Stumble of the Week

A Friday feature (revived) Journalism. Today is the day management has threatened to close The Philadelphia Inquirer and/or sell its assets if the unions don’t deliver $8 million in givebacks. Whatever happens today, it has been quite a tumble for America’s third-oldest daily newspaper and long one of its best – in 15 years under editor Eugene Roberts The Inquirer won 17 Pulitzer Prizes. But how the mighty have fallen: In 1993, The New York Times paid $1.1 billion for the Boston Globe, a paper very similar to the Inquirer, whose current owners bought it for $55 million a year ago.

Lennay Kekua is not dead! It should be good news that Manti Te’o’s 22-year-old girlfriend did not die, as reported, from leukemia last September, following her hospitalization from a serious car accident. In perhaps the most inspirational story of 2012, Notre Dame’s all-American linebacker and Heisman Trophy runner-up played a monster game after learning that both his long-time girlfriend and his grandmother had died earlier the same day. In the weirdest story of 2013, Lennay turned out to be a hoax. Overall, it was a bad week for big sports: Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds didn’t come close to election to Baseball’s Hall of Fame; Lance Armstrong demonstrated on “Oprah” that he is a pathological liar; and Lennay never existed.

Pornography. The dirty movie industry has launched a stiff protest against Measure B, which requires actors to wear condoms, claiming that Los Angeles County’s new regulation violates filmmakers First-Amendment right to make movies they way the want.