The bad news just came down the wire that Chicago-based politics and music journal Punk Planet is no more. The magazine's been on shaky ground ever since it ran into distributor-related financial problems in late 2005, but in an open letter on the Punk Planet Web site, editor/publisher Dan Sinker acknowledges that drop offs in ad revenue and subscribers finally did it in:

"[W]e could blame the Internet. It makes editorial content—and bands—easy to find, for free. (We're sure our fellow indie labels, those still standing, can attest to the difficulties created in the last few years.) We can blame educational and media systems that value magazines focused on consumerism over engaged dissent. And we can blame the popular but mistaken belief that punk died several years ago.

But it is also true that great things end, and the best things end far too quickly."

I'll admit that I haven't picked up an issue of PP in a while, but it was by far one of the biggest influences on my formative hardcore years, and the magazine's righteous fury in the lead-up to the 2000 presidential election still stands in my mind as a prime example of how passionate, effective, and emotionally moving political writing can be. 

Sinker says that punkplanet.com's forums and blogs will keep on keeping on as "a social networking site for independently minded folk," but I sort of prefer the image in my head of PP in magazine heaven, being pissed off among the angels.