‘Buildings Matter’ Editor Resigns From ‘Philadelphia Inquirer’ After Staff Walkout
The top editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer stepped down on Saturday night, according to The New York Times. Stan Wischnowski resigned just days after he approved an article titled “Buildings Matter, Too” that focused on the perceived aftermath of the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests. Just hours after the article was published, several employees of the paper staged a walkout.
Lisa Hughes, the publisher of The Inquirer — the 191-year-old daily — sent a memo to the paper’s staff that she had accepted Mr. Wischnowski’s decision to step down after 10 years leading one of the country’s largest newsrooms. The resignation ended what was his second stint in the position.
The headline of an article published on The Philadelphia Inquirer is what led to anger, rather than the substance of the article itself. The paper’s architecture critic, Inga Saffron, crafted the article to be a play on the Black Lives Matter movement, which caused consternation among staff at the publication, as well as people on social media who were quick to blast Saffron and Wischnowski for publishing the piece.
One day after publishing the article, the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer offered an apology but the damage was apparently already done. In the apology, the editors also said they knew simply saying sorry wasn’t going to be enough.
“The headline offensively riffed on the Black Lives Matter movement and suggested an equivalence between the loss of buildings and the lives of black Americans. That is unacceptable.”
The point of Saffron’s article was apparently to show a loss of life wasn’t the only kind of loss resulting from the protests. While some demonstrators around the country stayed peaceful, riots broke out at several different protests. Destruction of property and looting were also reported all over the country. Saffron attempted to show that business owners who had done nothing to the protesters were seeing their property destroyed simply because of where it was located.
On the same day that the article was published, the staff of The Philadelphia Inquirer convened an hours-long video conference meeting. During that meeting, several staff members voiced their anger at what they felt was uneven treatment. Some also said they felt as though they were constantly having to try and drag the paper into the 21st century. They added that publishing headlines like the one at the heart of controversy underlined their concerns.
The resignation of Wischnowski came the same week that 800 employees of The New York Times signed a letter voicing their displeasure with the paper publishing an op-ed by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, in which he called for using active duty military troops to quell the protests.
