CityPaper Editor of my Dreams - w4m

I had this dream where I wanted to cheat on my beloved boyfriend with you. I pulled off your pill-y beanie hat, removed your nerd glasses, and attempted to have my way with you. You were coy, but willing.

Though it was my own dream, people kept interrupting before it could get good, dirty parts, building up inside me a frightening desire to molest you in my childhood top-bunk-bed.

I awoke in my conjugal bed, racked with shame over my cheatin’ dreams, and wondering what your wife is like. It would have made a great I Love You, I Hate You, but those URLs are all there for the IT staff to see, and we can’t have that.

Thanks for the filthy dream. News junkies who blast DeBarge from their offices just do it for me, I guess.

And yes, that’s a real ad. After the jump, we consider the topsy turvy changes City Paper is going through.

We can be honest about this: The Philadelphia City Paper has been a lukewarm mess for at least a few years now. It has been behind the curve, it has been openly dorky, it has been numbingly repetitive. The upshot, of course, is that it almost always fares better by comparison to its nemesis, Philadelphia Weekly, a paper so rudderless that it’s literally crazymaking. Still, if any one print media outlet in the city could benefit immediately from a shakeup, it’s the City Paper: The dailies are too far gone and hemmed into their Guild-ed cage for anything to matter now; PW, as we’ve noted, is just fucked — oh, and is (still?) for sale, too, we think; and PhillyMag won’t change until their bottom line is affected, but their readership, we regret to inform you, has still not died off yet.

So when the news came that editor-in-cheif Duane Swierczynski stepped down two weeks ago — sorry, Duane — we got psyched. As pretty much lifetime readers, we’re not ready to give up on the alt-weekly just yet, even if Swierczynski’s milquetoast epoch made us want to sometimes. So who’s the next in line? It was almost immediately revealed that longtime CP staffer Brian Howard would be the new top dog. If you missed publisher Paul Curci’s coronation of Howard in last week’s edition, here’s a highlight:

You can’t teach empathy. You can’t teach journalistic instincts. You can’t teach people to have an insatiable curiosity, or to be active listeners.

[...] Brian Howard benefited from working closely with some great editors: David Warner, Howard Altman and Duane Swierczynski. He knows the history of the paper and he knows Philadelphia. He’s also the embodiment of our target reader: young, smart and politically and culturally engaged. He prefers his bike to his car, understands local and national music trends, and is passionate about all things Philly … especially its baseball team. He knows the difference between a viable, progressive idea and a half-baked, trendy one. He’s invested in the city.

If you take out the part about Swierczynski being “great” — sorry, we don’t wanna harp on this, but he wasn’t, the paper simply hemorrhagged relevance on his watch — we are shockingly inclined to agree with Curci here. The inside baseball on the City Paper over the last ten years is this: As Curci states, both David Warner and Howard Altman were truly great editors, in different ways. Warner helmed the paper during a period when CP had perhaps the best, most consistent arts coverage it ever has, and Altman is/was an old news dog of the highest cigar-chomping order. (He currently plies his trade at The Tampa Tribune, and full disclosure, never stays too far out of the Philebrity mailbag.) If Brian Howard’s work history is to be believed, he’ll be the kind of editor who can hold onto both Warner and Altman’s sensibilities in a time when alt-weeklies are waning both economically and culturally. (Note: We’re slated to chat with Howard soon, so watch this space for a proper interview.)

But there’s another story in the CP shakeup that is frankly baffling to us: The departure of Managing Editor Brian Hickey. Hickey has been, for the last few years, the most direct link back to the Howard Altman era of reporting at the paper. And within days of the shakeup for the top job, Hickey packed up his things and left. (We talked with Hickey about this directly, and he insists there is no bad blood.) Hickey was the paper’s resident craggy gumshoe, the guy who would go down to Atlantic City to talk with prostitutes in wild fear of a serial killer, as well as the guy who’d give voice to the toothless locals down at his corner bar. For as much as Howard needs to bridge the gap between front-of-book news and back-of-book arts, Hickey would seem to be a clutch player for the former. And thus far, City Paper has been deadly silent on what it plans to do to replace him.

Stranger still? Hickey’s new gig is campaign manager for this guy. Ooh, baby, it’s a wild world. Tell you what, though: If we get the old City Paper back out of this, it’ll all be worth it. Good luck to you, Brians.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 1:02 pm.