The Village Voice, a New York Icon, Closes
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Unfortunately, they ran afoul of some young politicians/prosecutors who needed to make a mark to get into national politics (Hello, Senator Harris), and some old political families they burned, and are now languishing without money to pay for attorneys before their 2020 trial.
https://reason.com/archives/2018/08/21/backpage-founders-lar...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15614771
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15614310
The debate intensifies.
Good for the owner that at least they were willing to spend a tiny bit more to make this part happen.
The irony of a former longtime Voice editor now teaching at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism is straight out of the pages of another dead paper: The Onion.
https://medium.com/@pilhofer/no-craig-newmark-did-not-kill-l...
By the way, "Posting Instagram Sponsored Content Is the New Summer Job" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17878131
Does that make a little bit more sense?
A clear sign, and only 14y later they closed.
They dropped a bunch of extras, and their journalism got bland when they stopped paying for good people.
It was obvious that there were cut budgets behind the scenes. The paper was thinner and smaller, and a number of regular columns and features dried up.
The most visible difference was that after you flipped past the table of contents, you saw no comic strips, and flipping through the concert section, the end of the section was no longer the horoscopes, and it ran directly into the red light district, so to speak.
For someone who knows the industry, such a sign is not as irrelevant as it appears - nor is closing down a sudden affair. Unlike SV startups which can fold in 1-2 years, news outlets are surprisingly resilient in their dying. It's a long process of decay with several milestones along the way...
As someone that has worked in the print business, and am familiar with the history of lots of businesses (although in a different country), alot of media businesses had a decade or more of struggling before they finally give up the ghost -- and it indeed starts with signs like these (first they cut some expensive syndications, a first round of lay-offs, then they give up some subscriptions to news services like A.P. and Reuters, call off special reporters stationed abroad, a few major columns are cancelled because they can afford their top columnists, the quality of photography drops, and so on. In the end, the content is mostly sloppy rewrites from whatever wire service they still have, plus amateur "opinion pieces", then a final round of layoffs, and they die...
The cancelling one or more expensive features, like syndications, are a sure fire sign of a decay process starting...
For it to be a sign, it has to be consistent. The vast majority has to follow the rule. Exceptions need to be rare.
Otherwise, it's pretty much just anti-survivor bias. Yes, all failed magazines did these things, but doing that thing doesn't mean your magazine is failing if all magazines do it. Or if enough successful magazines do it.
14 years is a long time. It would be like saying water is deadly because everyone alive who has ever drank it has died or will die in about 100 years or so. Or everybody who has ever gotten divorced was married at one point. So marriage is a sure sign of an inevitable divorce.
Exceptions are rare. Flaying outlets invariably go through those moves.
>14 years is a long time
"long" makes sense only relatively. For some things the time from writing on the wall to dying off is in that order, and media outlets are one of those things. I already explained how a SV startup for example can die in 1-2 years (because VC money dry off etc), but established news outlets die much more slowly, in the span of a decade or more.
It's something I've witnessed unravel from inside and from friends inside with dozens of outlets in my country, and I've seen from afar the same path followed in several others in the US and elsewhere.
>Yes, all failed magazines did these things, but doing that thing doesn't mean your magazine is failing if all magazines do it.
Well, all magazines don't do it. Few do it without such reasons.
The distance between cause and effect is great. 14 years is long enough for a child to be conceived and start attending high school. That's not insignificant.
My points were:
That on a long enough timeline, everything fails. Which I illustrated by showing that everyone who has drank water has died or will die in a specific time frame.
You need to see where you're wrong as well as where you're right. Which I illustrated by pointing out every divorce begins in marriage. It's technically true, but marriage holds no predictive power because plenty of marriages succeed. For something to be a sign, it needs to be common in one group and rare in another. So giving up horoscopes needs to be common in failed magazines and rare in successful ones.
And something I didn't really illustrate too well: it needs to have a strong correlation both ways. In other words not only do the vast majority of magazines that give up horoscopes need to fail, the vast majority of magazines that fail need to give up horoscopes.
And the lifespan of the average publication must be far greater than 14 years. Or even a decade using your timetable. Because if most publications fail within that time, then you could literally point to anything and call it a sign.
All of it needs to be true.
[http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2009/01/marc_cooper_the_la...]
I'm sad that an alt-news source has died. I would have loved to consume their content, but I wouldn't have paid for it. I don't really buy much stuff either, so ads don't work on me.
RIP
I have published indie monthlies and I'd chalk the Voice's demise up to things like a serious decline in classifieds revenue, trouble getting visibility once they were online only, and the kind of advertising/printing problems that only an indie weekly could experience.
If the sub thirty crowd is that powerful, I'd genuinely love to know.
I wouldn't have paid for it.
It existed to appeal to people, and get ads in front of them. Just like The Onion. At which point, whether the ads worked or not (and just like everywhere else on the internet, people resist and try to ignore ads, and that resistance is a known quantity) advertisers paid to get in front of eyeballs. Mostly, New York concert venues paid for its existence, and you picked up the paper, to see who was playing that week, or what dates upcoming shows were. That's why it was free in New York. It didn't really advertise any events outside of New York.
Additionally, advertisers pay for conversion, not eyeballs. If they aren't noticing an uptick in prospects or revenue, they stop advertising with their current campaigns
I was a paid subscriber to the Village Voice for a year or so when I was living in Minneapolis. 2008/2009, I think ?
So while the cover price was indeed zero, there were indeed people paying to read it.
Weird.
Which is odd considering his high education having attained a Massachusetts in the 30th best school in the nation. You'd think he'd know better than to do that.
Regardless of whether or not he would fall within Village Voice's demographic, the fact that he was never aware of it is telling of nothing. Nothing is ever going to capture 100% of their target demographic. And thanks to wide breadth of the totality of human experiences the world has to offer, that he was not aware of it says nothing except that it never crossed his sphere of awareness.
I mean, I'm not aware of a lot of things myself. Barely aware of a ton. Like I might vaguely remember hearing something possibly about it maybe. Kind of acquainted with some. I'll know the name but not exactly what it is, or kind of know what it is, but not the name. Etc, etc. I don't have time to be intimately familiar with everything. No one does.
I consume content voraciously
And how do you expect to read Pulitzer winning journalism among these?
I signed a lease for an apartment after searching google maps for the closest corporate apartment buildings (Bozzuto) near my job.
I bought Verizon internet because that's what the building is wired for.
I bought an LG phone because I impartially reviewed the specs and played with the phones at the closest Walmart to my house.
I bought a bag of onions and some ground chicken from the closest/cheapest super market to my house.
I think you get the point. I don't buy things like RGB keyboards or concert tickets, that require exposure
The reason you know the name "LG" isn't because you somehow heard the name through a complex series of coincidental events... instead, it's because LG spends money in a way that directly or indirectly imprints their brand in your mind.
It being the most "snappy" and "responsive" of the phones in the price range may just be your brain responding positively to the most known brand in that price range. A brand recognition that LG does pay a good deal for.
I mean, it boils down to the old "Pepsi Challenge". In the blind, people will prefer Pepsi over Coca-Cola most of the time. But if people know which is which before hand, Coca-Cola is chosen more often as being "better". (Although Pepsi is sweeter than Coca-Cola on average and people respond to sugar, which is what led to "New Coke").
Same things happen with fast food. Taking the exact same food and putting it in familiar branded packaging and people respond more favorably to it. Everything from chicken nuggets to carrot sticks.
And the converse happens. People who have convinced themselves of certain things, can have their perception of an item influenced in particular ways. Say those people who abhor fast food and only buy farm-fresh, local, organic, blah because it "tastes better". You can cut up a McDonald's chicken nugget, present it pleasantly as a local organic whatever and have people compare it to another nugget you present as a McDonald's nugget and people will sit there and tell you how they can taste the difference.
So yes, you might have bought the LG because you felt it was the snappiest phone at that price, but you only felt that way because of advertising.
Well, consuming e.g. Medium posts or Lambda the Ultimate discussions is not the same as consuming the kind of content that gets Pulitzers.