[Dryerase] It Takes a Village (Voice) To Raze the Media

[annie v]

It Takes a Village (Voice) To Raze the Media 
by Mark Pickens 

When do jaundiced business ethics tarnish a
newspaper’s hard-won reputation for feisty,
progressive reporting? 

Between Sept. 27 and Oct. 2, Village Voice Media (VVM)
snuffed out a Cleveland newspaper on 24- hours notice,
slit the throat of a union drive at the chain’s
second-largest paper and sealed a deal with its
biggest rival to divide up markets in two cities. The
actions have attracted the attention of the Justice
Department’s anti-trust division, according to sources
close to the deals. 

The events have left staffers at the six VVM-owned
papers wondering what’s happened to America’s
alternative press. "It just shows that alternative
media is now a part of big media business," said David
Eden, former editor-in-chief of the now-defunct
Cleveland Free Times. 

VVM head David Schneiderman pulls the levers for a
consortium of Wall Street investment bankers and
venture capitalists that bought the Voice papers for a
reported $150 million in January 2001. This was a step
up for Schneiderman, who was previously the publisher
of the Village Voice. 

"We definitely think of David Schneiderman as the
Wicked Witch of the West," says Erin Aubrey, staff
writer and union president at VVM’s LA Weekly. 

The 2001 deal brought the 57-year-old Voice under the
combined ownership of the Canadian Imperial Bank of
Commerce, a group of Dutch investors and Goldman
Sachs, America’s third largest brokerage house. 

The new management now owns some of the most respected
alternative newspapers in America, including the
Pulitzer Prize-winning Village Voice, the LA Weekly,
the City Pages in Minneapolis, the Seattle Weekly, the
OC Register in California’s Orange County and the
Nashville Scene. With a combined circulation of
900,000 copies and annual revenue of $90 million, VVM
is the largest alternative chain in the country. 

It took just months for VVM to institute its new
bare-knuckles management style. In May, a dispute over
unionizing the LA Weekly’s advertising department
began to divide journalists and managers at the paper.
Pressed by escalating sales quotas, post- Sept. 11
layoffs and other job security issues, the paper’s ad
staff petitioned to join the already unionized
writers. 

Given the Weekly’s unwavering editorial stance as an
ally of labor unions, employees were stunned when the
new Schneiderman-appointed publisher, Beth
Sestanovich, deployed every means at her disposal to
defeat the organizing campaign. 

"It was like Union Busting 101," says Aubrey. 

After questionable tactics, including intimidation,
withholding of raises, and hiring a well-known "labor
relations" law firm to help squash the union drive,
pro-union staff were defeated by just two votes in an
election held on Sept. 27. 

"We’re regarded as the gold standard of labor
reporting in L.A," says Aubrey. "Suddenly [management
is] at war with their own paper. It struck us as
extremely hypocritical." 

Sestanovich’s union busting echoes events this past
summer at the Village Voice itself. Staff in New York
came within 24 hours of a strike after Schneiderman’s
management moved to slash health and retirement
benefits, as reported in the July Indypendent. 

Just five days after the coup de grace for the Weekly
union, though, another VVM-devised hammer fell on the
alternative news world, this time hitting both L.A.
and Cleveland. 

Schneiderman and VVM colluded with ostensible
arch-rival, Phoenix-based New Times, a chain of 12
alternative papers, in announcing a surprise deal on
Oct. 2. VVM closed its Cleveland Free Times and paid
$8 million to New Times for it to shutter the LA New
Times. As the only two cities where the chains had
competing weeklies, the swap effectively ended
competition between the two publishing giants. 

Nationally, some 250 alternative weeklies generate
$500 million in annual revenue, according to the
Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. VVM and New
Times together rake in nearly one-third of the
revenue. 

The L.A.-Cleveland deal raised immediate cries of foul
play from many corners of the alternative newsweekly
world. 

"We give the finger to all those who think this is a
good deal for L.A.," said Alex Ben Block of the LA
Press Club, alluding to the popular column, The
Finger, which ran in the now-defunct LA New Times. 

The move also came as a total surprise to David Eden,
then-Cleveland Free Times editor in chief. "I heard
about it the same day it happened," said Eden. "They
had a few people come in from New York and give out
final paychecks." 

The controversies spanning from L.A. to Cleveland and
New York point to a widening gap between VVM’s
business behavior and the editorial support its
newspapers often give to progressive issues. 

The Village Voice, for example, was going to print
with a hard-hitting story on the woes of a
construction workers’ union (Local 32 B-J) in New York
just at the same time its parent company was squashing
its own employees’ union drive in LA. 

Howard Blume, staffwriter and vice president of the
writers’ union at the LA Weekly, thinks these changes
bode ill not just for the employees, but the public at
large. 

"There’s both a consolidation of media ownership and a
shrinking of media jobs and that’s bad in every way
possible," says Blume. "There seems to be more news
and more media than ever, but it’s a mile wide and
only an inch deep."

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