Philadelphia, Meet Your Future

Over the course of the night, as Ruth and Joey and I head out across this city, the Rocky issue will come up again. The people we'll talk to about it will uniformly share Sweeney's position. Which, if you think about it, is significant. For the Rocky question is really one much larger and more complicated than whether a 2,000-pound bronze effigy of Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa should stand on the grounds of one of the world's finest art museums. It's a question, in the mind of Sweeney and people like him — people who, whether you've heard of them or not, represent a large, growing and influential slice of urban life — about Philadelphia's identity at a time of seemingly breakneck change.

Later, Ruth will summarize things best. "Rocky," she'll say, as Joey stands beside her nodding, "is just not who we are anymore."



JOEY SWEENEY IS, in many ways, the embodiment of the strange confluence of factors shaping this city in 2006 — a Philadelphia morphing from cheesesteaks, Rocky movies and a gritty manufacturing vibe to trendsetting restaurateur Stephen Starr's culinary headquarters, auteur filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan's muse, and, perhaps, the first metropolitan area to offer citywide wi-fi Internet access.

"Philadelphia was like the last great Soviet city. Everything was broken — you know, it's amazing that the thing fucking works at all," Sweeney says of the transformation currently taking place. "Certainly culturally, Philly is a better place to be now than it ever has been in my life. And I feel like in a lot of ways, whether we" — he means Philebrity — "meant to or not, we've sort of assumed the mantle of that. But it is kind of funny, because sometimes I feel like we're so tied up in whatever that debate is, and whatever the movement is about."

It seems a Philadelphia-ism in the first place that Joey Sweeney, at the end of the day a rather big-fish-small-pond character, with a website that is, in all candor, a handful of random daily posts, could be at the forefront of "whatever the movement is about." He views Philebrity.com as entertainment — as a diversion, really — for the thousands of young Philadelphians who find themselves trapped inside gray cubicles in offices around the city — "People fucking hating their lives," he says. Accordingly, the site is updated around the hours of the workday. Sweeney, an on-again, off-again rock musician, considers advancing indie music one of his primary goals, particularly here in Philly, which he calls "the greatest alternative music scene in the country." So his day starts with an often frantic search for music he can post to his website and put his audience on to, and a photo — preferably of a Philly scene — that can set a kind of tone for the day.

Sweeney claims that Philebrity is currently being read by 100,000 unique — or ­individual — visitors a month, and rising. For perspective, the Daily News circulates to 116,000 readers daily. The Inquirer has about 350,000. Assuming that, by and large, the same readers buy the papers each day, Sweeney's numbers represent significant competition, especially among the all-­important younger-adult demographic. And it's that age group, of course, that Sweeney is not only trying to attract, but to define.