In 1998, as a member of City Year of Greater Philadelphia, an AmeriCorps Organization, I created, with my team, a community newspaper afters school program at the West Philadelphia YMCA. A monthly publication, Village Voices, was written almost exclusively by Philadelphia Public School students, grades 5-12, living near the YMCA. By year's end, the program was selected as one of the best after school programs in the national YMCA network. I graduated The George Washington University with a BA in Political Communications in 1997 with almost enough credits for a journalism minor and a few semesters worth of journalism internships and this is why I was chosen to lead this endeavor.
At first my goal with Philly1.com, which went live in August of 1998, was to create a citywide after school journalism program where every public school student would have an email account and could create a publication online and have access to everyone else's -- much in the same way blogs have evolved today. Whether or not this project would be an officially sanctioned or underground newspaper type of publication had yet to be decided, but, for one reason or another, I was unable to pull enough resources together or garner enough interest for implementation: Thank goodness today The Public School Notebook exists.
Instead, from 1998-2001, Philly1.com featured a variety of content from academic pieces to short literary works and biography features published monthly along with weekly webcasts. For a year, we operated a free internet cafe during the day at Orfeo Restaurant (now Monkey Bar - 2029 Walnut Street) and this served as our base of operations. When the Republican National Convention came to town we opened our doors to journalists and to many of the folks who would soon become the nascent blog community to broadcast and file stories. It was an amazing time and I feel very lucky to have been part of that experience.
In 2000, Philly1.com began filming monthly and then weekly video interviews featuring individuals, community groups and government officials we believed were making a difference in the community and streamed these videos from the homepage. While this is now commonplace, it wasn’t at the time. Along the way, I had the opportunity to meet some amazing people. Interviews included Mary Tracy (SCRUB), Loree Jones (Current Managing Director of TheCity of Philadelphia), Nick Stuccio (Managing Director of Fringe/Live Arts), Joey Sweeny (Philebrity), Sasha Issenberg (The Sushi Economy) and host of other Philadelphians making a difference in our city. In all, more than 120 short and feature videos were produced and streamed.
In 2002 Philly1.com partnered with Center City Weekly Press and University City Review community newspapers. Bob and Claudia Christian are an amazing couple and have been invested in community news for more than two decades. These papers have been a soapbox for many community activists and a score of issues were first covered on their pages. At the time, these papers did not have good web presence and we only produced video. By bringing the two entities together we created a very rich, diverse and local content partnership. It was a very good marriage.
At its peak, Philly1.com enjoyed 70,000 unique visitors and over approximately 250,000 pageviews per month. Our primary mission was to bring local content to the public that might not otherwise find an outlet and not commercial success. We succeeded in doing so. You’d be surprised (with a handful of exceptions) how many local businesses do not see the need/value in advertising in entities that cover zoning board and community group meetings and also how many of those same companies come running for coverage when they find themselves on the short end of the bureaucratic stick. Now with the advent of google adwords and blogads the value is predefined and easier to exploit.
Last April, we encountered a problem with YAHOO! Website Services. Initially they were helpful, but then, they were totally unresponsive and all of our archival material remains inaccessible on our Yahoo server. I continue to pay the hosting fee in hopes of retrieving nearly 10 years of our work and 4 years of work belonging to The Weekly Press & University City Review newspapers. Regardless of how hard we try or how many times we contact YAHOO! we receive no response (I have the email traffic, or lack thereof, to prove it). Philly1.com went dead for over 4 months. We have lost much of our goodwill and standing in the community. While we remain on good terms with The Weekly Press & UC Review and are planning future project together, our co-branded content partnership is over. We are just now trying to put the pieces back together and it is a terrifying and lonely process. If you have been interviewed by Philly1.com since 2000 and have copies of those interviews please contact us. We have rebuilt close to 60% of the archive already.
This brings us to today. The new Philly1.com is now a local social networking site that aggregates content from all over the city and gives individuals and organizations the opportunity to meet friends, form groups, blog and showcase their individuality. We invite you to come and help define this space for yourself and your community. In the months ahead we plan to again produce community video and showcase the works of others who are doing the same thing. We also plan on continuing our battle with Yahoo! Website Services to get back what is rightfully ours and rebuild what they have helped to all but destroy. With your help I know this is more than just possible. Thanks.
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