Port Folio Weekly was founded in 1983 as a lifestyle magazine for yuppies -- i.e., people who traded in their bongs for Cuisinarts and their 1960s ideals for Machiavellian career plans. (Remember, this was the yup\'s golden age.)
Over the years, however, it has evolved into a more substantive alternative weekly.
So what is an alternative weekly?
Good question. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart on the subject of pornography, it\'s hard to define, but I know it when I see it.
That said, I think these are a few key elements:
Unflinching coverage of local and national news, with special attention given to stories that are ignored or intentionally buried by the mainstream media.
Fiercely independent commentary on local and national issues. Our political point of view is unabashedly liberal, but we also make a point of including conservative voices, and we have little tolerance for knee-jerk political correctness from the left.
Serious but unpretentious coverage of the arts -- and of course by that we mean everything from punk rock and graffiti writers to opera and well-endowed art museums.
Humor, especially when it exposes cultural or political idiocies and hypocrisies.
Advocacy journalism. While we strive to be fair in all of our reporting, we believe journalistic objectivity is impossible to achieve, and just plain boring. We have our pet causes -- environmental protection, equal rights for all, economic justice, cultural quality before profit, and so on -- and we\'re not afraid to make that clear in our articles.
Above all, we strive to do what we can to make the Seven Cities a better place to live (unless, of course, you\'re a bigoted philistine or greedy powerbroker, in which case we strive to make it a worse place to live). We do so by celebrating good works wherever we find them, exposing the squelchers whenever we can, and bluntly admitting when we\'ve screwed up.
-- Tom Robotham, Editor-in-chief