BETTER DAYS: The editor with an old, dear friend, circa 2006.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The following open letter is in response to this.]
Jojo,
I find it ironic in the extreme that despite all your frantic efforts to paint me as a stick-in-the-mud rockist and yourself as the ever-evolving purveyor of What Comes Next, I see Phawker as a DJ — mixing, mashing and adjusting the visual BPM of all the media drifting 
in the ether, constantly re-writing the recombinant DNA of the news — and you see Philebrity as a band, where all the songs start with “I” and end with “me” and rhyme with ‘Sweeney.’ How quaint.
It makes perfect sense for Blogging Version 1.0 to feel threatened and hostile towards Blogging Version 2.0 after all the past never wants to concede the future to something else, so I take this as the unintended compliment it is. If this were Philebrity we would have headlined this with something oh-so-predictably snarktastic like: 2002 JUST CALLED AND THEY WANT THEIR BLOG BACK. But, alas, we are not. And given that we will hit the half million unique reader mark some time in the next week, not to mention one million page views, I’d say there is a sizable constituency out there that is eternally grateful we aren’t Philebrity and don’t bother trying to be. To quote Christian Bale: What don’t you fucking understand?
your former pal,
Jonathan Valania
Editor-In-Chief
Phawker.com
PS Don’t you ever get tired of the sound of your own fucking voice? I know I have.