Visiting other newspapers and various newspaper conventions has been an eye-opener too. “There is a dearth of talent on the business side of this industry that is shocking to me,” he says. “No one goes to Wharton and says, ‘I want to run circulation at Knight-Ridder.’ ” In general, he adds, “the business side has let down the journalistic side of newspapers.”

Tierney made his fortune founding and selling advertising and public-relations agencies that represented Philly’s business elite and national companies like Verizon. As a political activist, he was known as a combative defender of rich and powerful Republicans, a fast-talker despised by some reporters for his habit of complaining directly to their editors. Newsroom cynics may regard his current criticism of their business-side colleagues as disinformation. As a relative beginner, Tierney has had an impressive ability to analyze newspaper-revenue patterns, discerning, for example, the trip-wire role of the humble HELP WANTED ad.

Up until 2007, big-city broadsheets had done a decent job of managing the gradual decline in display advertising. In fact, Tierney’s newspapers were No. 2 nationally in retention of ad revenue, losing only 6 percent in 2007. But newspapers everywhere have been slammed by catastrophic declines in classified employment advertising. At the Inquirer, Tierney says, “that category went down from $135 million in 2000 to $35 million in 2007.”

Those figures fit into the big picture nationwide, according to John Morton, who, at 74, is the dean of newspaper financial analysts. For me, hearing that analysis of the classified market amounted to déjà vu all over again. It’s been 15 years since my generation of newspaper editors and business managers ignored warnings from our strategic planners that classifieds would move en masse to dedicated websites like Craigslist. According to Morton, the loss of that critical slice of the revenue pie has left owners with only one choice: “Plunder their own pockets or plunder their newspapers.”

The advertising whammy has squeezed the cadre of prominent newspaper buyers in the past few years: William Dean Singleton and his privately held Media News Group, with 57 daily papers; the McClatchy family group, with 31 dailies; and most flamboyant, the eccentric Chicago real estate tycoon Sam Zell. In December, he paid $8.2 billion for Tribune Co., which owns the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and some smaller papers. Of course, Rupert Murdoch, who shook the temples of journalism by taking over the Wall Street Journal, is no newcomer. Neither is Mort Zuckerman, who bought the ailing New York Daily News in 1992 and earned a profit quickly thereafter, as well as a measure of journalistic credibility, a rare thing in this group.

Zuckerman rattled the industry newbies last year by saying that their business models for newspaper websites seem to be “substituting pennies for dollars” in replacing lost advertising revenue. During our meeting, Tierney outlines one of the more plausible-sounding plans for wringing real dollars from underachieving newspaper sites. “A year from now, I hope Philly.com will be the largest producer of short-form video in Philadelphia,” he says. This means that instead of asking print reporters to blog around the clock, producing repetitious versions of the same story, Tierney wants to “monetize” the most common surplus commodity in any newsroom: the reporters’ nonstop gabbing about local politics, hometown sports, business, movies, wine, car prices, undiscovered restaurants, and so on.