Advertising executive and entrepreneur Brian P. Tierney bought the Philadelphia Inquirer nine months ago. Many readers are impressed, but employees are paying the price, and accommodating advertisers has become a bit easier under the new regime.

An excerpt from the NYT story:

Starting next week, The Philadelphia Inquirer will run a new column called PhillyInc., written by Inquirer reporters and editors, on the first page of its business section.

What is unusual is that the column will be sponsored by a local advertiser, Citizens Bank. It will carry the bank’s logo and be outlined in the bank’s distinctive green ink. The bank will also run ads across the bottom of the page and in an upper corner.

Many newspapers are losing advertising revenue these days and have taken steps that they might not have taken when times were flush. But at The Inquirer, everything — even a joint venture with an advertiser that in other times might have raised questions about editorial integrity — is being rethought.

The sponsored column is part of the new world here as Brian P. Tierney, a local advertising executive, settles in as the paper’s hands-on publisher and promoter in chief for what has become a grand experiment in private local ownership of a major metropolitan daily.

It is being closely watched in the newspaper industry — still made up mostly of public companies — where the Tribune Company, owner of The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Newsday, is going private and others are considering such moves, to get away from the harsh, disapproving glare of Wall Street. And it is being watched by journalists to see whether a once-great newspaper with scaled-back ambitions can still fly.

Since spearheading the purchase nine months ago, Mr. Tierney, a hard-charging entrepreneur, has avoided a strike while extracting concessions from the paper’s unions and laying off 17 percent of newsroom employees. He has also poured millions of dollars into promotion and new equipment, reaching deals with advertisers and hiring columnists on contract — which is cheaper than hiring regular staff members.

And he has brought in a new editor, William K. Marimow, a former Inquirer reporter and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who has the widespread respect of the staff and lends journalistic credibility to Mr. Tierney’s venture. “Now,” Mr. Tierney said, “I’m more confident than I was nine months ago.”

He said statistics supported his confidence: daily circulation has held up over the last six months, rising 0.6 percent to about 352,600, while circulation at most other papers is down. Ad revenue for the company has “significantly improved” from the period a year earlier. (Because the company is privately owned, the numbers are not available.) And page views on the Web site, www.philly.com, have climbed to 30 million a month from 20 million in July.

Just as important, readers and even critics have been impressed by the newspaper.

“Some days I’ll look at The Inquirer and say, ‘Wow!’” said Michael Days, the editor of The Inquirer’s sister paper, The Daily News. “You’d rarely see a columnist on the front or a sports story leading the paper, and now you do.”

But these nine months have been trying. Many in the newsroom are still bitter about the concessions — on pensions, sick pay and seniority — and they are stretched thin. The staff, now 330, is half its size in the paper’s heyday in the 1980s and ’90s. The layoffs cost the paper many of its younger and minority journalists.