EDITOR|PUBLISHER Allison Hurwitz

EDITOR|PUBLISHER Hannah Serrano

Hello world!
We’ve finally arrived. And we want to get to know you. You are our magazine. You are the stories, you are the audience, you are the reason it exists, and you are the ones who make it happen.
The SevenCities publications include a web magazine and a seven-title print series that begins with Taste. Our online daily, 24SevenCities.com, carries the watchword “Here. Now.” We aim to be a fresh and constant presence in the community. Constantly updating with blogs, feeds and original stories, we are always on and always tuned in to local life.
From everything on the web, we derive the best material relating to food, nightlife, style, music, home and living, and the arts, to fill our print editions. Those respective titles are Taste, Haunt, Shop, Sound, Inhabit, Create and MoreSevenCities, which has a changing theme and comes out only twice a year. The others, however, are quarterlies. But because a new one is released every two weeks during the quarter, there’s something fresh for you more often.
The content that we pull from the website can be anything—anything that we find meriting space in the print quarterly. So long as it’s relevant, we draw upon your comments and emails as much as our own bloggers’ posts and our writers’ features.
In particular, we hope to fill this comment space with your thoughts and feedback. Tell us what you want to see, what’s missing, what we’re doing wrong, and what we’re doing right.
Your opinions and experiences are like research for our stories. When we talk about a new restaurant or an upcoming concert or an important referendum, we want to quote you. For the local community and visitors to the area, your advice is gold. If Anne from Suffolk says River Stone Chophouse’s filet mignon is maddeningly delicious, we’ll likely take her word for it.
Many of the restaurants we’ve featured here and likely will in the future are admittedly focused in Virginia Beach, Ghent, and downtown Norfolk. Of course mainly this is due to our feature story, which covers all three of their restaurant weeks. But it is also because those places are our own communities, where we live and work. (42SevenGranby is both the name and location of our soon-to-be headquarters.) We want to know what’s going on where you are. The beautiful thing about the internet is that it connects people without building roads. So keep us posted.
And on an even deeper lever, we want to know and tell your story. Submit your photographs, give us your reviews and your top picks, send in recipes…If it makes it to print, we will pay you in kind.

So who’s behind all this?
We—Hannah Serrano and Allison Hurwitz—are local writers and former editors of Port Folio Weekly. We established Paper Pixel in the fall of 2008 to publish SevenCities.
We love it here where we live. We love this area. Certainly, we want to bring to it something more, something we feel it’s missing—but at the same time we know you can’t very well improve a place without first recognizing its inherent splendor.
Both of us admit we’ve tried to leave. Hannah, after growing up in suburban Virginia Beach and yearning for a more worldly experience of life, promised herself when she left that she wouldn’t ever come back here to live. Allison, upon leaving PFW, decided also to move on from her home in Norfolk to make a new one Frederick, Maryland .
But as true native are wont to say around here, ‘They always come back.’ And we both did. We each realized that there was so much we’d built and still want to build here.
Though our creative aesthetics are perfectly in sync, our personal sensibilities couldn’t be more dissimilar—like a scoop of ice cream and a cup of black coffee. “We want to make people smile,” says Hannah, and completing her thought Allison adds, “and we want to make them think.”
Nevertheless, we have have a singular goal at the core of our partnership–the dream of making something exciting for where we live.
In the course of putting together this premiere issue, we’ve gotten to meet amazing people who’ve inspired us in many ways. From Chef Phillip Craig Thomason’s return to the area after traveling the world and gaining renown to Paul Chhabra’s commitment to bringing heart-warming, exotic food These people have inspired us to believe that there not only can be more in this area, but that with heart and hope and ingenuity (and some luck) we can be the ones to help make that change.
We’re not the Pilot, we don’t pretend to be a place where news breaks. We’re not Link or Port Folio or 9Volt, which all had their place in “alternative news media.” SevenCities is something else entirely—a true local independent alternative. We’re a small endeavor with a big vision.
And we want to grow with this region. Our magazine is about everything that makes this home of ours great—and you are what makes it great.
So let’s continue to get to know each other…
With a new year and a new magazine is a new opportunity to embrace the world around you and the one just outside your door.

Hannah Serrano | Allison Hurwitz
Editors | Publishers

Please send your letters via email to comment@24SevenCities.com. Contact us at Hannah.Serrano@24SevenCities.com and Allison.Hurwitz@24SevenCities.com.