N.Y.’s Village Voice wasn’t a victim of the internet but of greed
New York City’s Village Voice, the granddaddy of North American alternative newsweeklies, a community of which I am a part, announced on Tuesday it is shutting down its print edition. It didn’t have to be this way.
The first time I visited the dusty Village Voice offices was in 1984, when then-owner Rupert Murdoch had reluctantly agreed to let his staff host a bunch of visiting alternative newspaper publishers for a visit during their annual convention.
I was newly in the fold, having co-founded Toronto’s NOW Magazine three years earlier. The dingy, but to me, glimmering building and its staff were invested with all of the beautiful self-importance of mission journalists everywhere, sweetly, smugly certain they were doing important work, as was I.
The second time was in the mid-’90s, a golden age of publishing, at least in revenue terms, including for alt-weeklies. The Voice’s then-publisher, David Schneiderman was trying to create a North American-wide empire of alternative newspapers and he wanted NOW to be part of it. I was admittedly intrigued, flattered at the least. And so began the disintegration of the Village Voice, as it worked with a venture-capital company to monopolize the anti-monopoly press. Co-founder Norman Mailer would not have been impressed.
Walking through the uneven-floored building with Schneiderman, the whispers from eye-darting staff seemed to be of schemes, not scoops. It felt like staffers looked at me as if I was with The Man instead of fighting The Man. NOW eventually walked away from talks with the Voice, as the conversations veered away from journalism and focused more on getting 35-per-cent return on investment, compressing newsrooms and sharing reporters nationwide.
The Voice got in a bloody battle with the cowboys at the hugely successful Phoenix-based weekly, the New Times. The New Times owners were more loud-mouth libertarians than liberals, prepared for a death match for alt-media supremacy.
Both companies and their backers were committed to buying as many alt weeklies as they could.
The fight between the Voice and the New Times ripped the heart out of the alt-weekly world.
When we should have been savouring the glory years before the internet’s assault on our young readers, we were consumed by which of the two companies was courting us.
The once anti-monopoly, anti-mainstream media were lining up to be consumed. After the late ’90s crash, the two companies pushed the limits of U.S. antitrust laws, agreeing to shut down competing papers in shared markets.
The New Times won the battle in 2005, consuming the Voice and all of its publishing booty to create a huge, heartless alt-media, virtual monopoly. Their glee at victory was indicated by renaming the new mega-company Village Voice Media.
The Voice was the prize, but they didn’t treat it like one. The New Times’ cowboy-boot-wearing commando, Mike Lacey, ambled into Manhattan and made it clear he wasn’t impressed with the legacy of the admittedly now, somewhat dour paper.
He threatened staff and eventually got rid of venerable and more expensive writers, including Nat Hentoff, James Ridgeway, Robert Christgau and more. Editors were changed as often as the sheets.
Lacey foolishly thought he had a franchise, not a sacred trust, capable of being stripped to the bone, with readers prepared to take whatever scraps he offered. It didn’t happen. Readership and page size shrunk as the watereddown weekly faded to irrelevance. The Voice corporation became the very thing it was created to oppose, and savvy readers moved on. The Voice wasn’t a victim of the internet but of greed.
Eventually, Lacey and his crew gave up, the New Times took the adult advertising business, a website called Back Pages that features prostitution ads, and sold the paper to the hapless publisher now overseeing the end of the era.
The end of the Village Voice in print is not a statement about the state of publishing but a morality tale about what happens when a values-based business sells its soul.