A few things bug me about this [Philly Mag] article:
1. Of course Joey‘s gonna be nice to a reporter. When there’s something in it for him, Sweeney‘scharm can be downright dazzling. Of course, the flipside to this, is we don’t know what the piece looked like after x amount of edits, and Philly Mag doesn’t want to alienate a possible new demographic (which I don’t think exists in this town in any real large numbers: the indie-yuppie…I still think it’s The Khakis buying all those gazillion dollar condos). Besides, maybe Sweeney’s not important or familiar enough to most Philly mag readers to throw under a bus.
2. That tired old folk tale about the Humble Fishtown Boy Making Good. Truth is, he’s had a cakewalk in this town and sponsors from a very young age, Barnabys on forward. There’s no reason for him to have a chip on his shoulder anymore, besides a totally undeserved sense of entitlement. He’s like a Penn kid with a better record collection…3. The idea of Sweeney and Philebrity on the tip of any cultural vanguard. It’s good in theory, but in the past year (since he got on board with Blatstein) it’s only brought out our worst Napoleonic impulses. It makes me want to support the Rocky statue in principle. There is a middle ground between people who say youse and eat cheesesteaks and let their guts hang out of their sweatpants — and the overwhelmingly white male, hetero homogenous indie yuppie culture that every town with wireless and a Garden State DVD has now.
4. The idea that bloggers aren’t journalists. Just because you’re not writing an investigative piece in the NYT, doesn’t mean you’re not a journalist. You might be a bad journalist, but you still are one by definition. If you’re writing about anything other than yourself, your dog, and your records and you’re read by anyone other than yourself and your dog, then guess what, you have a responsibility to get your facts right and not libel anyone. Sweeney (and about a zillion other bloggers who’ve said this) want it both ways: They want to be considered a source. They want to scoop everyone else. They want to be the ultimate truth tellers. But when the shit hits the fan, and pesky conflict of interest surfaces? It’s the shrug of the shoulders and “I’m not a journalist,” like the kid accidentally hitting the baseball through the neighbor’s window.
4a. I’m not against other bloggers. Quite the contrary. With media consolidation not slowing down anytime soon, we need all the bloggers that we can get: good ones and bad ones, clogging up the works. The democratization of the internet — while still somewhat divided by those who can and can’t afford internet access — is really all we have left.
5. Why can’t this fucker pay his electric bill when he’s charging $900 for ad rates? Does PECO really charge that much to illuminate a space in the Blatstein compound?
If I write out 6-10, my head will explode. Thanks for listening.
Name Withheld By Request
We may live to regret this, but we pass this along because we’d rather start conversations than end them, and we believe his points are worth airing — even the ones we don’t necessarily agree with. Besides, no Philly Mag profile comes without a shit sandwich on the side. Just ask Neil Stein. If you put it out there, people are gonna talk back and some people are gonna talk smack. And some smack is less useless than other smack. Besides, we know for a fact the Hipster King has a pretty thick skin by now. Thick as a rhino’s, it is. And oh, what a mighty horn!