The Voice of Change
The merger of New Times Media and Village Voice Media is a big-time business deal between the two largest alt-weekly chains in the US, and it created a new entity composed of 17 papers with a circulation of 1.8 million. (In a nod to the Village Voice brand, the new company is called Village Voice Media.) From the outset, speculation focused on whether the New Times would impose its editorial culture on the Voice, an aging liberal lion with a circulation of about 250,000 that has won three Pulitzers in its storied history, including one in 2000 in the international-reporting category for a series on AIDS in Africa. At this point, however, the paper is better known for its columns and criticism than for its enterprise reporting.
The 35-year-old Phoenix, Arizona–based New Times operation has built its reputation on long-form narrative journalism and its proclivity for investigative digging. In a departure with traditionally liberal alternative journalism, however, its papers don’t wave the banner of any particular political philosophy. San Francisco Bay Guardian founder, editor, and publisher Bruce Brugmann, who is involved in litigation against New Times, is a harsh critic who had dubbed the New Times ideology “libertarianism on the rocks with giant stocks of neo-con politics.”
On occasion, the company’s aggressive approach has backfired. Miami New Times editor Jim Mullin left that job last year after publishing a highly controversial story that included, among other things, allegations about former–Miami commissioner Arthur Teele’s sex habits. Teele, who was under indictment, shot himself to death as the story was hitting the streets. Some furiously blamed the paper and in a column that verged on a mea culpa, Mullin wrote that “no one knows if Teele read the article before ending his life,” but “at the least, it’s likely he’d heard about it.”
In December, nine-year Voice editor Forst — whose salary was reported by the Bay Guardian to be a robust $325,000 — also resigned. In late January, publisher Miszner was gone as well, replaced by then–Miami New Times publisher Michael Cohen. On February 1, Lacey met with anxious Voice staffers to lay out his vision for the paper. A Bay Guardian account described Lacey as critical of the news section “because it was full of commentary and criticism of the Bush administration.”
Lacey says, “I’m opposed to having four or five writers an issue saying ‘Hey, me too. I don’t like [Bush] either.”’ Readers “are not going to put up with 5000 words of political axe-grinding.” Not all of this was well received.
The 72-year-old Schanberg says he resigned after “it was clear to me at that writers’ meeting that [Lacey] did not want a press column.... He said he didn’t want any stories that referred to other people’s work.” Schanberg described the mood in the room as “frightened,” adding that Lacey’s “language was adversarial and pugnacious.... He played the bully. I respond terribly to bullies.”
Lacey says that the 80-year-old Hentoff resigned at the meeting, and that although he reconsidered, he is “pretty upset.”
Hentoff says Lacey expressed annoyance at one of his columns and “he was talking about reporting that was stenography. So all I said at the meeting was I guess we have different concepts of reporting.”
