City Paper: Pretty Much Invented The Internet In Philly, But Sadly, Somehow Got Stuck With The Dot-Net
AS TOLD BY HOWARD ALTMAN, FORMER EDITOR, CITY PAPER: Back around the time that Al Gore invented the Internet, a chest-hair-twirling pre-cog named Bruce Schimmel divined the future.
“One day, son, all this will be yours,” he would say.
He wasn’t talking about the curtains.
Rather, he was talking about what was behind the curtains, in this case, who was reading what online.
In those days, when email addresses had about two dozen numbers in them and most communicating was done in things called “bulletin boards,” Schimmel, in between spitting out gibberish about GUIs and Archies and Veronicas and a whole bunch of other stuff I never understood, said that in the future, we would measure success by counting the numbers of eyeballs on stories. And that coverage could and would be tailored by those numbers.
When it came to the internet, hell, when it came to a lot of things, Schimmel was a visionary. He knew that an alternative weekly could make oodles of boodle. At least back then it was, when City Paper’s biggest worry was making sure the cigarette ads (remember those?) were no closer than eight pages together. And he knew that the future of our business was the Internet. He was one of the first to take a paper online (even though, somehow, the Baltimore City Paper beat us to the dotcom punch, leaving us with the lesser dot, dotnet).
Not only were we among the first papers online, we were among the first to mine what is now called “user-gen” – tips and other content provided by readers that would improve our coverage.
We were also among the first to realize the importance of getting things online, because the story would reverberate around the globe, vastly increasing traffic and notoriety. And we were among the first to get involved in “flame” wars, including one famous one between me and Michael McGettigan at the Weekly that made for some humorous reading.
The good old days came up recently where I now work – as an editor on the Continuous News Desk of The Tampa Tribune/WFLA-TV and our website, TBO.com. We were looking at the page views we got during Tropical Storm Fay. Something like 3 million page views in 80 hours. I turned to some of my colleagues during a break in the action and told them about this guy named Schimmel, who eons ago predicted Things to Come.
Check out some of City Paper’s earliest days on the web here.
