Hey, All You New Times Naysayers...
To all you Cassandras bemoaning the deal by the alt weekly chain New Times to take over Village Voice media, here's a letter on Romenesko from Jeremy Voas, fired by Mike Lacey from his editor job at Phoenix New Times:

I should be one condemning the hegemony of the so-called New Times Evil Empire. Why? I was fired by Phoenix New Times in 2001. I'd spent nine years there, including a stint as editor in chief. I was very well paid and, for the most part, well treated. So were my colleagues. It was great fun.

The criticism leveled by Bruce Brugmann and others is little more than sour grapes. At its best, New Times is a journalistic model. Fearless, resourceful journalists are royalty at New Times. Unlike typical nickel-and-dime alt-weeklies, unlike drive-by daily rags, we were given the time, the resources and the column inches to pursue any story we deemed worthy. I was expected to think big, to produce definitive literary journalism. In most cases, a piece in a New Times publication immediately becomes the benchmark for all future reportage on that topic; all future stories necessarily emanate from a New Times piece.

...It's true that New Times publications openly eschew alt-weekly orthodoxy. Good choice. How often do you see a headline in an alt-weekly and forego the trouble of reading the piece? Hey, you already know what it says. This doesn't happen much at New Times pubs. There's an aura of unpredictability. At New Times, the so-called progressives in the community are held to the same standards of accountability as the business moguls, the right wing nuts, the porcine bureaucrats.

...This is not to say that Lacey is ever easy to work for. His eccentricities are well documented. I frequently fantasized about kicking his ass. An exasperated colleague who'd felt his wrath once described him as a combination of W.C. Fields and Pol Pot. But he knows exactly what he's doing. He is, at his core, a journalist. His tics could never trump the opportunity he gave me to do the best journalism I've ever produced.

I'd encourage those who are wringing their hands over this merger to take a breath and -- here's a novel idea-- actually read New Times publications. Anyone who bothers to do so with an open mind will quickly recognize outstanding, muckraking journalism. There's no city on earth that couldn't use more of that.

By the way, my late friend Marnye told me Lacey heard she had $10,000 in medical expenses, and swooped in and paid them without a word. I've heard many other stories like this. I dare Bruce Brugmann to compare Bay Guardian salaries and freelancer pay to that of New Times papers. Somehow, the commies are always shittier to the workers than the evil capitalists they shake their tiny sticks at. Without Barrs (the editor of New Times Los Angeles before it closed down) and all the rest here, there are few checks on the crooks and assholes in this town, and usually, nothing fun to read in a paper within the city limits.

Yeah, so, woooo, New Times papers have a consistent design, town to town. More papers should be more like them. Here's Lacey (New Times owner and exec editor) on what New Times is all about:

At New Times, our writers have a virtual blank check to explore the issues in their communities without the burden of a political agenda (mine or their editor's). As a result, our reporters break stories that later rip through the mainstream media.

The disgrace of the serial rapes at the Air Force Academy in Colorado first saw the light of day in our Denver paper. In Cleveland, we recently published grand jury documents that the daily sat on. In Phoenix, our writers broke the polygamy scandal in the Mormon sect on the Utah/Arizona border, as well as the stories about poor people submitting to unnecessary surgery so that doctors and patients both -- but particularly the doctors -- could swindle insurance companies. You've read about all these stories in national dailies. Bob Norman, one of our writers in Fort Lauderdale, was recently selected as the best in the country by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

We have also pursued law enforcement records through the courts in Phoenix, not for weeks or months, but for years. We have successfully pursued the right to parody the establishment all the way to the Texas Supreme Court. And our writers have pursued their stories to Sakhalin Island, Mexico, Haiti, and Cuba.

Don't confuse our growth with our jones for journalism. I got in this business in 1970 to raise a little hell. I try to stay at it by writing myself, and it usually isn't a tedious screed like this.

Jane Levine, a former publisher of the altweekly Chicago Reader, told the Boston Phoenix media columnist her opinion of New Times: "I think they're committed to uncovering wrongdoing. It is generally accepted that they don't have a political position. But I think it's pretty clear that they're bulldogs about uncovering corporate or government malfeasance. That's alternative. I don't know whether it's Republican or Democrat."

That sounds mostly correct. We here at New Times don't forgive anyone his trespasses. We like to compete. We bring our lunch bucket and our shot glass. We expect our colleagues to do the same. We hope that folks will have a mess of fun on the way.

That's not Gannett; that's New Times.

And just supposing the rumors were true. What would that mean for the Village Voice? The New York publication is a newspaper that in recent times survived owners like Rupert Murdoch, Leonard Stern, and, for the past several years, Wall Street. If David Schneiderman were to team up with a couple of Irish guys, I've got to think it's a step in the right direction. Or, at least, it is not the end of Western civilization.