The Village Voice's No-Alternative News: Corporate Takeover

[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Howard Kurtz]
The nation's two largest alternative newspaper chains plan to announce a merger today, a long-rumored combination that champions of quirky, iconoclastic, locally controlled papers have been sniping at for months. New Times, the Phoenix-based publisher with 11 newspapers from Miami to San Francisco, is acquiring the Village Voice, the storied New York weekly co-founded by Norman Mailer, and five other papers owned by the Voice. Reaction is likely to be chilly among many staffers at the notoriously fractious Voice, where columnist Cynthia Cotts described a 2000 acquisition attempt by New Times as a "hostile takeover" by a company whose media purchases produced a "signature bloodbath." But David Schneiderman, chief executive of Village Voice Media, says the merger will give his papers a "national platform," particularly on the Web, an operation that he will oversee. While his staff will go through "a period of trepidation," Schneiderman says, "the resources of the combined company will strengthen us editorially." New Times executives, he says, "invest in editorial. This is what they're about. It's quite refreshing." As for the notion that the fabled counterculture papers of yore are becoming more corporate, Schneiderman says: "The issue is, what's in the newspaper? I would challenge anyone who's critical of this to point to anything in our papers or the New Times papers that's establishment. It's flat-out not true." The planned acquisition will require Justice Department approval on antitrust grounds, since the combined company would control about 14 percent of the circulation of the major alternative weeklies nationwide. The department has clashed with both companies before. In 2002, New Times agreed to close its Los Angeles paper, which competed with Village Voice Media's L.A. Weekly, in exchange for the Voice shutting down its Cleveland paper, which did battle with New Times's Cleveland Scene. To skeptics, a large company that serves both the 1.1 million readers of New Times and the 800,000 of Village Voice Media -- which also has papers in Seattle, Minneapolis, Orange County and Nashville -- is a giant step toward the corporatization of the alternative news world. But Michael Lacey, New Times's executive editor, argues that "media concentration at our end of the business is a good thing because it allows us to compete effectively," and says he hopes to restore the Voice "to its glory days."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/23/AR200510...
(requires registration)

* The Village Voice, Pushing 50, Prepares to Be Sold to a Chain of Weeklies
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/business/24voice.html
(requires registration)