspapers in an age when print is most often governed by huge shapeless bureaucracies.

Tierney, the face, earned applause several times. He talked about plowing dollars into the business (cue applause!), about the importance of returning the papers to private hands safe from the whims of Wall Street (cue applause!), and then he declared, "The next great era of Philadelphia journalism begins today." (Cue applause!)

Most notably he read a pledge he said each investor signed declaring they'll "not interfere with editorial," eliciting a sustained response, as if each pair of clapping hands found hope and encouragement in the other. And Tierney even got some laughs. He feigned a heart attack when the $562 million price tag for the company was announced. And he got into coy banter with former Pennsylvania Gov. Mark Schweiker.

"Brian here, to my right," said Schweiker, motioning to the Man Out of Time.

"No, Mark," said Tierney, crossing to the other side of the podium. "Say I'm on your left."

"Brian," said Schweiker, playing along as the crowd laughed, "you've never been to my left on anything."

It was a revealing moment-a little bit corny vaudeville, a little bit truth in advertising, and more than a little informative, since Schweiker himself is a pretty conservative guy. Give Tierney credit: He found a way to turn the elephant in the room-his Republican credentials-into a figure of fun.

Of course not everyone was laughing.

"I was standing there," says former Inquirer reporter Ralph Cipriano, "listening to everyone applaud, and I was thinking, 'I probably worked with this guy more than anyone else. He doesn't understand what reporters do, and more important, he doesn't think it should be done.'"

With these thoughts in mind, Cipriano says he approached Tierney after the press conference concluded. They spoke briefly and finished with a handshake (See "The Tierney I Saw Was a Bully," p. 27). The moment will be remembered less for what happened than for its symbolic connotations, as the Man Out of Time stood on the brink of his great new future-and stared into the depths of his past.

Born in Upper Darby to a father who worked in the not-so-glamorous job of claims adjusting, Brian P. Tierney took rather easily to the life of a pitchman. A natural performer, he built a quarter-mile-long hoagie on Broad Street to promote the famous Wawa convenience store chain, a stunt that signified his rise to the top. The rest is history.

"I think Brian deserves a lot of credit for keeping advertising going in this city," says Neil Oxman, himself a longtime political consultant. "The business here declined in the early '80s when all the major clients started leaving for New York. But when everyone else was getting out, Brian got in and built a big successful company."

Tierney graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979 and spent many of his early years laboring for the Republican Party.

At the tender age of 18 he sought the Republican nomination for township commissioner in Springfield, Delaware County. He lost but came back swinging the very next year, running the Penn Students for Gerald Ford campaign. He eventually worked as a field representative in the RNC in Washington, ascending the ladder there until 1983, while shuttling messages between the Reagan White House and Republican candidates nationwide.