"Our employers promise this won't happen again," the statement reads. "That must be the case."
Craig R. McCoy and Joseph Tanfani, members of The Inquirer's investigative-reporting team, e-mailed the statement Thursday to staffers in the newsrooms.
"As The Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News, and Philly.com have gone up for sale once again, we watched with dismay as our own coverage of the process was compromised and censored," the statement reads.
Gregory J. Osberg, PMN chief executive officer and publisher, responded with his own statement expressing support for the journalists' "clear message" but disagreeing that censorship had occurred.
"While we don't agree that censorship has taken place at PMN, we support our journalists in a unified pledge upholding the Bill of Rights," Osberg said in the statement.
Both statements referred to three incidents involving articles about the potential sale of the media properties.
First, a paragraph about the 2011 financial results of PMN was removed from the online version of a Feb. 4 Inquirer article about a group of local investors assembled by former Gov. Ed Rendell to potentially buy the company.
Next, an article by an Inquirer reporter about the developer Bart Blatstein's organizing a rival investor group to attempt to buy PMN was not permitted to be published in the Feb. 7 issue. (An updated version was published Feb. 9). On Feb. 7, a blog post about the same topic that had been written by a Daily News reporter was removed from Philly.com.
Word of the actions ordered by PMN's top management quickly spread via social media, blogs, and journalism websites. It was the subject of both an article and a column in Thursday's New York Times.
