JONATHAN VALANIA "Fear About What Comes Next"
Did Inky Editor Walker Lundy resign because Knight Ridder won't stop cutting costs?
Shock and awe hit 400 N. Broad St. Monday afternoon when Philadelphia Inquirer Editor Walker Lundy stepped down after just a year and a half on the job.
Publisher Bob Hall delivered the news to a stunned newsroom staff. Rumors that Lundy was resigning had been worming their way through the newsroom all weekend. By Monday morning staffers were hearing about Lundy's imminent departure from colleagues at newspapers outside the Knight Ridder chain, which owns both the Inquirer and the Daily News.
Finally, a last-minute memo came down from Managing Editor Anne Gordon, informing the staff that Hall would deliver a major announcement in the conference room in nine minutes. According to staffers present at the meeting, Hall said Lundy's resignation had been tendered days before, though the announcement was not to come until later. But as the rumors became rampant, Hall decided to move up the timetable for the announcement.
Lundy was reportedly on a plane returning home to Philadelphia. After announcing Lundy's departure, Hall opened the floor for a question-and-answer session.
"The thrust of most of the questions was 'What is really going on here?'" says reporter Dick Polman, an Inky newsroom veteran. "If things were supposedly going so great for Walker, then why would he not wait around a couple of years until he hit retirement age--unless there is something else going on."
When Lundy was brought on board in November 2001, he was widely seen in the Inky newsroom as a Knight Ridder bagman, installed to cut newsroom costs and implement a plan to extend the paper's reach into the lucrative suburbs and exurbs of the tristate area. Many in the newsroom found his aw-shucks Midwestern style disarming and affable, but the goodwill gradually diminished as he implemented his suburban strategy, which was the cause of instability and resentment in the newsroom. Staffers say Lundy retreated into his office, becoming almost a non-presence.
"Walker never, ever connected with the staff," says a source inside the newsroom. "There was no sense of loyalty to that man. None at all."
Sources at the paper point out that Lundy often banged heads with the business side over cost-cutting, specifically with Fred Mott, who became president and general manager of Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. (PNI), the parent company of both the Inquirer and the Daily News, last September. Before coming to PNI, Mott served as publisher of The State, a Knight Ridder paper located in Columbia, S.C. According to one source, the Knight Ridder front office put Mott on a mission to cut an additional $100 million out of the Inky budget.
It was Mott--not Lundy--who was seen as one of the primary players in the decision to kill the Sunday Inquirer magazine. "Lundy fought hard against it happening, and he lost," says one newsroom source. "He didn't want killing the Sunday magazine to be his legacy."
At the meeting, Hall told staffers that the Inquirer was currently posting a profit-margin percentage in the mid-teens and that the goal was to get to the low 20s, although he offered no specifics on how that would be accomplished.
In his resignation letter, Lundy looks forward to retirement: "People tell me roses have an odor about them, and I want to see if that's true. Plus, I want to live on a lake and drive a boat fast. And read a million books. And write something more spellbinding than memos."
But for the Inky staffers he's leaving behind, the future is not so certain.
"There is not going to be any sadness about [Lundy leaving]," says one newsroom staffer. "Just fear about what comes next."