Now, look: We cannot and will not pretend that we have had anything, really, to do with with nuts and bolts of why both the City Paper and Philadelphia Weekly have been failing so miserably in recent times. They did that entirely on their own; we just happen to take advantage of it, any chance we get, really. And while Jason Fagone’s piece in PhillyMag quite accurately describes the existential/financial funk of those papers right now, we were a little surprised, if you will pardon this moment of absolute non-humility, that there was no mention whatsoever of Philebrity or other cityblogs in Fagone’s piece. Only because we ourselves have acknowledged for a long time a very simple truth about our alt-weekly ancestry that goes like this: If papers like CP and PW nationwide hadn’t fucked up their respective web presences for so long and so spectacularly, the hole that sites like this one occupy now may have never existed. Because honestly: These papers had this audience on lockdown from the jump street, for the whole first 10 years of the Internet. This shit was theirs to lose. And boy, did they ever lose it. We just thought it was worth mentioning. (Sidenote: If we did a Kickstarter to raise a respectable annual salary with which to hire away/rescue Tara Murtha or Daniel Denvir, would you people pledge to it?)

Anyway, it stuck out to us, in our admittedly weird tunnel-vision. But then we remembered: We finally managed to get off the PhillyMag quote-tap list forever. Our bad!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2012 at 10:32 am.