On September 30th, Broad Street Me­dia an­nounced that it had ac­quired Phil­adelphia City Pa­per from SB New York, Inc., the publishers of Metro. As a res­ult of the ac­quis­i­tion, City Pa­per ceased its print pub­lic­a­tion last week. The news was announced in a press release on the Broad Street Me­dia-owned Northeast Time’s website.

The demise of City Paper (CP) was not entirely unexpected, though — the alt weekly had been diminishing from some time. Not only did the paper’s physical size decrease but the content of the paper weakened like a Jersey shoreline crippled by climate change. The paper’s slow death seemed to accelerate after its purchase by Metro — the king of soundbite urban news and rapper glam.

CP’s glory days were the 1990s and early 2000s when writers like Howard Altman covered the Center City jogger case in pieces like “The Kimberly Conundrum.” The jogger case was one of Philly’s most sensational crimes in which a 26-year-old paralegal was raped, murdered and left in a stairwell at the corner of 21st and Pine Streets in early morning hours of November 2, 1995. Altman’s two-part CP series told the story of the haphazard and disturbing legal events surrounding the murder and the arrest of suspects Herbert Haak and Richard Wise. I was also involved in reporting on that case for another publication but that’s another story…

During that period of time, if you were a journalist or a new college grad with journalistic ambitions, writing for CP was an obligatory rite of passage. Philadelphia Weekly (PW), CP’s rival publication, was not such a prized venue because it came to ape sensationalistic elements of The New York Post. But for a period of time the two newspapers seemed to run neck and neck when it came to a quality product.

Early on, CP’s consistently solid editorial basis put it heads above PW, especially after the latter’s bloody Cesarean section birth in January 1995 when the old Welcomat staff (and format) were sent packing in a coup right out of a Russian melodrama. In some ways, it’s not possible to talk about CP without tapping into PW’s history.

At the time, Bill Warner was the Welcomat’s editor and a charismatic leader who the staff was very dedicated to. Warner’s editorial style had a micromanagement flavor but he was astute in a New Yorker Magazine kind of way. He had moved from New York to take the job and was beginning to make serious changes to The Welcomat. But he would never have a chance to implement his vision for the paper because publisher Michael Cohen had begun to engineer a coup in newsroom.

Cohen wanted to bring an alternative weekly format to the paper but Warner and his staff resisted. Cohen eventually decided to fire Welcomat staffers following their current deadline and bring in a new editorial staff. Just as the completed weekly was going out the door to the printer, The Inquirer called Suzanne Ross, who was the managing editor of The Welcomat at the time, and asked her how she felt about having lost her job. Ross didn’t realize she’d been fired. Soon a parade was forming down to Cohen’s office and that’s when people were told that they had all lost their jobs.

In addition to my work as a Welcomat columnist, I also worked in the newsroom as a proofreader so I witnessed the tension between Cohen and Warner firsthand. The conflict seemed to be as much about personality as about conflicting editorial views. Warner’s cerebral, insular style was the opposite of Cohen’s hyper-extroverted used car salesman persona. It seemed to me then that Warner saw Cohen as an editorially clueless money man who knew little or next to nothing about writing and culture. The way Warner saw it, Cohen’s job was to support the editor and work on the production side of things, like finding new distribution outlets. The monumental clash of egos contributed to Warner’s undoing. In fact, the word in the newsroom then was that Warner hated talking to Cohen. We will never know what PW might have become had Warner not been given the axe.  

Former PW staffers like to say that the paper received an upgrade from community paper to alt weekly after the expulsion of Warner, but the fact is that The Welcomat had already sailed into alternative waters after its move from a tiny office on Ludlow Street. Writers like John Guinther and Jim Knipfel were hardly “community,” although I suppose the difference had to do with an alt weekly having more paid staff and music reviews than the old Welcomat could support. After the move from Ludlow Street, a new cover design improved the look of the paper and The Welcomat seemed headed in a new direction. And so PW was born.

It strikes me as odd that CP staffers were notified of the loss of their jobs and the end of their publication the same way that old Welcomat staffers heard the news about the original PW coup. In both cases there was no advance warning. As CP stated in a press release: “This came to as a surprise to us. We first heard about it via Broad Street Media’s press release announcing that they’d acquired intellectual rights to City Paper. That was brought to our attention when people from other newspapers started calling us for comment.”

In a strange, Machiavellian twist you might say that this was PW’s second bloody coup but only by default because it was conducted under the Metro and Broad Street Media umbrella.

Looking over the legacy of both newspapers, it is true that both PW and CP seemed to run on the same editorial gas so that readers often got them confused, leading to talks of a merger and the benefits of a unified newspaper. That history was recounted in a 2013 Philadelphia Magazine article by Jason Fagone, who wrote, “The staffs are very similar, comprised of the same smart young urbanites; there’s been plenty of staff-swapping.”

But by 2013 the differences between PW and CP had become radical: PW was up to its neck in New York Post and National Enquirer sensationalism, even as both publications were being hammered down in size. The elimination of pages and content accelerated for CP last year when it was purchased by Metro. With that purchase, CP’s death warrant was signed.  

Immediately after the sale of CP was announced in the Broad Street Media press release, it was explained that “the best” of CP would be incorporated into PW. It was also made clear that the Broad Street Media preferred PW although it was also suggested that after the “incorporation” of the two papers that PW would rise from the ashes in phoenix fashion.

What is this if not admitting that PW is currently little more than a patient etherized upon a table? Time will tell whether this urban prophecy occurs but as things stand today it is pretty obvious to most that PW needs more than an editorial transfusion and should have been the weekly standing on the firing line.