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The Philadelphia Daily News is a gritty tabloid with great sports coverage, attitude-laden headlines and a perfect feel for the tough town it calls home. But Editor Zack Stalberg wants more: He wants the paper to be a civic crusader.

THE TIP CAME IN the middle of the day in June. A dead body on Philadelphia's Main Line. No name was mentioned. But a corpse in the legendary blue-blood suburbs is likely to be a good story. Reporter Kitty Caparella was dispatched to pry information from one of the area's least-cooperative police departments.
Soon she picked up the names "Biddle" and "Clothier," two of Philadelphia's more prominent families--and talk of murder. Whoa! She called the city desk, which assigned two more reporters and a photographer.
"At the point it was confirmed it was a Biddle, we started to go out of control," says Philadelphia Daily News City Editor Kurt Heine. "As the story kept getting better and better, I put increasing amounts of horsepower on it. When we learned a Biddle had murdered a Clothier and then killed himself, we were really, really excited. You don't have to think too hard whether it's a good story. You know it's a tremendous story."
In fact, it's a vintage Daily News story. The scion of a distinguished family kills his equally well-bred ex-wife with their 16-year-old daughter in the house, then turns the pistol on himself, leaving no note.
While obviously tragic, the story has all the elements that get pulses pumping at the Daily News: crime, celebrity, sex, money and mystery. The paper went to town. The front page of the tabloid the next day screamed: "BLUE BLOOD." More than seven reporters worked on three detail-laden stories, writing 2,680 words. The package was well-crafted, vibrant, journalistically solid.
The lead: "He was a Biddle. A wealthy, accomplished lawyer and avid history buff who could trace his lineage to Revolutionary War soldiers. She was a Clothier. A marriage counselor, part-time college professor, amateur artist and frequent volunteer at her children's private schools, who descended from one of the founders of the Strawbridge and Clothier department stores."
The Daily News' big sister in the Knight Ridder family, the morning Philadelphia Inquirer, told it straight--and boring. "A divorced couple from the Main Line, members of two of the most prominent families in Philadelphia's long history, died yesterday in an apparent murder-suicide at the woman's home in Haverford."
Say what you will about the Philadelphia Daily News, one thing is certain: It instinctively knows a good, juicy story and how to swarm over it. Who wouldn't inhale every tidbit about a society murder? Although the Daily News caters to the blue-collar straphanger living inside the city, surely many on the Main Line were secretly slipping 60 cents into an honor box to get the inside scoop. The Daily News, with pitiful circulation outside the city, was so sure of it that the paper printed 20,000 extra copies just for the suburbs (15,000 were sold).
But comparing the Daily News to the Inquirer is like comparing David Letterman to Madeleine Albright--they are two vastly different animals serving different constituencies. The Daily News zeroes in on the city government and city working-class neighborhoods; the Inquirer has a more regional bent, reaching out to the suburbs as Philadelphia's population flees the city.
The two just happen to share parents, a building, a publisher and presses, and an unusual accounting system that allows the Daily News to soldier on with the help of the Inquirer. Without Big Sister, the Daily News would not exist. And with circulation drifting steadily downward, some say it's kept alive only to keep interlopers out of the afternoon market.
The Inquirer is the driven, articulate older child who scores well on standardized tests and earns lots of money. The Daily News is Cinderella, trying hard to please but permanently miffed that Big Sister appears to get the goodies. "They're like siblings," says Robert Hall, publisher of both papers. "They both always ask for bigger allowances, and they both think I favor the other one."
The major difference is that the Inquirer's future is secure while the Daily News has lived many of its 75 years bleeding red ink and threatened with extinction.
"The most amazing thing is that it's still around, although the death knell has been sounded so many times and it always seems to survive," says former Daily News City Editor Jackie Jones, now a Washington Post editor. "I think it did because it's so different than every other paper in the Knight Ridder chain. It does a lot of good journalism but also has a little cheek to it. I think a lot of people in the Knight Ridder brass kind of like that."
No one would dispute the Daily News is alive today largely because of its charismatic, smart, wacky and thoroughly Philadelphian editor, Zachary Stalberg. "Zack has that sort of screw-you attitude," says his counterpart, Robert J. Rosenthal, editor of the Inquirer. "It's part of his shtick, and he pulls it off. I admire him for that."
After 29 years together, the Daily News and Stalberg are so intertwined it's hard to separate where one stops and the other begins. The two are as Philly as cheesesteaks, water ice and pelting Santa Claus with snowballs. "If you believe in God, you have to believe that God made Zack for the Daily News," says Paul Maryniak, the Daily News' former city editor/enterprise who is now with the Arizona Republic. "He is so much the heart and brains."
But Stalberg is tired of decades of dismissal of the Daily News as a cheesy tabloid. He wants respect. And he's trying to get it.

THE DAILY NEWS ESSENTIALLY IS a scrappy tab that melds entertainment with serious news. In an age where blandness defines many newspapers, the Daily News reeks of individuality. It's passionate. It gets outraged. It loves to stir things up. It wins admiration for not sticking to traditional newspaper rules.
"I think of it as 1920s journalism: wonderful headlines, exceptional sports coverage and a first-rate job of covering the city," says Peter Binzen, a longtime Philadelphia journalist who writes a business column for the Inquirer. "In some respects, I would say they have more of a hard-nosed approach to the city government than the Inquirer. The Daily News knows the city better than the Inky and is more sympathetic to the travails of the citizenry."
The paper's strategy is to only cover a story if it can add something new or do it with "attytood," as they say in Philly. "That's how we start out every day," says Stalberg. "How can we be different?" The paper's philosophy is twofold: Be unique and own breaking news. And it is adding a third, more controversial ingredient to the recipe: advocacy journalism.
But what it has established is the ability to be outrageous and still be respected. It may be the bold headlines. Or it could be the punchy front page. Or it could be the sense of fun. The paper held a wake when Frank Sinatra died, and readers threw tributes in an empty casket at a local funeral home.
"We are closer to the ground and react viscerally," says Kevin Bevan, a news editor and premier headline writer. "We'll lead with our heart, rather than the straight-up-and-down missionary coverage."
The paper loves to take risks with a headline or story. Sometimes it's dead-on; other times it offends when trying to be clever (as in the headline, "Slain Model loved her Greek Seaman"). "There are some things in the paper that make me go: 'Jesus Christ, that's a stretch,' " says the Inquirer's Rosenthal. "But when they hit them, they really nail them. Sometimes they miss. That happens when you take chances."
Since the paper depends almost exclusively on street sales, its front page must grab attention. Clever headlines are key. "The art of Daily News headlines basically involves starting in a place that you know you can't use, and then dialing back to something acceptable," explains Managing Editor Ellen Foley, a former assistant managing editor for features at the Kansas City Star. "Frankly, the headlines sell the paper most of the time. The flaw that surfaces with that from time to time is: 'Did we dial back enough?' "
The paper's philosophy is to hook readers, reward them, and hope they will read the serious journalism that also fills its pages. In July, City Hall Bureau Chief Mark McDonald wrote several stories about Mayor John Street's chief of staff's spending habits. Turns out she spent $350,000 to fix up her City Hall offices, including $59,000 on furniture. She resigned, and McDonald wrote: "In the end she tripped over a finely crafted piece of solid cherry furniture."
Unlike many papers, the Daily News has figured out what other papers pay consultants to learn: how to plug into the city and stay connected. "The Daily News succeeds because they have attitude and fit the city like a glove," says Michael Smerconish, a local lawyer and radio talk-show host. "The Inquirer comes across as a bunch of dilettantes. The Daily News looks like it's written by a group of Philadelphians."
Echoes Karen M. Turner, chair of Temple University's journalism department: "In terms of politics and sports, generally that's where a lot of people go," she says. "If there's any criticism, I don't think they have the diversity of voices you'd like to see in a city paper."
There's no doubt the Daily News calls things as it sees them. After a local television station caught Philadelphia police officers energetically pummeling a suspect who had wounded an officer, the paper's front page made national news. With the Republican National Convention set to begin in the city in a matter of weeks, the Daily News linked the two events with a "WELCOME, AMERICA!" headline over the picture.
Since the beating made the evening news, it would be rebroadcast repeatedly before the Daily News hit the streets as late as noon the following day. The paper's quandary: how to make it a Daily News story and not repeat what's already known.
"In this case, we were trying to make a very honest point that others would agree with," says Stalberg. "Everybody was looking at that video and saying: 'I can't believe this is happening two weeks before the Republicans come.' That's what people were thinking. We just said it."
The headline drew criticism from local politicians and Republican officials, who claimed it glorified the suspect, a violent criminal with a long rap sheet who had stolen an officer's car. Others accused the paper of editorializing.
"I thought 'Welcome, America!' was inappropriate but typically Daily News," says gossip columnist Stu Bykofsky, a 28-year Daily News veteran. "Of course, it infuriated the city fathers. I'm not sure what the message was, but it was all over the networks that night. That underscored our credentials that we are over-the-top."
When the Concorde crashed outside Paris in July, killing 113 people, the Daily News didn't mention it on its front page because it couldn't distinguish its coverage from the zillion other crash stories. Nor does it bother much with business news, since it lacks the staff to do in-depth or original stories. It doesn't even print stock pages.
"The Daily News has a tremendous advantage over the Inquirer," says media writer Frank Lewis of Philadelphia's City Paper. "They can afford to have a narrow focus just on the city. They don't have to be all things to all people. They can crusade and bang that gong until somebody listens."
Zack Stalberg and the Daily News have grown up together. "It's pretty hard at this stage to separate the newspaper and me," says Stalberg, 53. "One of my strengths is that I act like it's my newspaper. The editor has to be the supreme advocate. The paper has a persona. It's not some institution where the baton is handed from one person to another. I like the part of the Daily News that lets me say what's on my mind."
The traits that distinguish the Daily News--not holding back, taking risks, living on the outside, saying what it thinks--are characteristics Stalberg attaches to himself. Neither he nor the paper lives in a "tweed-and-khaki world," he says. (Stalberg, who has lived in Philadelphia his entire life except for two years in the Army, has a penchant for expensive suits and cuff links.)
"Zack is a fabulous journalist in all the traditional ways, and he's also the impresario for the paper," says Brian Toolan, a former Daily News managing editor who left in 1998 to become editor of the Hartford Courant. "Under Zack's direction, the paper never comes up small or deficient on the big story."
Stalberg's first journalism job came when his dream of being a cartoonist fell flat. "I had no talent, so I answered an ad in the Inquirer for a job" at the suburban Bucks County Courier Times, says Stalberg. When he called, the editor asked him to bring his clips when he came for an interview. "What are clips?" replied Stalberg, fresh out of the Army. He got the job anyway.
In 1971, at 24, he joined the Daily News as a night rewrite man. It was not long after the Inquirer and Daily News had been acquired by Knight Newspapers, the forerunner of Knight Ridder. The papers had not exactly been journalistic paragons under former owner Walter S. Annenberg, and while they were to improve dramatically, the Daily News had a long way to go when Stalberg signed on. The paper specialized in short, punchy stories packed with sex, crime and sensationalism. It ran pictures of pinup girls with weather stories. "In 1971, the Inquirer was shit and the Daily News was lower than shit," says Stalberg, who tosses out swear words defiantly. "I had no big plans to stay. I just kept getting bigger and better jobs."
In 1975, Stalberg's star began rising after Editor Gil Spencer arrived. "Gil was the conquering hero, forever burning holes in his pants and rugs with his cigarettes," says Gar Joseph, who directs political coverage. "Gil, an unbalanced patrician, was enormously talented and fun."
By the time he turned 28, Stalberg was city editor and by 30, managing editor. "As far as Mr. Stalberg is concerned, he has what's required. He's a goddamn good newsman," says Spencer, a true journalism legend who also edited the New York Daily News, the Denver Post and the Trentonian and is now retired. "But we differ. He likes the paper to be a little more smartass. Zack is my child. He was almost a creation."
Spencer and Stalberg improved journalistically on an already winning formula. The paper, based in sports-crazy Philadelphia, has excelled at sports coverage for years and has spawned world-class sports columnists. "Sports was a franchise and was critical to the paper's success," Spencer says. The paper's sports section is often listed among the nation's ten best by the Associated Press Sports Editors.
At age 37, Stalberg took the helm when Spencer left for New York. Sixteen years later, Stalberg's still in the job. It was on his watch that the Daily News won its only two Pulitzer Prizes. And he managed to work his magic on Knight Ridder brass when some wanted to shut down the paper.
"When I got there in 1985, the Daily News was losing $5 million a year and projected to lose $9 million in the coming years," says Jay Harris, a former executive editor who left in 1988 to join Knight Ridder's corporate staff and is now publisher of the San Jose Mercury News. "It's typical in today's climate to close papers that are losing money, but with Zack's leadership and Knight Ridder corporate, we turned it around."
Mixing drive, wit, chewing gum and sheer determination, Stalberg has escaped the guillotine several times and turned the tabloid into the unimaginable--a profitable paper. Profitable, that is, according to Knight Ridder's acounting system. "What we are charged for is anything that would go away if there was no Daily News," says Stalberg. "For example, the publisher's salary is not in our profit and loss. My salary is."
His value to the Philadelphia operation--by far the biggest in the chain--became clear in September when the unimaginable occurred. Stalberg was asked to join a committee looking for ways to boost sales of the Inquirer's earliest Sunday edition, which is sold Saturday night.
Yet a nagging circulation decline continues to plague the Daily News itself. It hovers at an average of 160,000 copies a day, with home delivery accounting for only 7 percent. (By contrast, the Inquirer's circulation is about 400,000 daily and more than 800,000 on Sunday.) In the summer of 1984, Daily News circulation stood at 280,000. Some blame the decline on a 60-cent single-copy price; the Inquirer is 10 cents cheaper. Despite objections from Knight Ridder Chairman and CEO P. Anthony Ridder and Stalberg, Publisher Hall says the Daily News must charge 60 cents if it wants to remain profitable.
Within the tightly regimented corporate world, Stalberg has defined himself as an engaging rogue editor. He entertains Knight Ridder executives with humorous monthly memos detailing the highlights of life at the Daily News. He's figured out how to play the corporate management game and still have fun publishing six days a week. (Sunday belongs to Big Sister.) It's not an accident that Ridder and other Knight Ridder executives have a particular affinity for the Daily News. But it's not just the memos.
Stalberg capitalized on the tension between Ridder and former Inquirer Executive Editor Gene Roberts after Ridder took over Knight Ridder's news division in 1984. "Gene was bigger than 5,000 gorillas," says Spencer, Daily News editor from 1975 to 1984. "I was fond of Gene, but he wanted no interference with his newspaper. He ran that paper like a bulldozer and, of course, I was in the way all the time. I don't think Gene wanted to stamp out the Daily News. I would say he wanted to keep it in its corner sucking its lollipop and stay the fuck out of the way."
Roberts was well-known for spending huge amounts on stories but was given slack since he turned a newspaper that was mediocre at best into one of the nation's finest, one that collected 17 Pulitzer Prizes in his 18-year tenure. Roberts didn't mind the competition with the News, he says, as long as it didn't mean a smaller budget for the Inquirer.
"I benefited big time by the tension between Gene and Tony," says Stalberg. "The belief was that Roberts was doing his best to kill the Daily News. That made for a fierce competition. If I was going to survive in the same building, I'd have to compete as well as Gene."
Until 1986, neither paper had an on-site publisher. But life changed dramatically after Ridder named Sam McKeel publisher of both. Corporate executives wanted to kill the Daily News because it was hemorrhaging money. "Tony was new then and he said, 'You can't kill it without trying to make it profitable,' " Stalberg recalls.
The paper survived. "I was president of the news division then," says Ridder, who concedes a special fondness for the Daily News, "and so I thought I made a compelling case why we should keep it going."
As far as Stalberg is concerned, Ridder saved the paper. "He was probably feeling some kind of attachment, like you would for a cat you brought in from the storm," says Stalberg.
In 1995, the paper had another near-death experience, but its future is safe now, says Publisher Hall. "We made a real close evaluation back in 1995," he says. "There was a lot of discussion here and with the labor unions, and we made a decision to keep [the News] open. Since that time, they've grown from an advertising standpoint and are secure for the future."

BUT MERE SURVIVAL ISN'T enough for Stalberg. He wants to change the paper's direction. In 1998 he named Foley, who has a strong features background, managing editor, with a mandate to bolster the features section in the middle of the paper. Now the two are pushing for a newsmagazine approach that isn't always popular with the troops. "There's resistance in the newsroom to the concept, because old news horses want to go after the breaking news stories," says reporter Earni Young. "Instead, we have to look at what time an event happened. I can understand it. But I don't like it."
Paul Maryniak and Dave Warner, co-city editors, both left in 1999, in part because of the new game plan. "When I joined in 1986, it was a much harder newspaper, more aggressive and had a bigger staff," Maryniak says. "It started to get not so much fun. There were these wacky public journalism directives from Knight Ridder, and the paper under the new managing editor really seemed to be deliberately growing the features department at the expense of news. I disagreed with that."
Stalberg and Foley say the Daily News can no longer focus just on hard news; it has to find additional ways to engage readers. "Our readers vote with their 60 cents, and that vulnerability has made us very savvy," says Foley. "The discipline of single-copy sales and the lack of resources has caused us to be extremely focused and extremely reader-centric."
The change in focus is palpable. "They've really softened up the front page," says Jerry Mondesire, head of the local chapter of the NAACP and a former Inquirer reporter and editor. "They had a front page Christmas story on Santa being wired, which advised what cell phone you should buy your spouse. That's very unlike the Daily News I know. Most of the hard-news people I pal around with find it rather comical that the Daily News, this hard-edged tabloid, has become a coffee-table magazine," says Mondesire, who now owns the weekly Philadelphia Sunday Sun.
But a magazine approach isn't the only change in Stalberg's repertoire. The editor wants his paper to offer solutions and bring about change.
The Daily News has always been a bit of a crusader, especially with its tabloid characters such as Millennium Man, the Urban Warrior, Joe Sixpack and the Phantom Rider, who for years rode the buses and the rails to provide Daily News readers with a firsthand picture of the city's vast transit system.
The Urban Warrior, aka reporter Carla Anderson, tries to solve readers' problems. In a recent campaign, the Urban Warrior took off after the city to rid poor neighborhoods of thousands of abandoned cars. "What I did was spend months and months harping on the abandoned cars," says Anderson, who joined the paper in July 1999. "People wind up feeling helpless and powerless when they call the city, and they do nothing."
Last spring, the paper ran a picture of an abandoned car every day. In May, Mayor John Street announced a plan to get 40,000 cars off the street. "It's so rewarding," says Anderson. "I got thank-you notes. I got tons of phone calls. And the thanks are so heartfelt."
Anderson thinks this kind of reporting engages readers in a way most papers don't. "We invite reader response," she says. "I get calls all the time. We are kind of a segue between a traditional news format and online. This paper is very interactive."
"We are doing a lot more advocacy journalism or public journalism or whatever you call it," says Deputy Managing Editor Michael Days. "I know that's got to be a big part of our mission. Otherwise, we are just another paper covering the same stories and not making a difference."
In 1997, Editorial Page Editor Frank Burgos pushed for legislation forcing gun manufacturers to add gun locks. Nothing happened. So the Daily News took action. "I suggested we just give away 1,000 gun locks free," says Burgos. "Within two weeks, there were 5,000 requests. That idea would never have floated on any other editorial page. We said: 'Let's do it.' We don't say: 'Newspapers aren't supposed to do that.' "
What brought about the metamorphosis from cowboy to crusader? "The transformation came as I figured out I had some influence and that it made sense to use it," Stalberg says. "Then it got to be fun to use it. The journalist in me was fearful of using it. The rest of me is unapologetic. The fear is still there, but we are getting things done.... I'm one of the more powerful people in town.
"But," he adds, "a lot of it comes from Russell."
Russell Byers joined the editorial page 10 years ago and quickly became a controversial figure in the newsroom as he pushed his brand of "make things happen" journalism. "The thing Russell did was introduce Zack to agenda-setting, not just reporting the agenda," says news editor Bevan. "But it gets tricky, especially when we start getting ourselves into where or whether we should build a stadium."
Byers felt strongly that a newspaper had a responsibility to help bring about social change. Independently wealthy, conservative and with no journalism background, he was Stalberg's opposite. And yet Stalberg saw Byers as "a spiritual leader." Says the editor, "For most journalists, the idea of using your influence outside the newspaper is icky. Too scary. But having Russell by my side helped." (Byers was killed last December while shopping at a Philadelphia convenience store.)
Byers was behind "Rethinking Philadelphia," a campaign launched in 1997 in which the newspaper is "saying we want to take a leadership position," explains Stalberg. "We are using news pages to point out things that have to be done."
"The whole point of 'Rethinking Philadelphia' is to shape policy," says Earni Young, a Daily News reporter for 18 years who is uneasy with the new direction. "The series is designed to make something happen.... I don't do miracles."
During the Republican National Convention, the paper published a 64-page section, "The Future of the City," showcasing the best ideas working in other cities. For more than three months, the paper dedicated 12 reporters, three or four editors and a couple of page designers, spending about $300,000 on the project.
"At some point, Zack decided he wanted respect," Young says. "The Daily News has never gotten respect in this town. I think it does now, despite the circulation loss. Especially over the last four years, we've gained respect from the movers and shakers."
But Stalberg's head isn't swollen. As Young notes, expressing a sentiment shared by others at the paper, "Zack is very happy being the big frog in this little pond. He's a benevolent dictator, and this is his kingdom."
And what a kingdom it is when the king's favorite letter to the editor has nothing to do with the paper's journalism. Stalberg prizes a note from Vince Zito, who had high praise for the paper, but not because of outrageous headlines or civic crusading.
Wrote Zito: "It's still the best paper to roll up and smack your dog with."