Voices
filed for bankruptcy in 2008.
I claim no special insight about
where alt weeklies are headed.
(It’s worth noting than many papers in smaller markets are doing
much better than their big-city
brethren.) But, as long-time publisher of LA Weekly (1984-2002)
and short-time executive vice
president of VVM (2000-2002),
I can offer a reality check on some
of the nuttier notions as to how
we got here.
Former Voice staffer Rosie Gray
wrote a piece for Buzzfeed that
suffers from historical laziness
and business naïveté, beginning
with the wrongheaded notion that
the Voice’s “slide began in earnest” when the paper dropped
its $1 cover price and went free.
When Village Voice owner Leonard Stern bought LA Weekly in
1994, the Voice was in the throes
of a sharp decline in paid circulation. Drops in circulation generally lead to drops in the price
a publication can command for
advertising. Leonard and Voice
CEO David Schneiderman saw the
potential for growth in taking the
Voice free and made the move.
The Voice made huge profits for at
least the next decade.
In fact, alt weeklies were pio-
MICHAEL
SIGMAN
HUFFINGTON
09.09.12
neers in making money by providing “free” information to their
readers. As New York Times media critic David Carr—formerly
an outstanding alt weekly editor
in Washington D.C. and Minneapolis—writes, “Alt weeklies were
onto the whole model of giving
away content for free long before
there was a consumer Web.”
Gray also points to distrust of
VVM owners Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey
among Voice staffers.
In fact,
She says, “The (Voice)
alt weeklies
staff assumed that
were pioneers
Village Voice Media
in making
Executive Editor Mike
money by
Lacey and his team
providing ‘free’
were interlopers bent
information to
on squeezing the last
their readers.”
drop of juice out of
the paper before leaving it to die. We had
a sinking feeling that they’d be
willing to hurt the Voice instead of
shuttering or selling other papers
in the chain.”
Some financial history: During the late ‘90s, long before Larkin and Lacey owned the Voice,
Leonard Stern, no liberal himself, sold his newspaper holdings—the Voice, LA Weekly and
five smaller papers—to an equity