Independent voice broke news and documented the weird

By Samantha Melamed

Four years ago, I was a freelance writer working a day job editing a suburban magazine and wondering how I'd ever get a full-time job in the city.

Then I landed a job as news editor at City Paper. Yes, it was a 25 percent pay cut. But it was actual journalism about the city I live in, not semi-advertorial best-of lists or stories that were written only about and for residents of affluent zip codes.

In this beleaguered profession, those jobs are hard to attain. And the odds just got worse: City Paper will cease publication next week.

The brand will be absorbed into Philadelphia Weekly, and a newsroom that produced powerful investigations on civil-asset forfeiture, police brutality, and government corruption will, apparently, be dissolved. With it goes another independent voice, a 34-year journalistic tradition, a training ground for journalists now working around the city and the country, and one of the few sources providing granular coverage of the turmoil of Philadelphia's media industry.

In my time at City Paper, I got to crash block parties, attend hijabi fashion shows, spend hours with boxers from Philly's badlands, ride along with community health workers, and hang around homeless shelters to learn what it's like to be sick and unsheltered in Philadelphia. When things got weird in Philadelphia, I took out my notebook and documented it. No publication in the city now has that as its mandate.

By the time I arrived there in late 2011, the party was already winding down. The newspaper was half the size it had been and shrinking all the time. I headed a three-person news team - each of them painfully underpaid and overworked. Yet we saw ourselves as viable competitors with every news outlet in town, and somehow we broke news on a regular basis.

It's hard not to wonder what stories might go uncovered now that it's gone.

Samantha Melamed is an Inquirer staff writer. smelamed@phillynews.com@samanthamelamed