Last week, while we were down in Texas, some of you may have come across this piece in the Philadelphia Weekly, lambasting us for, ahem, “selling out.” The Weekly only ever has a few notes to ring, so when we found that this one in particular combined two previous notes — that is, “Philebrity selling out” and hipsters somehow being “over” — we were as amused as you’d expect: We’ve never once made any bones about having a business to run, and any student of popular culture realizes that hipsters (somehow aligned, synonomous with Philebrity, we guess) have been in various shades of “over” since Miles Davis was in his twenties. Possibly even longer. And after a few years of listening to these PW monkeys bang out the same notes on that old rusty piano, it was indeed inevitable that they’d eventually form a chord. Here’s what we’re here to tell you today: Get used to it. You’re going to hear it a lot more, we suspect.

For these are the twin sounds, desperately out of tune, of both wishful thinking and fear itself. The facts are these: Philebrity’s monthly readership has for a while now matched the print circulation numbers of both the Philadelphia Weekly and The City Paper. If you’re surprised, imagine how we must feel. Presently, we compete with them both for ad dollars as well your readership. It’s our opinion that there’s plenty of each to go around. But because of the squirrelly nature of print media these days, you’re seeing the Weekly in particular running scared these last few weeks, allowing its writers to voice what its business side had already been feeling since before Philebrity was even born: Fear and confusion.

Now, sure: We’ve been clowning the Weekly, and to a slightly lesser extent the City Paper, since day one. We have no intention of stopping that, because it’s fun, and because, cliche as it may seem, we kid because we love. The truth is that Philebrity exists because of a hole created by the weeklies (and the print press in Philly in general) being asleep at the wheel for years at a time during the last decade. And as both media fans as well as professionals in this industry now, we’ve ripped these guys a new one simply because we demand more, we demand something better, truer and less boring. And if they’re not doing it, our logic has always gone, you better be damn sure that we will try to do it ourselves.

That being said, even though we have expanded what Philebrity offers in these last months, we are not trying to replace either of the weeklies. If I may step out of the royal we for a moment, I, Joey Sweeney, personally dedicated a decade of my life to writing for either. It wasn’t because I liked the shitty pay and angry letters from barstool failures. It was because I believed, and continue to believe, in the printed word. All of us here do. Without the alt-weeklies, the dailies, the totally half-assed local lifestyle mags and more, we’d have nothing to talk about here every day. Though they may not be quantifiably “good” in any steady way, they are all necessary. Very necessary.

So to the Weekly, and whosoever else feels the need to act out in public and fly their flags of fear and frustration, we say this: Let’s get Christlike up in this bitch and turn the other cheek. We’ll stop kicking your asses the moment you start kicking ours. But in the meantime, we’re not holding our breath.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 3:41 pm.