For as much as we have a way of harping on the dailies in this town for not being able to keep up with the Internet, the dirty little secret every alt-media wonk in Philly already knows is this: Alt-weeklies are even more fucked. City Paper and the Philadelphia Weekly have a smaller editorial staff, less resources and, believe it or not, a frequently even less enlightened attitude toward the web than their colleagues at the dailies do. (Need evidence? Check out the low post count on The Clog.) Fuck, I mean, the site you’re reading now basically exists because the alt-weeklies blinked. For about four years. We bring it up because nowhere is this lag more profound than in this week’s PW cover story, “Faces Of 2006.” By the time the paper hit stands yesterday, Philly Skyline’s “Faces Of 2006″ had been up for almost a week already. Coincidence? For sure. But the fact is, by the time anyone at the Weekly might have noticed Bradley Maule’s photo essay on the faces that made the year in Philly pictures ‚Äî and who the hell knows if they did ‚Äî it would have been entirely too late for them to change tracks even if they wanted to. Had the PW cover been anything other than a photo essay, the paper could have patted itself on the back and said, “Well, at least this has the kind of reporting that people just can’t get from blogs.” And they would have been right. But what about all the things that alt-weeklies do that are not reporting? Because there is much of it. And until the alt-weeklies figure out how to make their non-news coverage pack the same kind of punch as their reporting does (we’re looking in your directions, floundering A&E sections everywhere), anything that’s not good old fashioned journalism is gonna look as weak as PW’s cover does this week.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 3:38 pm.