City Paper stopping the presses next week

Philadelphia City Paper will appear in print for the last time next Thursday, Broad Street Media L.L.C., the publication's new owner, said Wednesday.

Broad Street Media, of Cherry Hill, bought City Paper for an undisclosed price from SB New York Inc. and will consolidate City Paper's website with that of Philly Weekly, which is owned by a related company.

"To have two papers in the city of Philadelphia like that made no sense," said Perry Corsetti, publisher of Broad Street Media.

The two papers targeted the same readers and the same advertisers, said Corsetti, who was an advertising executive at The Inquirer for more than 20 years before leaving in 2011 to become publisher of Broad Street Media.

R.P.M. Philly L.L.C., a firm that has many of the same owners as Broad Street Media, bought Philadelphia Weekly in February. Broad Street publishes the Northeast Times and other weeklies in the region.

"From our standpoint, it made perfect sense to only have one paper being produced in Center City Philadelphia, an alternative paper. That really was our intent here. Our intention to buy it was that the City Paper would be shut down," Corsetti said.

Philly Weekly's editor, Stephen Segal, tweeted Wednesday that he was leaving the publication.

Through an assistant, City Paper publisher Jennifer Clarke had no comment. Other officials at SB New York, which also publishes Metro, a free daily, in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, could not be reached for comment.

City Paper staffers, who did not join Broad Street, were stunned to learn of their prize-winning paper's demise through a story posted on the website of the South Philly Review, an R.P.M. Philly publication.

"Our Web traffic has been steadily increasing and we've been doing good work," said City Paper senior staff writer Emily Guendelsberger. "But I didn't see this coming at all."

City Paper was founded in 1981 by Bruce Schimmel, who initially published it monthly from his house in Mount Airy.

"It was by and for people who felt strongly about political causes and artistic movements," Schimmel said Wednesday."

Schimmel sold the paper in 1996.

City Paper won first place at the Keystone Press Awards this year in its circulation category for investigative reporting, feature writing, and beat reporting.

"It's heartbreaking," said Daniel Denvir, who covered criminal justice and public education for City Paper until last year.

"It leaves an enormous hole in the news ecosystem," Denvir said.

hbrubaker@phillynews.com

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