Are Alternative Weeklies Toast?

By DAVID CARR

Over the weekend, Rosie Gray, a former staffer at The Village Voice now at BuzzFeed, wrote that the men in charge of Village Voice Media had more or less the run the place into the ground. She pointed to staff layoffs on Friday at the newspaper, one more episode in a long stretch of downsizing at a publication that is part of a chain of weeklies.

The main problem, she said is,

they're not Voice people. And it's hard to explain the importance of being a Voice person if you're not one. The Voice, as marginalized and irrelevant as it has become, really was the voice of the city and of a certain kind of New Yorker. It was insouciant and jubilant, with sharply reported city politics pieces sitting next to art house movie reviews and sex ads. The afterglow of that leaves an impression on those of us who worked there, even if you're like me and were born well after the Voice's heyday.

The last part is the telltale. The version of the Voice that was the “the voice of a city” has not existed for many years. The cup of coffee Ms. Gray had at The Voice as an intern and the author of the “Runnin' Scared” blog may have made a strong impression, but The Voice has no shot of reclaiming a central role in a city that has four dailies covering New York - The Daily News, The New York Post, The New York Times and now The Wall Street Journal - in addition to the myriad blogs and print products of New York magazine, The New York Observer, Gawker and Capital New York. The list goes on, but you get the idea. In a large market like New York, The Voice, which used to make a noise nationally, has a hard time standing above the metropolitan clutter.

Ms. Gray points to the chain's legal problems with Backpage.com, which critics have contended is used to market children and teens for sex work, as a significant distraction and a drain on resources. And she suggested that the co wboy tendencies of Village Voice Media's two principals - Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey - did not endear them to the staff.

But whatever their idiosyncrasies, those men aren't killing The Voice; the informational ecosystem is. The problem with so-called alternative weeklies is that they were often formed in opposition to the daily newspapers in their respective markets, offering a spicier take on civic events and cultural coverage that reflected what was actually nascent in various places. With dailies limping in almost every American market and the listings and classifieds that were the bread and butter of weeklies now all over the Web, alternatives are just one more alternative among many.

Mr. Lacey, in an e-mail, pointed out that with the current political campaign focused on a faltering economy, it's not surprising that his company is struggling, along with many other media companies.

“Of course it is disappointing to let Rosie Gray, or any staff perso n, go,” he wrote. (Ms. Gray actually left the paper, she was not laid off.) “But her take on The Voice could not be more cynical or wrong: ‘We had a sinking feeling that they'd be willing to hurt The Voice instead of shuttering or selling other papers in the chain,' she writes.”

He added: “Nothing like that ever happened, but her suggestion that in a properly ordered world other journalists are more expendable, well, it is almost as revealing as her imagining that her departure is, somehow, part of the end.”

And it's not just The Voice that is struggling among weeklies. The Chicago Reader, once a huge, successful weekly, has been sold to The Chicago Sun-Times, a transaction that would have been unthinkable when it was in its prime. The Washington City Paper, where I once worked, was recently sold to yet another owner. City Pages in Minneapolis, a very well regarded weekly owned by Village Voice Media, is now down to two full-time writers.

The id ea that Mr. Larkin and Mr. Lacey had - using private equity money to roll up over a dozen weeklies into a chain to give the company scale in the advertising marketplace and savings on the cost side - has not panned out, in part because it was a big bet at the wrong moment. (Two of the company's private equity funders backed away from the company because of the controversy over Backpage.com)

Smaller weeklies in smaller communities, much like the pattern that has held for dailies, seem to be relatively healthier.

“Small and midsize markets have more traction these days” said John Saltas, owner of The Salt Lake City Weekly. “They aren't bound to strategies formed half a continent away. Nor are they as burdened with crippling debt. On that score, Village Voice Media is no different than MediaNews or any daily chain that bit off more debt than it needed when engulfing and devouring and consolidating. In the end, it made some short-term savings (repurposing movie reviews, for instance), but the long term loss was the loss of local credibility.”

Mr. Saltas said that he admired Mr. Lacey and Mr. Larkin for their approach to journalism and that they had published significant work for years in many markets. But he noted that chains like theirs were bound to have trouble in the current market, when small and medium-size newspapers are having a better time of it.

“Our percent of market is far larger than that of most big city papers - our 60,000 circulation is a higher percentage of population than say, the Chicago Reader's circ in a city of seven million,” he said. “We have impact on even the smallest story. It's hard to miss us and other small/medium market papers in our markets. Thus, we've held our market share better than some.”

There was a time when big metropolitan weeklies embodied the zeitgeist and hosted some of the best, or at least most provocative, writing in the country. (Not to mention that they were onto the whole model of giving away content for free long before there was a consumer Web.) Many of the more compelling editorial voices were annealed by their time in the alternative weekly world. Some would argue that it is a better training ground for the basics in reporting than hyperactive digital realms where the emphasis is on productivity.

Washington City Paper was edited by Jack Shafer, one of the more respected media critics in the country, writing at Reuters. Erik Wemple, who does a similar job at the opinion page of The Washington Post, also edited the newspaper. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who blogs at The Atlantic, worked there, as did David Plotz, the editor of Slate, and Kate Boo, who writes for The New Yorker. Eben Shapiro at The Wall Street Journal worked for a now closed weekly I worked at in Minneapolis and we competed with Monika Bauerlein, co-editor of Mother Jones with Clara Jeffery, who worked at City Paper. Sam Sifton, the national editor of The New York Times, worked at The New York Press, Harold Meyerson spent time at The LA Weekly and Susan Orlean worked for Willamette Week.

The idea of the alternative weekly - that news would be covered absent the agenda of mainstream media and that truths would be told without paying heed to any kind of formal balance or objectivity - has all but been overwhelmed by the Web. Listings, spicy writing, coverage of the next big thing, all of that has been digitized and democratized and many alternatives have ended up looking, of all things, stodgy within this new-media context. It probably makes sense that Ms. Gray, a talented young journalist, issued her anticipatory - and perhaps premature - obit for The Voice writing for BuzzFeed.