Eulogy For the Alt-Weekly

By Jeff Chang, AlterNet. Posted November 4, 2005.

At just after midnight on Monday, October 24, the Village Voice announced that its parent company, Village Voice Media, will merge with the New Times.

That means that competition in the "alternative weekly" sector has been all but eliminated. The New Times is adding magazines like the Los Angeles Weekly, City Pages, and Seattle Weekly to its list, and will command 25 percent of the market.

It is now the Clear Channel of alt-weeklies.

There is no longer anything "alternative" about the alternative. The long goodbye to an oppositional politics and aesthetics begins now.

This deal was first reported as more than a rumor in the San Francisco Bay Guardian over a month ago. The BG reported that the New Times would take a 62 percent stake in a new LLC while Village Voice Media would take 38 percent. A plurality, if not a majority, of the new LLC board would be venture capitalists.

The New York Times confirmed the details of this arrangement. It also cited New Times CEO James Larkin as saying that they expect to buy out the VCs in 5 years. Apparently, the new company will be called Village Voice Media, but clearly the Voice will be changing to become more like the New Times, not the other way around.

Current union contracts with the Voice would be honored -- and that, friends, is another story in itself. But others would likely be dealt with nastily. Earlier this year, there was a bruising battle at Cooper Square over union givebacks that resulted in small concessions from union members, and deep cuts in rates to freelancers.

This is no small matter -- the Voice once paid the best rates in the industry. By contrast, New Times freelancers received much less, and largely remained a point of entry for new writers. This merger is likely to push freelancer rates even lower, as NT execs ask editors why they are paying so much for mere "content". Writers, after all, are worth much less than a dime a dozen.

In the meantime, David Schneiderman, the man who sold the Voice, is reportedly ready to receive a cool half mill as a bonus to close the merger deal, and will become the VP of online operations.

Peter Scholtes at the City Pages sounds an ominous note on the future of the merger:

"…the first business decision of the long-rumored new company, which now owns City Pages? Feed the scoop to the New York Times, not its own reporters. So much for our vaunted "online efforts…"

From the point of view of the principals, the NT/VVM merger is the next logical step in rationalizing the industry.

Here's a business that started in the McCarthyist 1950s as a true alternative -- the papers used to be called "undergrounds" -- and took flight during the "whole world is watching" media explosion of the '60s. Lots of assholes got exposed, lots of rebels got their shine, and lots of cutting-edge culture got introduced to the world. Then, just like a lot of lefty orgs in the '70s and '80s, the alt-weeklies began to implode. Those decades were rife with purges, shakeouts, closures, and union-busting drives.

All these burned bridges were long forgotten by the go-go '90s, when dot-com money flooded alt-weeklies across the country. That's when VCs started checking out the scene, and corporate hounds like Larkin started moving in.

(This period also led to the rise of a new generation of writers -- one much more clean-scrubbed, signifier-savvy, overeducated, and arch-browed than the drug-slammed, whiskey-swilling, ink-stained renegades of an earlier era. The New New-New Journalists were culturally sharper and, much too often, politically less committed. They could take apart a movie or a CD for you in a smarter, funnier way than any overly earnest hippie ever could, but they couldn't tell you why they were getting paid so poorly for it, or organize anything more impactful than a kegger. And yes, I absolutely include myself in this not-so-wild bunch.)

Jeff Chang is the author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. This essay originally appeared on his blog.

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