ghostwriter
Deserving of a big cut n' paste:
In an effort to make Manhattan as interesting as Phoenix, the new owners of the Village Voice have dumped Jim Ridgeway, one of America's leading journalists. The move has stirred considerable anger among Voice staffers, a score of whom signed a letter that stated, "In light of this distinguished track record, the decision last week by the Voice�s new ownership to terminate Ridgeway is shameful. It also sends a terrible message as to the sort of coverage that the new ownership portends. We call on Voice Media Executive Editor Michael Lacey and Chairman and CEO Jim Larkin to reverse his discharge."
The letter was signed by signed by Tom Robbins, J. Hoberman, Lynn Yaeger, Nat Hentoff, Jarrett Murphy, Ed Park, Chuck Eddy, Robert Christgau, Nina Lalli, Elizabeth Zimmer, Dennis Lim, Tricia Romano, Aina Hunter, Corina Zappia, Jennifer Gonnerman, Jorge Morales, Wayne Barrett, Michael Musto, and Darren Reidy.
The letter also said: "For 30 years, James Ridgeway has, in his person, his politics, and his writing, defined what makes the Voice a special publication.
"From Three Mile Island to 9-11, Ridgeway has provided some of the nation's most incisive and insightful coverage of government misfeasance and malfeasance. He was one of the first journalists in America to spotlight the threat posed by a resurgent racist and neo-Nazi movement, an issue he hammered away at in the pages of the Voice years before anyone ever heard of Ruby Ridge or Timothy McVeigh. His reports on escalating environmental abuses exposed corporate law-breakers and bureaucratic indifference.
"Ridgeway's writings on conflicts from Bosnia to Baghdad to Haiti have always provided the otherwise unreported flip-side of the world according to the mainstream media, in short reporting that jibes precisely with the exact mission of the Voice. Over the past few years, Ridgeway expanded onto the Web, filing regular nuggets of breaking news, and even posting video reports on the 2004 elections."
According to Wikipedia, "Seventeen alternative weeklies around the United States are owned by the Voice's parent company New Times Media. In 2005, the Phoenix alternative weekly chain purchased a majority stake in Village Voice Media. The move grew out of the anti-trust conviction of New Times Media and Village Voice Media; they had secretly agreed not to compete against each other. Now, with all the papers under one roof, they can control competition among their subsidiaries legally."
The takeover, which had the charm and logic of Enron buying out an electric cooperative, is effectively ending an alternative media era that began when a few publications like the Voice paved the way for a new journalism that would eventually, in the late 1960s, have a voice in some 400 underground newspapers across the country.
By the 1980s, however, these papers were being replaced by a faux alternative press far more interested in style, food and entertainment than in politics or social change. As your editor wrote at the time, one got the impression from reading these newspapers that, when the revolution came, the guerillas would come down the mountains in designer jackets on Head skis and listening to Sony Walkmen. Jack Shafer, then editor of Washington's City Paper, explained it this way: "Look, Sam, we're not an alternative news medium; we're an alternative advertising medium."
Despite ownership changes, including a bout with Rupert Murdock, the Voice held its own until the New Times crowd moved in. (emphasis Dex's)
Ridgeway is one of this country's most important journalists. When I think of the Voice, I think of James Ridgeway. This is ridiculous.
I have never been sure what role exactly Denver's blandly bitchy, wanna-radical McWeekly is supposed to fill, and while this doesn't make it any clearer, it certainly doesn't make me any happier that we're one of the beach heads.
Or, maybe not - maybe we got some leverage, Labrateers. That said, I'm putting up the Dex Signal, and I'm asking all the CO bloggers who stop by the Lab to write the Westword. DO IT NOW: send a note to both the New Times (or, "Village Voice Media") and to the Westword, and ask them what sort of message they think they're supposed to be sending about hard-hitting political journalism - not only to readers of Ridgeway, but to the other consum -ah, sorry, readers around the outposts of their franchise.
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