Hyperspace Clusterfuck: The Continuing Misadventures Of Philadelphia Magazine On The Internet
It’s the biggest ongoing, unrectified media blunder in Philly: The PhillyMag website. Draconian policies regarding posting their own content, navigational hell, near utter-uselessness, and a blog? What are you, fucking nuts? Well, maybe not. But then again, maybe you are. After blowing through a mid-May deadline, sources tell us that PhillyMag was slated to finally re-launch its website — including a feather-lite party pictures blog a la Philly2Nite — on June 25. But don’t expect that to happen, either. According to those close to the project, the webification of PhillyMag has been a clusterfuck from the start; recently we reported a rumor to the effect of the magazine blowing a half million dollars on an unfinished web redesign. (Apocryphal? Maybe. Possible? Definitely.) And whether it’s the magazine’s legendary process of rewrites or just the raw truth that its plastic-surgery-and-luxury-car readership is not exactly web-friendly, one could easily make the case that PhillyMag just isn’t fast enough for the web. (It also doesn’t help when you tap people who don’t know how to drive for advertorial, but that, friends, is a story for another time.) But, for now, that’s all OK: While the alt-weeklies in Philly are taking severe blows, losing ad clients left and right to online ad spends, the PhillyMag client and reader (if you don’t realize they are one and the same, you’ve obviously never read this magazine) seems to be staying put for now. Which will be fine until they all die in five years from skin cancer, and by then, PhillyMag will be poised perfectly for whatever they need to do to enter Web 3.0. Until then, is it crazy to ask whether or not, for the moment, PhillyMag cares about its web presence at all? We asked PhillyMag staff writer and Deadspin contributor AJ Daulerio, apparently the only person there who knows what the Internet is. “The only answer I can give to you right now is,” he said, “‘Hopefully, yes. Or I’ll be forced to move out of the cozy confines of the Gayborhood.’”
Perish the thought.
