It was a surprise to come back from vacation to hear that Village Voice and New Times may be well on the way to a merger. You may remember as I do that it was someone’s unenviable job to make Village Voice Media properties profitable enough to justify the significant investment it had required by the capitans of capital venture when Leonard Stern couldn’t interest his children in continuing the family business. The odds seemed long for a couple of reasons–not the least of which was the tension at the core of the business between making money and casting a jaundiced eye upon all who make money–nowhere more of a destructive/creative force than at the company’s namesake paper. But creative tension does not necessarily result in creative change.
New Times and Village Voice have been nothing if not persistent. In other words, “innovative” is not a word I would use for most of the papers those companies own and operate. The old-guard alt-weekly world has stayed in the same old trenches that were first dug in the fifties and sixties, and then paved in the eighties and nineties. It’s a necessary front, and I’m glad someone is occupying the watch while the rest of us play around at other forms of “entertainment.” Indeed, you might say that alt-weeklies suffer the opposite problem of the dailies–they have not innovated enough, not made enough inviting gestures to their readers, continued expecting the mountain of readership to come to Mohammed on the masthead.
Someone has to be doing this necessary work– the problem is, no one has to read it. So the alt-weekly’s self-appointed task of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the blah blah blah (and also continuing the important post-grad colloquium on the hermeneutics of popular music) is not necessarily a business venture that capitalists ought to be all that interested in–except as a property to be flipped when ripe. The pitch seems to have deveopled thus: if you buy enough of these local papers, you can create a pool for national advertising. An advertising buy in New Times or Village Voice is a nicely targeted national buy with impressive local numbers. That’s the idea, anyway. Problem is, as I say, ain’t no one gotta read it, and it remains an open question whether the combined papers of VVM and New Times would be any more capable of selling national ads than they are now. There are reasons why national ad buyers still prefer Rolling Stone, Vibe, and Teen People to the local alt-weekly–and it’s not just about glossy paper and Jessica Simpson.
You could also make the argument–and we often do make the argument–that a broken clock is right twice a day. Never has the traditional role of the alternative press been needed more, for social opportunities as opposed to business opportunities. Indeed, the last time the need was so great for a skeptical, pugnacious, David-taking-on-Goliath press, that press didn’t really even exist as an industry. This should be the alt-press’s finest hour since Vietnam. And yet, like the boy who cried wolf for thirty years, these papers tend to appeal, editorially speaking, to a small number of chorus members who crave being preached to.
What’s the point? I’m not sure the national chains of alt-weeklies recognize the value of entertaining and engaging readers while they continue the important work of shouldering the world. Is it possible to be both substantive and irreverent? To do good work without being a toady for the correct political party–and still make money doing it?
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