Top Editor of Philadelphia Inquirer Resigns After ‘Buildings Matter’ Headline

Stan Wischnowski, a 20-year veteran of the paper, stepped down days after the publication of an article that led to a walkout by dozens of Inquirer journalists.

By Marc Tracy
June 6, 2020
Updated 10:30 p.m. ET

Stan Wischnowski, the top editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, resigned on Saturday, days after an article with the headline “Buildings Matter, Too,” on the effects of civil unrest on the city’s buildings, led to a walkout by dozens of staff members.

Lisa Hughes, the publisher of The Inquirer, the 191-year-old daily controlled by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism, said Saturday in a memo to the staff that she had accepted Mr. Wischnowski’s decision to step down after 10 years across two stints as the leader of one of the country’s largest newsrooms.

The headline of the article — a column by The Inquirer’s architecture critic, Inga Saffron, that was published on Tuesday — played on the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” long a rallying cry for civil rights activists protesting police violence against African Americans. It has been a key phrase for demonstrators in the nearly two weeks of protests across the country and in cities worldwide since a black man in Minneapolis, George Floyd, died last month after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by a white police officer’s knee.

The day after the Inquirer article was published, the paper’s top editors, including Mr. Wischnowski, who had worked at the paper for 20 years, issued an apology that appeared on its website.

“The Philadelphia Inquirer published a headline in Tuesday’s edition that was deeply offensive. We should not have printed it,” the editors wrote. “We’re sorry, and regret that we did. We also know that an apology on its own is not sufficient.

-snip-