Village Voice Media
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 and Jim Larkin, was then known as New Times Inc. and the publication was named New Times. The company was later renamed New Times Media.
By 2001, the company 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.
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
s 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. It soon became a unique focal point for a variety of viewpoints and intellectual positions in New York City and beyond.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 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, The Rag and the Great Speckled Bird.
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, the end of the Vietnam War, and harassment by the U.S. government, predestined a rather short life for them. 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.
Another of these survivors was Phoenix New Times in Phoenix.
History
Early history
The impetus for the creation of Phoenix 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.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 draped in vines with a torch in one and a knife in the other. The caption: "Hang ivy on me and call me a student".
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. Lacey had attended Catholic schools in Newark before moving west to attend Arizona State University. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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."
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, 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.
Larkin later recalled:
The paper survived because there were so many people willing to work for nothing or next to nothing because they had a common vision: all that Sixties and early-Seventies bullshit. The anti-war movement was valid, certainly, but there were certain elements of the hippie movement that the paper took advantage of. People would work for nothing because they thought they were part of a great social experiment.
In 1972 the company launched a Tucson edition. It never gained traction for a variety of reasons, including cultural differences between the two Arizona cities, a lack of advertising interest, and an editorial emphasis on Phoenix politics and issues. The Tucson edition was shuttered in 1975, but not before launching the writing career of Ron Shelton, a former minor-league ballplayer who would go on to write and direct the baseball classic movie Bull Durham.
In July 1973 the company, in desperate need of capital, issued a public stock offering for Arizona residents. It raised $38,000, with stock priced at $1 per share. The money was spent in no time, leaving the company in much the same precarious financial position as it was prior to the sale – only now with more than 200 individual shareholders.
In 1974, Larkin was named publisher and president of the company, a move that presaged his future role as CEO of the largest group of alternative newsweeklies in America. By 1975 many of the paper's staffers had begun to leave the company. Low pay and the collective nature of the organization had taken its toll. Lacey left in 1974, followed by Larkin in 1975. Larkin was replaced by Phillip Adams, a shareholder and board member who was also a certified public accountant. Adams and his business partner, Al Senia, also owned the Casa Loma apartments in downtown Tempe, where they headquartered the New Times.
But the Adams era was short-lived. Complaints came from stockholders: A lack of communication from management, a failure to hold any Board of Directors meetings for more than a year, and a loss of focus on local issues. This led the previous leaders of the company including Lacey and Larkin to devise a plan to take back the newspaper. On March 19, 1977, the former leaders staged what came to be known as "the coup." After Adams was voted out by supportive shareholders, they loaded up all of New Times meager office equipment and supplies from the Tempe offices and transported them to a new location at the Westward Ho Hotel in downtown Phoenix. There the modern New Times company was reborn. Litigation ensued, but within a few months the new management group had prevailed. Larkin became the publisher/president and Lacey soon joined him as editor.
With circulation now at a low point of 17,000 copies, the new managers knew they faced an uphill struggle. Luck was with them. Investigative Reporters and Editors was about to release a massive report entitled The Arizona Project that detailed the events surrounding the 1975 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles. But the Republic refused to publish the report, claiming it was unfair and improperly investigated. The Bolles murder was a major story in Arizona. The refusal by the Republic meant the residents of Maricopa County would have no place to read the report— except, that is, in the newly re-formed New Times. For weeks the paper ran installments of the IRE investigation. Papers flew off the stands and the paper established a readership foothold in the Valley of the Sun. The IRE report was far from the last time New Times would clash with the Republic. In 1980 the daily and its publisher Duke Tully sued New Times for libel, claiming its coverage of a union dispute at the Republic was inaccurate. While the suit was eventually dismissed, the enmity between the two publications grew. Ultimately Tully was forced to resign as publisher of the Republic after it was revealed that he had falsified his claims he had served as an Air Force fighter pilot in Korea and Vietnam. In fact he had not served in Korea or Vietnam and had never been in the military at all.
Fights with the Republic aside, one of the first important initiatives for New Times was to increase circulation. The paper was distributed free at locations chosen to attract the young readers coveted by advertisers. The Chicago Reader had pioneered free circulation in the early 1970s and Larkin eagerly embraced the concept. By 1984 weekly circulation reached 140,000. The paper also expanded its coverage beyond news and feature stories to include extensive listings, as well as music, food, film and arts coverage that gave it a much wider appeal.