Philadelphia Weekly

>MEDIA Star Treatment Fishtown residents liked their old newspaper just fine, thank you. By Frank Rubino --> The ladies of Oxford Street want to get their groove back. They want to open their front doors, stoop down and pick up the free tabloid that answers their most pressing questions: Whose birthday's coming up? Who died in the past week? And (by inference, of course) who's trysting with whom?

They want their beloved Fishtown Star to come home.

"We didn't just read it," explains 26-year-old hairdresser Erin Foley, standing outside the narrow brick row house that her cousin, Amber Leo, shares with Leo's 82-year-old grandmother, Anna Marie Bickel. "We looked forward to reading it. Every week. Our whole lives."

About a month ago--shortly after it was purchased by Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. (PNI, the conglomerate that is The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News and that owns the Northeast Times)--the Star stopped showing up on doorsteps.

"Every woman on this block has been flipping," says the freckly Leo, a 27-year-old mother of three.

But they needn't go off the deep end, says Todd Brownrout, PNI's senior vice president for sales and marketing. He says home delivery of the Fishtown Star and its six sister publications--the Port Richmond Star, Bridesburg Star and Art Museum Home News among them--will resume shortly, though the newspapers will now arrive on Thursdays rather than Wednesdays. (For the past month they've been dropped off en masse at neighborhood stores.)

"We've had some distribution problems, which we're straightening out," Brownrout says, adding that, contrary to swirling rumors, none of the newspapers will be terminated or consolidated.

Okay. But will the papers, which have a combined circulation of about 46,000, retain the folksy, cornball flavor that made them so popular?

Yes, but to a modified degree, says new editor John Scanlon, who also calls the shots at the Northeast Times.

Scanlon says he doesn't plan to ditch the Norman Rockwell-type stuff, though he does want to move it further inside. "I'd like to give the papers a little harder news edge up front," he says.

Scanlon has already given the papers a new aesthetic. They now resemble the red-trimmed Northeast Times.

He says he's fielded about 20 calls from readers, most of whom aren't crazy about the look. "It's understandable," he says. "They're used to the newspapers they've been reading for decades. We're going to have to win them over."

Complicating that effort is the fact that the papers no longer have a neighborhood base. They're now headquartered in Trevose, Bucks County, at the offices of Broad Street Community Newspapers, a PNI subsidiary. The old building at Third Street and Girard Avenue where the newspapers were put together for years has been shuttered.

"It used to be so easy to drop off 'Breezes,'" says Foley of the photos that accompanied "Happy Birthday," "Congratulations" or "Do You Remember Meeting Me, Baby?" blurbs. "Now we have to mail them to Trevose?"

Still, Foley and Leo say they'll probably remain loyal readers--as long as Scanlon doesn't eliminate all the fun scuttlebutt.

Older folks like Bickel, on the other hand, might be tougher converts. Asked what she'd like to say to Scanlon, she doesn't hesitate: "Give us our paper back, will ya?"

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Frank Rubino (editmail@philadelphia weekly.com) is a freelance writer from Philadelphia.