Some Inquirer employees are not fans of “Project Liberty” incubator

If you follow media news like us, you’ve likely heard that the Philadelphia Media Network, the company that owns the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com is laying off 19 employees. Naturally the paper’s union employees aren’t happy and have penned an open letter to CEO Greg Osberg expressing their frustrations.

However buried within the letter is a dig at Project Liberty, the startup incubator that houses Cloudmine, SnipSnap and ElectNext funded by the Knight Foundation with support from DreamIt Ventures and Drexel University. From the letter:

Perhaps instead of killing stories he didn’t like about the sale of the company and trying to be seen as some sort of digital visionary by holding press conferences at the Academy of Natural Sciences, giving free rent to start-up companies who play ping pong on the 5th floor at 400 N. Broad, creating a poorly-launched tablet and worrying about apps that make a few dollars, Osberg should be focused on properly staffing the newspapers in a manner that will allow more copies to be sold.

We’ve been to the incubator and they do, in fact, have a ping pong table. However, the amenities pretty much stop there.

You can read the full letter here.

(h/t to @bydanielvictor for pointing this out to us)