Emily Guendelsberger
Found this outside today.
You may have read this afternoon that Philadelphia City Paper had been sold and would cease publication as of Thursday, Oct. 8.
This came as a surprise to us, too. We first heard about it via Broad Street Medias press release announcing that theyd acquired the intellectual rights to City Paper (in other words they bought the name and the URL.) That was brought to our attention when people from other newspapers started calling us for comment or friends started texting their condolences, the result of a very unfortunate misunderstanding between our current owners and our soon-to-be-owners about the timing of the announcement.
Were all obviously really sad. Were intensely proud of the work weve done this past year not to mention the past three decades. Philadelphia City Paper was privately owned since our founding in 1981 until we were acquired a little over a year ago by Metro US, publishers of the free Metro papers.
Metro’s CEO immediately hopped on a train from New York to Philly when all this started going down and arrived to tell us the bad news in person. Metro’s own press release then came out an hour ago:
Metro US, the most-read free daily newspaper nationwide, announced today that it has decided to cease publication of the Philadelphia City Paper effective with its last publication on October 8th, 2015.
“When we acquired City Paper, we wanted to explore its potential within our product portfolio. However, due to the recent performance of City Paper, we have decided refocus our efforts on the continued success of our core Metro brand,” said Yggers Mortensen, Publisher and CEO of Metro.
“I would like to thank everybody involved in this project especially our advertisers for their trust and employees for their hard work and dedication throughout the year.”
The rights of City Paper have been sold to Broad Street Media, publishers of Philadelphia Weekly magazine, Northeast Times and South Philly Review.
We’re happy to be able to update this post with the news that, while City Paper will not be publishing any new stuff after the 8th, Darwin Oordt, the CEO of Broad Street Media, has said he is committed to finding a “good steward” to keep our 35+ years of archives public and available possibly Temple’s Urban Archives, which has expressed an interest in helping with the project.
However, CP’s entire staff is still being laid off by Metro US, which is a pretty big bummer particularly in the case of two staffers who recently moved here to take their jobs. This is why we are typing this from the bar.
So. At the moment, we’re the only people here, playing maudlin songs on the jukebox. Somebody just said, “It might be really great to do a post chronicling what it’s like when an entire staff gets laid off!” Someone else replied, “Dude, the clicks don’t count anymore.”
They don’t, we guess. We’d like to think, though, that the clicks were never the most important thing. We did our best to do good journalism, to give a voice to the people and stories of Philadelphia that sometimes get overlooked.
We have one final print issue that you can find in the orange boxes on Thursday; we’re trying to figure out what to put into it now. We’re not even sure what to say. Feel free to suggest things.
We’ll always love you, Philadelphia.
Sincerely,
The staff and writers of Philadelphia City Paper