co-founding editor Jenn Meccariello Layman who showed me this story in Pittsburgh Magazine on The New Yinzer‘s 10-year anniversary celebration.
Which means it was just more than 10 years ago that I was working a PR job at an arts center in Pittsburgh and I ran into Jenn one night at a White Stripes concert at the 31st Street Pub, a venue smaller than some exurban garages about which last I knew anything had strippers during happy hour. I “Wanted To Start A Magazine In Town And Call It The New Yinzer,” I’d kept telling people, but I had no idea how to go about it. Jenn, too, was restless and eager. So we started it online and we published our friends and we made new friends who submitted stuff to us or showed up at our happy hours (namely Seth Madej, who graciously went on co-edit for a time), and after five months in the winter and spring of 2002 we had our 10th issue up.[1] And so we threw a little 10th-issue anniversary celebration at the newly opened ModernFormations Gallery in Bloomfield.
It’s fitting, then, that the 10-year anniversary‘s also being held at ModernFormations. Technically, if you consult the archives[2] (as I had to), the real 10-year anniversary was back in January, but these new folks—none of whom I’ve ever met, but each of whom I admire and am grateful to—are throwing it September 20. If I were a richer man I’d fly up to be there.
The thing about Pittsburgh was (is, still, I hope) that wanting to do something that could change the landscape of an entire city was always in one’s reach, even at age 24. We got written up in the papers. We pissed some people off. It was a time and a place where you could launch something as small and blase as a Web site (in HTML, no less, using Notepad) and see the thing make waves in the city you’d come to adopt as your own.
I can’t believe it’s still around. I can’t believe it’s still around.
[[]]Jenn and I’d decided originally that to compete as best we could with the two (at the time, RIP InPittsburgh) alt-weeklies in town that we had to be a fortnightly publication. So we had a new issue up every 14 days. It was too rapid a pace in the end, and by that fall we’d become a monthly with no regrets.[[]]
[[]]My favorite issue remains , which in hindsight is very bros-y, but includes the that got me into graduate school, a review I was just thinking about the other day, and a comic by the guy who wrote Casey Affleck vehicle Lonesome Jim (2005, dir. Steve Buscemi).[[]]
- s my co-founding editor Jenn Meccariello Layman who showed me this story in Pittsburgh Magazine on The New Yinzer‘s 10-year anniversary celebration.
Which means it was just more than 10 years ago that I was working a PR job at an arts center in Pittsburgh and I ran into Jenn one night at a White Stripes concert at the 31st Street Pub, a venue smaller than some exurban garages about which last I knew anything had strippers during happy hour. I “Wanted To Start A Magazine In Town And Call It The New Yinzer,” I’d kept telling people, but I had no idea how to go about it. Jenn, too, was restless and eager. So we started it online and we published our friends and we made new friends who submitted stuff to us or showed up at our happy hours (namely Seth Madej, who graciously went on co-edit for a time), and after five months in the winter and spring of 2002 we had our 10th issue up.{{1}} And so we threw a little 10th-issue anniversary celebration at the newly opened ModernFormations Gallery in Bloomfield.
It’s fitting, then, that the 10-year anniversary‘s also being held at ModernFormations. Technically, if you consult the archives{{2}} (as I had to), the real 10-year anniversary was back in January, but these new folks—none of whom I’ve ever met, but each of whom I admire and am grateful to—are throwing it September 20. If I were a richer man I’d fly up to be there.
The thing about Pittsburgh was (is, still, I hope) that wanting to do something that could change the landscape of an entire city was always in one’s reach, even at age 24. We got written up in the papers. We pissed some people off. It was a time and a place where you could launch something as small and blase as a Web site (in HTML, no less, using Notepad) and see the thing make waves in the city you’d come to adopt as your own.
I can’t believe it’s still around. I can’t believe it’s still around.
[[]]Jenn and I’d decided originally that to compete as best we could with the two (at the time, RIP InPittsburgh) alt-weeklies in town that we had to be a fortnightly publication. So we had a new issue up every 14 days. It was too rapid a pace in the end, and by that fall we’d become a monthly with no regrets.[[]]
[[]]My favorite issue remains , which in hindsight is very bros-y, but includes the that got me into graduate school, a review I was just thinking about the other day, and a comic by the guy who wrote Casey Affleck vehicle Lonesome Jim (2005, dir. Steve Buscemi)↵
- co-founding editor Jenn Meccariello Layman who showed me this story in Pittsburgh Magazine on The New Yinzer‘s 10-year anniversary celebration.
Which means it was just more than 10 years ago that I was working a PR job at an arts center in Pittsburgh and I ran into Jenn one night at a White Stripes concert at the 31st Street Pub, a venue smaller than some exurban garages about which last I knew anything had strippers during happy hour. I “Wanted To Start A Magazine In Town And Call It The New Yinzer,” I’d kept telling people, but I had no idea how to go about it. Jenn, too, was restless and eager. So we started it online and we published our friends and we made new friends who submitted stuff to us or showed up at our happy hours (namely Seth Madej, who graciously went on co-edit for a time), and after five months in the winter and spring of 2002 we had our 10th issue up.[1] And so we threw a little 10th-issue anniversary celebration at the newly opened ModernFormations Gallery in Bloomfield.
It’s fitting, then, that the 10-year anniversary‘s also being held at ModernFormations. Technically, if you consult the archives{{2}} (as I had to), the real 10-year anniversary was back in January, but these new folks—none of whom I’ve ever met, but each of whom I admire and am grateful to—are throwing it September 20. If I were a richer man I’d fly up to be there.
The thing about Pittsburgh was (is, still, I hope) that wanting to do something that could change the landscape of an entire city was always in one’s reach, even at age 24. We got written up in the papers. We pissed some people off. It was a time and a place where you could launch something as small and blase as a Web site (in HTML, no less, using Notepad) and see the thing make waves in the city you’d come to adopt as your own.
I can’t believe it’s still around. I can’t believe it’s still around.
[[]]Jenn and I’d decided originally that to compete as best we could with the two (at the time, RIP InPittsburgh) alt-weeklies in town that we had to be a fortnightly publication. So we had a new issue up every 14 days. It was too rapid a pace in the end, and by that fall we’d become a monthly with no regrets.[[]]
[[]]My favorite issue remains , which in hindsight is very bros-y, but includes the that got me into graduate school, a review I was just thinking about the other day, and a comic by the guy who wrote Casey Affleck vehicle Lonesome Jim (2005, dir. Steve Buscemi)↵
Aw jeez, thanks Dave.
I forgot about the “pissing some people off” part. That brings back memories of the war in the City Paper letters column over something that I can’t even remember now. Someone didn’t like us using the word “yinzer”?
I can’t believe it’s still going either. You should be proud that the majority of its time in existence has come after you and Jenn passed it on. That’s a mark of strength.
It was this dude who wrote from InPittsburgh. Joe Someone? And how yeah: we were young punks who weren’t even from Pittsburgh and didn’t even realize “yinzer” was pejorative. Oh no wait, he wrote (at the time) for Pulp, as did I, because he and I met at a Pulp editor’s party and chatted about TNY and he aired no objections whatever with the magazine or the title. Then a few weeks later, after we got some press for something in CP, he got all angry. I’m pretty sure I wrote a letter back.
Letters-column wars in cities’ alt-weeklies!