I once drank in each page of the magazine thirstily after checking for it several days in a row at Austin’s now-defunct Sound Exchange record store praying that the new issue had arrived. In fact, it was my first serious exposure to magazine journalism. I never told Newitz how geekily proud I was when I first met her, mostly because I didn’t want to seem overly anxious.

But the first time she edited a piece I’d written as a Guardian intern about international students struggling to enroll in U.S. colleges after Sept. 11 was one of those moments I could have hardly wished for as a once-wistful Midwesterner.

“Holy shit,” I enthused quietly to myself. “This is the same woman who dressed as a man and attended a Promise Keepers convention undercover all for a PP cover story. Awwweeeesome. And she’s editing my piece.”

Newitz probably wouldn’t have understood why that was a big deal to me. It was.

I learned more about smart sex and femininity from the magazine’s often-bright columnists than I ever did from the public-school system (or my mom, God bless her). It’s a shame that magazines promoting unbridled douchbaggery like Stuff and Maxim will thrive while scrappy punk zines like PP die.

On the music side, the magazine years ago published unforgettable interviews with Steve Albini, Ian Mackaye and Mike Watt, as well as an early conversation with Isis frontman and Hydrahead Records honcho Aaron Turner, who is today among the most powerful forces in independent music.

It perhaps didn’t help that at one point, for better or worse, the magazine chose to limit access to its articles online in order to protect the ownership rights of those who wrote them. The October 2005 announcement that its newsstand distributor was in major financial trouble added significantly to the magazine’s woes.

A.C. Thompson wrote early articles about the punk/squat scene in Western Europe as he toured the world lugging around equipment and merch for Virginia-based punk heroes Avail. He later became my mentor, and I’ve learned more from him about investigative reporting over the last several years than I ever did from the journalism program at the University of Kansas.

He’s today working at the respected Center for Investigative Reporting in the East Bay (after a stint at the SF Weekly), but if you know him in person, he could still be safely described as a “punk journalist.” He continues to wear nothing but black. Several of his articles written for the Guardian were later republished by Punk Planet, as were selections from his first book about secret CIA planes used to transport terrorism suspects around the globe.

I’ve always told him I loved the idea of tattooed, lunatic hardcore kids becoming impassioned reporters and junkies for byzantine government records. We probably never would have gotten along so well if we weren’t both still obsessed with brutal hardcore and metal even as we approached (or crested in Adam’s case) our 30s.

I could hardly contain myself when he won a coveted Polk Award two years ago for a series of stories about the living conditions at public-housing units in San Francisco. There couldn’t have been a subtler sign that punks were creeping into traditional institutions and making all those years of hopeful -- but not always quixotic -- song lyrics mean something.

Other wide-eyed punks who became lawyers, nonprofit administrators and teachers quietly attribute some of their motives to magazines like Punk Planet and Heartattack, too.

Thank you, Punk Planet. We’ll never forget you.