“It’s basically outright warfare going on,” says one source. “None of us wanted to be part of the Philly.com ship of entertainment and sex.” But the site remains in “power because they still control our main portal to the world. Nobody knows about Inquirer.com.” The tension is longstanding. In March, the creation of the Inquirer.com and PhillyDailyNews.com sites gave both papers handsome websites and the online editorial control they had long been denied. But Philly.com conspicuously fails to advertise either site, and their peculiar structure suggests that they may have been built to benefit Philly.com to the papers’ detriment: Newspaper content is on Philly.com for free, while the papers’ sites guard the same content with a hard paywall.
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