The Philadelphia Inquirer

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Philadelphia Inquirer was founded on the 1st of June, 1829, by a printer named John R. Walker and a former newspaper editor named John Norvell. On its first day, it made a promise: to defend the right of the minority to voice their opinion and to stand against the abuse of power. Nearly two centuries later, that original pledge is still being tested. How does a newspaper born in the age of Andrew Jackson survive into the age of the internet? How do you hold onto your identity when your staff is shrinking, your building has been sold, and you have filed for bankruptcy? And what happens when the institution built to question power is accused of failing its own city? The story of The Inquirer runs through wars, tycoons, Pulitzer Prizes, extortion scandals, and open-letter revolts by the newsroom itself.

• 2. Founding and Early Struggles

  ›

  John Norvell had left his previous post as editor of Philadelphia's largest paper, the Aurora and Gazette, because he disagreed with its editorial direction. When Norvell and Walker launched The Pennsylvania Inquirer, they aimed to represent all Philadelphians, not just the wealthy. An editorial in the first issue declared support for "the maintenance of the rights and liberties of the people," pledging backing for President Andrew Jackson and American manufacturing. According to legend, Norvell argued there could be no better name for the paper: in a free state, there should always be an inquirer asking on behalf of the people, "Why was this done? Why? Why? Why?"

  The idealism did not survive the market. Within six months, competition from eight established daily papers and an empty treasury forced Norvell and Walker to sell. The buyer was Jesper Harding, associate editor of the United States Gazette. Harding proved a steadier hand. He expanded the paper's content, adding fiction, and in 1840 secured rights to publish several Charles Dickens novels, paying Dickens a significant sum at a time when foreign authors routinely received nothing. By the time Harding retired in 1859, The Inquirer had grown into a major Philadelphia paper. His son, William White Harding, who had been a partner for three years, took over and gave the paper its current name: The Philadelphia Inquirer.

• 3. War, Collapse, and Revival

  ›

  In 1859, The Inquirer's circulation stood at around 7,000. By 1863 it had reached 70,000, driven in large part by demand for Civil War news. Between 25,000 and 30,000 copies were distributed to Union Army soldiers, and the U.S. government asked The Inquirer to publish special editions for its troops. Confederate generals reportedly sought out copies of the paper, believing its war coverage to be accurate.

  One of the reporters responsible for that reputation was Uriah Hunt Painter, who was present at the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861. When the government issued initial reports claiming a Union victory, Painter's firsthand account told a different story: the Confederacy had won. The Inquirer ran Painter's version. Crowds threatened to burn the building down. That willingness to print what the government did not want printed came at a social cost, but it secured the paper's credibility.

  Another reporter, covering General George Meade, wrote something that so angered Meade that he publicly humiliated the correspondent, Edward Crapsey. In response, Crapsey and his colleagues decided that any Army of the Potomac victory would be attributed to Ulysses S. Grant rather than Meade. Any defeat would be laid at Meade's feet. It was a quiet form of editorial revenge.

  When the war ended, the paper's fortunes reversed sharply. Circulation fell from 70,000 during the conflict to 5,000 in 1888. In 1889, James Elverson bought the paper, brought in new printing technology, and launched a Sunday edition. A new Inquirer premiered on the 1st of March, 1889. By the end of that decade, the paper had outgrown two buildings, eventually settling on Market Street.

• 4. Annenberg's Inquirer

  ›

  Moses L. Annenberg bought The Inquirer in 1936 and inherited a paper that had stagnated. During the Depression years before him, editors had largely ignored the economic catastrophe unfolding around them. News of bank closings was tucked into the back of the financial section. The paper's chief rival, J. David Stern's Philadelphia Record, had surpassed The Inquirer in circulation and become the largest paper in Pennsylvania.

  Annenberg moved fast. He added new features, expanded staff, and held promotions. By November 1938, weekday circulation had climbed to 345,422, up from 280,093 in 1936. The Record's readership had meanwhile fallen from 328,322 to 204,000. The turnaround was real and rapid.

  Then the trouble started. In 1939, federal authorities charged Annenberg with income tax evasion. He pleaded guilty before trial and was sentenced to three years in prison. He became ill while incarcerated and died from a brain tumor six weeks after his release in June 1942. His son, Walter Annenberg, took over.

  Walter promised the paper would be independent, but he ran it with a personal hand. He kept a blacklist of individuals he disliked, insisting they not be mentioned in print. People on the list were airbrushed out of photographs. The list included Nicholas Katzenbach, Ralph Nader, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and the Philadelphia Warriors, the city's professional basketball team, whom Annenberg banned from coverage for an entire season. In 1966, an Inquirer reporter asked Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Milton Shapp at a press conference whether he had ever been a psychiatric patient. Shapp said no. The following day's headline read, "Shapp Denies Rumors He Had Psychiatric Treatment in 1965." Shapp later attributed his loss in that election to Annenberg's campaign against him.

  Annenberg was a backer of Richard Nixon. In the 1952 presidential race, critics claimed the paper looked away from allegations about Nixon's handling of funds. Later, to deflect charges of bias, Annenberg instructed The Inquirer to rely solely on wire services for coverage of the 1960 and 1968 presidential elections in which Nixon was a candidate. After Nixon's victory in 1968, he appointed Annenberg U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom. In 1969, Annenberg sold the paper to Knight Newspapers.

• 5. The Knight Ridder Turnaround

  ›

  When Knight Newspapers acquired The Inquirer in 1969, the paper was understaffed, its equipment was outdated, its employees were underskilled, and it trailed its chief local rival, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, in weekday circulation. Time magazine had described it as "uncreative and undistinguished."

  In 1972, Eugene L. Roberts Jr. became executive editor, and the transformation that followed was substantial. Between 1975 and 1990, The Inquirer won seventeen Pulitzer Prizes, six of them in consecutive years from 1975 to 1980. Time magazine named The Inquirer one of the ten best daily newspapers in the United States and called Roberts's overhaul "one of the most remarkable turnarounds, in quality and profitability, in the history of American journalism."

  The prize record tells part of the story. In 1975, Donald Barlett and James B. Steele won for auditing the Internal Revenue Service. In 1978, the paper itself won the Public Service award for exposing abuses of power by the Philadelphia police. In 1980, the staff won for covering the Three Mile Island accident. Between 1985 and 1989, the newsroom collected multiple awards for investigative reporting, feature photography, and national reporting.

  By 1980, The Inquirer had become the most circulated paper in Philadelphia. Two years later, the Evening Bulletin shut down. The Inquirer hired 17 Bulletin reporters and doubled its bureau count to pursue former Bulletin readers. By 1989, Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.'s editorial staff reached a peak of 721 employees. The paper's reach had grown far beyond the city. One critic, citing its international scope, noted in Time that The Inquirer was covering "Karachi better than Kensington."

  Between 1970 and 1985, however, The Inquirer also endured eleven strikes. The longest, in 1985, lasted 46 days. Roberts enjoyed unusual editorial freedom under Knight Ridder for most of his tenure, but by the late 1980s, the parent company began pressing for cost cuts and a push into the more profitable Philadelphia suburbs. Some of the paper's best reporters accepted buyouts and left for other major national papers. By the late 1990s, all of the senior editors who had worked with Roberts in the 1970s and 1980s had departed, none at normal retirement age.

• 6. Bankruptcy, Sale, and Nonprofit

  ›

  In June 2006, Knight Ridder was acquired by McClatchy, which immediately put The Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News on the market, describing them as among the 12 least profitable Knight Ridder papers. On the 29th of June, 2006, the two papers were sold to Philadelphia Media Holdings LLC for what was later understood to be roughly $515 million. The new owners announced a plan to spend $5 million on promotions and advertisements to rebuild readership.

  The strategy did not work. Advertising revenue fell, circulation continued to drop, and between 2006 and 2009 management cut 400 jobs across the two papers. On the 21st of February, 2009, Philadelphia Newspapers LLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, carrying approximately $390 million in debt, much of it borrowed to complete the acquisition three years earlier.

  What followed was a year-long dispute between the previous owners and their creditors. On the 28th of April, 2010, both sides bid at a bankruptcy auction. The lender group initially won, but the deal collapsed after they could not reach a contract agreement with the union representing newspaper delivery drivers. The auction was run again in September 2010, and the lenders again won. After negotiations with all 14 of the paper's unions, a $139 million deal was finalized on the 8th of October. The same papers that had sold for roughly $515 million in 2006 sold on the 2nd of April, 2012 for $55 million, less than 15 percent of the 2006 price.

  In 2016, H.F. "Gerry" Lenfest, who had bought the papers in 2014, donated them to The Philadelphia Foundation. The move was designed to keep The Inquirer, the Daily News, and their joint website rooted in Philadelphia. In 2019, the Daily News became an edition of The Inquirer, Philly.com was renamed Inquirer.com, and the operation was renamed The Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC. That same year, The Inquirer became a founding member of Spotlight PA, an investigative reporting partnership covering Pennsylvania.

• 7. Newsroom, Race, and the 2020 Crisis

  ›

  On the 2nd of June, 2020, The Inquirer published an op-ed by architecture critic Inga Saffron covering the George Floyd protests under the headline "Buildings Matter, Too", a reference to property damage associated with demonstrations. The following day, editors issued an apology for the headline. The day after that, more than 40 Inquirer journalists called in sick as a form of protest.

  The action was preceded by an open letter from Inquirer journalists. They wrote that they were tired of "dragging this 200-year-old institution kicking and screaming into a more equitable age." They described seeing their work "twisted to fit a narrative that does not reflect our reality" and said they were tired of being told to report both sides "of issues there are no two sides of." On the 6th of June, senior vice president and executive editor Stan Wischnowski announced his resignation.

  The fault lines the letter exposed were structural. The Inquirer has 225 newsroom employees, 75 percent of whom are White, while the city of Philadelphia is 34 percent White. As of 2021, three quarters of the paper's editors were White. As of 2026, two desks, Health and Investigations, have no Black journalists. In 2022, the paper formally acknowledged its own racism, both in the decision to publish the article and more broadly across the organization.

  The workforce's contract history adds another layer of context. In March 2020, the NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia and The Philadelphia Inquirer LLC reached a new three-year agreement that included a workforce diversity provision and pay raises for the entire newsroom, the first across-the-board salary increases since August 2009. Three years later, in August 2023, the NewsGuild and the Inquirer agreed on another three-year contract, which the guild called its best in 20 years. Amid this period, in May 2023, a cyberattack severely disrupted the paper. In March 2025, the Inquirer eliminated its Communities and Engagement Desk, which had covered marginalized communities since 2020.