Village Voice Media
Company type
Holding Company
1970 (as New Times Inc.)
Formerly published alternative newspapers and websites. As of December 2014, it had divested itself of all of these properties
Village Voice Media or VVM is a newspaper company. It began in 1970 as a weekly alternative newspaper in Phoenix, Arizona. The company, founded by Michael Lacey (editor) and Jim Larkin (publisher), was then known as New Times Inc. (NTI) and the publication was named New Times. The company was later renamed New Times Media.[1]
By 2001, the company (NTI) had grown to 13 newspapers in major cities across the United States. Most of these publications were acquired via purchase from the current owner/publishers.[2]
In 2006, with the acquisition of The Village Voice, the company took the name Village Voice Media Holdings. The company is often referred to in this article as NTI/VVM after that date.
Emergence of alternative newspapers[edit]
Alternative newspapers trace their beginnings to 1955 and the founding of The Village Voice in New York City. Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer together chipped in $10,000 to start the paper.[3] It soon became a unique focal point for a variety of viewpoints and intellectual positions in New York City and beyond.[4]
However, in the late 1960s a new type of journalistic enterprise began to emerge in the United States and elsewhere: the underground newspaper. Fueled by the growth of the anti-war movement, radical politics, the Civil Rights Movement and the counterculture of the 1960s, these publications appeared in virtually every city and large town (especially college towns) in the United States. At one point Newsweek estimated there were more than 500 underground papers with a combined distribution of between 2 million and 4.5 million copies. Among the most prominent were the Berkeley Barb, Los Angeles Free Press ("Freep"), The Rag (Austin) and the Great Speckled Bird (Atlanta).[5][6][7]
The Village Voice and Paul Krassner's The Realist— an amalgam of Mad-magazine-style satire and alternative journalism first published in New York City in 1958—are often cited as the main sources of inspiration for underground newspapers. But there were differences. Although the Voice and The Realist had a distinctly liberal bias, they also gave favorable treatment to multiple opinions and put an emphasis on quality writing. Radicalism and activism were not their focus. This was not the case for the underground press. Activism and social and political change was its raison d'être. Journalism and editorial quality took a back seat. That fact, combined with a lack of sound business practices (most were organized as collectives), the end of the Vietnam War, and harassment by the U.S. government, predestined a rather short life for them.[5] By the early 1970s, the majority had ceased publication. A few, grounded in a different publishing philosophy that followed many of the examples set by the Voice and The Realist, survived and formed the beginning of a new alternative press. These included the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Boston Phoenix and The Georgia Straight (Vancouver).[6][7]
Another of these survivors was Phoenix New Times in Phoenix.
History[edit]
Early history[edit]
The impetus for the creation of Phoenix New Times (New Times) was provided by opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War and specifically President Richard Nixon's decision in the spring of 1970 to expand the war and launch an invasion of Cambodia. The spark came from the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University by National Guardsmen. College campuses across the country erupted into demonstrations and strikes, including Arizona State University in Tempe.[7]
The state's dominant newspaper, The Arizona Republic, published an editorial cartoon by Pulitzer Prizewinner Reg Manning. The cartoon showed "a dirty, longhaired young fellow (labeled "campus terrorist") draped in vines with a torch in one ("arson") and a knife ("deadly assault") in the other. The caption: "Hang ivy on me and call me a student".[8]
The cartoon angered Michael Lacey, the Binghamton, New York-born son of a sailor turned New York City construction worker. Although his father was not college educated, Lacey later recalled, he had insisted that his son read the daily New York Journal-American every day, a habit that bred a lifelong interest in journalism.[9] Lacey had attended Catholic schools in Newark before moving west to attend Arizona State University (ASU). He had already dropped out of school when he and a pair of students, Frank Fiore and Karen Lofgren, felt compelled to report accurately on the campus anti-war protests, which they believed were either being ignored or misrepresented by the ultra-conservative local media led by the Republic. They planned to publish their own paper, which after missing its own first deadline, made its debut on June 9, 1970, as The Arizona Times.[8]
Rechristened New Times, the paper began weekly publication in September 1970. It was neither a hard-core underground publication nor a mainstream journalistic enterprise. It began to develop a unique identity, like a number of other post-underground papers around the country. Over the next two years, New Times explored a variety of social and political issues, both local and national. Revenues crept up, and small successes became beacons of hope. In April 1972 the paper attracted J.C Penney, which ran a series of full-page advertisements.[8] In that same summer, Phoenix native Jim Larkin joined the paper. Part of a blue-collar family that had deep roots in the desert metropolis, Larkin had grown up reading many of the same magazines as Lacey, whose attention he got by sending New Times a detailed written analysis of the city's political and media scene.[9] A fellow college dropout who had attended school in Mexico before returning home, Larkin quickly became the paper's business and sales leader, injecting some practical thinking into its operations.[8] Larkin took a more level-headed approach in part because he had something few of the other New Times staffers did – a spouse and two children to support. After working all day at the paper, "he would drive to the Nantucket Lobster Trap where he worked all night as a waiter."[8]
But in the early days, New Times was not an organization upon which a major newspaper group could be built. The company, which had incorporated as New Times Inc. in October 1971,[10] was internally organized as a collective, mirroring the thinking of a large number of its underground predecessors. This resulted in long bouts of introspection, analysis and debate.[8]
Larkin later recalled:
Journalism of New Times and Village Voice Media[edit]
Philosophy of journalism[edit]
From its inception, NTI/VVM became known for its fiercely independent journalism and its willingness to take on topics and stories that spooked mainstream publishers. The newspapers also became touchstones for local arts and culture, devoting entire sections to the coverage of rock music when most dailies ignored the genre, and investing in sophisticated restaurant criticism at a time when dailies focused primarily on recipes and home cooking tips.[75]
During the 42 years from its founding in 1970 to the sale of the publications in 2012, the company's publications followed a different path than that of daily papers and glossy magazines. The early days of Phoenix New Times were driven editorially by opposition to the Vietnam War. As the company grew, Lacey, the rough–edged editorial boss, demanded reported stories but also expected his reporters to have a voice. In a writers' manual first drafted by Laake and amended by others over the years, reporters were told that, "Objectivity is the Loch Ness monster of journalism. Only a few claim to have seen it, and no one believes them. Your standard in framing stories should be intellectual honesty. A crook is a crook, a liar is a liar, and these are demonstrable things."[76]
That mission statement created the foundation for a deliberate methodology of unfettered, often long-form, journalism. Early on, Lacey demanded editorial independence from the business interests of the paper, and in 1978 the company's board of directors approved an editorial board for Phoenix New Times that gave editors full control of the editorial section of the paper. That separation of editorial and business meant that publishers did not hire or fire editors, an arrangement that was an anomaly in the newspaper industry but which made it easier for Lacey to fulfill his stated desire for entering the industry in the first place: to "... punch a few people in the fucking head."[1][77]