Should Philly's Daily Papers Worry About New Owners? The good news about Philadelphia newspapers is that there are Philadelphia newspapers - two of them, even. Just a couple years ago, when Michael Sokolove wrote this magazine story about The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News and their struggles in bankruptcy court, it was looking like Philly might become the first major American city to have no daily newspaper of its own. The bad news about Philadelphia newspapers, to hear Buzz Bissinger tell it in a Times Op-Ed today, is that the city "stands to effectively lose them" anyway should they be sold to an ownership group led by Ed Rendell, "one of the most powerful politicians in the modern history of Pennsylvania." Rendell has a lot of formers to his name: Philadelphia district attorney, Philadelphia mayor, Pennsylvania governor, Democratic National Committee chairman. And the area bigwigs who have teamed up with Rendell comprise a group, Bissinger writes, that "covers the waterfront of virtually everything that is important in Philadelphia - local politics, state politics, national politics, big development, casino gambling, sports." Whether or not these new owners could turn the papers into "their personal Gutenberg press," it certainly seems fair to worry about conflicts of interest and owners interfering with what their journalists are up to. Indeed, some see meddling at work already (see the front of today's business section). The Teamsters are protesting. On the other hand, local power brokers taking over the Philadelphia press - it's not really news that's new. When Sokolove was writing about the Inquirer and Daily News two years ago, their owner at the time was Brian Tierney. Before their industry went into free fall, most Philadelphia journalists would have been apoplectic at the thought of working for Tierney. He was enmeshed in local politics, contributing money to Republican candidates and running campaigns. In the late 1990s, he successfully fought to keep an investigative article involving his best-known client, the local Catholic archdiocese, out of The Inquirer. The reporter on the story ended up filing a defamation suit against his own newspaper and settling out of court. And not all that many years before Tierney, there was Walter Annenberg. As the owner of both papers, Sokolove writes, he "was said to have a blacklist of names that could not appear in print, an eclectic group that included Ralph Nader, Imogene Coca and Zsa Zsa Gabor, as well as the city's N.B.A. franchise, when it went uncovered for a season because Annenberg had a beef with its owner." Hard to imagine Rendell quashing coverage of Michael Vick and the Philadelphia Eagles, at least.