Clara Jane Hendrickson | The end of an era

Leftovers | Paying homage to 34 years of the City Paper

By Clara Jane Hendrickson 10/21/15 11:44pm

For many of you, Thursday, Oct. 8 passed unnoticed. However, Philadelphia was the site of the latest casualty of the American alternative newsweekly with the City Paper putting out its very last issue after 34 years of exceptional local journalism. On Oct. 6, the City Paper was sold to Broad Street Media and the City Paper staff was notified of the sale of their paper and their layoffs through a press release. Drinking together in a bar, the City Paper staff began brainstorming ideas for their last issue. Sharing the news with their readers, the staff posted online, “we did our best to do good journalism, to give a voice to the people and stories of Philadelphia that sometimes get overlooked.”

When I first arrived in Philadelphia, I immediately fell in love with this city. It was eccentric and dirty — the bastard child of New York, I called it. Even the cliche of place-based pride somehow didn’t apply here. Parochialism wasn’t seen so much as a necessity, as a way of life. One day freshman year I was in 30th Street Station. There was a new art installation — a giant clown that filled up the entire place. The clown had his face in his hands with two giant blue teardrops painted on his cheeks. That’s when I came up with my personal motto for Philadelphia: “You got public art?!? We’ll take it.”

At the very beginning of my freshman year, plans were just being enacted in the city to close 24 public schools. I attended protests and School Reform Commission hearings, trying to grapple with why this was all happening. City Paper journalist Daniel Denvir wrote an incredibly well-crafted, well-researched series on the education crisis. I fell in love with the paper and picked up copies from their orange boxes often, happy to feel like a Philly resident rather than just a Penn student. The stack of papers would grow throughout the course of the year and every time I moved apartments, I would wrap all my belongings up in old copies of my favorite newspaper. The City Paper was an integral part of falling in love with Philly, falling into local politics and confronting the deep inequities and injustice that face so many in this city.

The City Paper’s blog, the Naked City, covered stories in neighborhoods often dismissed by many of the Philadelphia dailies and glossies. In a final farewell piece, ex-Editor in Chief of the City Paper Lillian Swanson, wrote, “what I regret most is that Philly will be left without a real alternative voice, one that speaks truth to power.”

While the paper in the last couple of years fell short of funding, it continued pushing for great journalism, local coverage, promoting emerging artists in Philadelphia and a tradition of long, investigative pieces. One reader remarks, “the long, long, long word counts that meant a reader could get lost in a story, a reporter could take all the time and column inches needed to tell it and a long attention span was not only encouraged, but expected of both.”

I have benefited tremendously from the City Paper over the years and I am heartbroken to see it go. Part of the end of many urban American alternative weeklies is due to the increasing turn to online, boredom killing media. The City Paper may no longer be with us, but I believe we as young, well-educated people have an important choice to make. I wish not to preach but instead want to emphasize the importance of such a choice. It is not enough to simply passively consume, scrolling through whatever appears on our screens and feeds. We must decide deliberately as the audience, what it is we wish to consume. Do we want reporting that is more committed to the divisiveness of politically entrenched belief or reporting that is willing to let research lead them to an unknown destination? An old City Paper journalist reflected, “we were scrappy and annoying. But we mattered.” It is journalism’s responsibility to be annoying so it matters. Let’s take this moment to reflect on how we wished to be annoyed.

CLARA JANE HENDRICKSON is a College senior from San Francisco studying political science. Her email address is clara@sas.upenn.edu. “Leftovers” appears every other Thursday.

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