Much like with a puppy claimed from the pound, Smile Politely’s birthday is somewhat arbitrary.
SP began in the heady days of late 2007, when it seemed anything was possible, even a no-budget, volunteer-run online magazine. The recession has since quashed the hopes of anyone planning to duplicate this business model, allowing us to remain unchallenged on our uncomfortable perch between blog and legitimate media outlet.
We’ll be celebrating two years of paper-free bliss this Saturday, December 5, at Mike ‘n Molly’s, prior to some excellent live music from Laarks, Zach May & the Maps, and My Dear Alan Andrews provided by Mike ‘N Molly’s and in partnership with the fine folks at the Shadowboxer Collective.
You should come out and help us celebrate, or at least mock us incessantly. Preferably the former, but hey, whatever floats your boat. It’s free to get into the party, which will be from 8 to 9 p.m., and you can stay for the bands free of charge if you get there by 9 p.m. After that, the cover is $5 for 21+ and $7 for 19 and 20 year-olds. At midnight, the cover reverts to $1. Got all that? It doesn’t really matter, since we’ll be buying people drinks early, and that oughtta get most of you out before the clock strikes $5. Seriously. We have almost no money, and we’re gonna spend it on YOU. By buying you alcohol. We encourage good times and drinking.
To commemorate the occasion, here are some facts and figures about the site that you’ve come to know and acknowledge:
- Our first entry was entitled “Where Blood is Thicker than Lard,” a photo of a ferris wheel with a one-sentence ode to the Champaign County Fair penned by Justine Fein Bursoni on July 21, 2007.
- We used to meet at Farren’s every Tuesday night to plot our launch. Initially, we just did a lot of talking about what we wanted the magazine to be — news? opinions? sports, even? — but once our designer and co-founder, Mason Kessinger, actually had something to show us, it became hard to meet there without the use of “wireless” access. So, we moved to Pekara, and then to Esquire. We meet there every week, sometimes.
- Chris Maier was the first person to actually give the magazine some focus. He actually created a Smile Politely style guide, and people kind of use it, too. For instance, we use an en-dash between numbers (like Purdue beat Tennessee last week 73–72) and an em-dash to separate thoughts. It was this type of attention to detail — after all, no one else wanted to do it — that helped cement our place in the annals of C-U journalistic history.
- The first time that we actually told people we were posting things on the Internets was Wednesday, December 5, 2007. The public response was overwhelming, causing online stampedes which injured several.
- Initially, each article ran as a “top story” no matter the content. Then, last year, we redesigned our little magazine, and started to include what we call the SPlog — a community / user generated information-collecting device, developed by Doug Hoepker, who has subsequently taken hiatus to develop board games for… himself.
- We have no rivalry with the217.com whatsoever. We actually really like it, on the whole. WPGU is radical. In fact, we even had a meeting with their person-in-charge-but-not-really about how to best work together with this click-it-motherfucker-it’s-free type of world we live in. But they didn’t wanna play ball. At all. We feel that their policy of not allowing their “training staff writers” to get real world experience by free-lancing (something relatively common in this day-in-age) is, well, ludicrous. More on that in 2010.
- We’ve always had an eye on the community above campus. It’s part of the reason we decided to start this: there was no one representing the opinions and thoughts of those folks who call C-U home.
- Sometimes we even set up at the Farmer’s Market or Taste of C-U, and generally confuse older readers about how they access our leftist material.
- Smile Politely, as of 9:20 p.m. yesterday, has had 449,411 visits, 1,048,315 pageviews. You could be our 500,000th visitor, which would go a long way toward explaining all that confetti in your cubicle.
- Our most-read article is “Is it March Yet?” by Rob McColley, on August 31, 2009, with 3,367 views.
- Our second-most read article is “Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet Opens Tonight,” by Logan Moore on February 7, 2008, with 2,495 views, which is funny because nearly all of those resulted from, as best we can tell, people who did a Google Image Search for pictures of Shakespeare. No offense, Logan; helluva job there.
So, yeah. Feel free to roast us in the comments.