
The Village Voice, a New York Icon, Closes - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/business/media/the-village-voice-closes.html
======
pythonistic
Related, don't miss the Reason feature on Larkin and Lacey. They purchased the
Village Voice in 2005 and had a solution for the classifieds problem,
Backpage.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://reason.com/archives/2018/08/21/backpage-founders-larkin-and-
lacey-speak)

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zone411
The article mentions Gothamist and DNAinfo but the NY Daily News also recently
laid off half of their staff.

~~~
twingie
Uh, that’s a whole ‘nother story. Nuked from orbit, so to speak.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15614771](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15614771)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15614310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15614310)

The debate intensifies.

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gumby
> Some staff members will stay on to make the paper’s print archive digitally
> accessible...

Good for the owner that at least they were willing to spend a tiny bit more to
make this part happen.

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liftbigweights
Thought they closed down years ago. Used to see tons of village voice
newsracks all over the city. Haven't seen any in years.

~~~
alexhutcheson
They went digital-only last year.

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Theodores
They never made it online in a meaningful way. Not once have I had a must read
link to their website. There are news websites that even if you hate the paper
will lure you back due to content, for instance the New York Times will get
stories on here, one will visit even if one hates the bloated paywall. But the
Village Voice? It never made it onto most people's surfing radar.

~~~
subpixel
They were Craigslist before Craigslist - classifieds were the heart their
business model and the money stopped flowing hard and fast. Once that happened
they had no means of funding ‘must read’ articles. They kept the lights on
with the collapsing print display ad business until that gave out.

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.

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xrd
The irony and tragedy of a former Village Voice writer Tom Robbins now at the
NYU Craig Newmark journalism school. Craig Newmark, the founder of the site
that killed print newspapers. I'll miss the Voice.

~~~
snaky
> Do you really truly believe that, if not for Craigslist, little kids would
> be riding around your neighborhood today tossing thick newspapers onto your
> lawn laden with classified ads? If so, we need to talk.

[https://medium.com/@pilhofer/no-craig-newmark-did-not-
kill-l...](https://medium.com/@pilhofer/no-craig-newmark-did-not-kill-local-
news-94c8365eb934)

By the way, "Posting Instagram Sponsored Content Is the New Summer Job"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17878131](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17878131)

~~~
jhbadger
Only in the sense that if it wasn't Newmark and Craigslist, it would have been
someone else with a different site. The fact is that classifieds were a major
supporter of journalism and that they were killed by Craigslist. That he has
given money to journalism schools is nice, but not unlike how Gordon Moore's
foundation gives grants for environmental research despite Intel not being the
most environmentally friendly company.

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iCannotEven
When they removed the good cartoons and the horoscopes, the writing was on the
wall. It was very clearly over. That was back around 2005.

~~~
irrational
Removing something as useless as horoscopes was a sign they were going down
hill? I would think that would be a sign the content was improving.

~~~
iCannotEven
It's indicative that they didn't even have the budget to syndicate
_horoscopes_.

Does that make a little bit more sense?

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
"didn't even have the budget to syndicate horoscopes"

A clear sign, and only 14y later they closed.

~~~
coldtea
> _A clear sign, and only 14y later they closed._

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...

~~~
bena
You're getting into some really sketchy territory though.

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.

~~~
coldtea
> _For it to be a sign, it has to be consistent. The vast majority has to
> follow the rule. Exceptions need to be rare._

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.

~~~
bena
You've made those claims, yes.

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.

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anoncoward111
I think it's really telling that even though I consume content voraciously and
am a highly educated 26 year old making a decent wage, I have never heard of
literally any of these writers and Pulitzer Prize winners. I only know ee
cummings in passing, because my high school English textbook told me he was
famous for using non-standard punctuation and capitalization.

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

~~~
paulcole
Serious question: What are you thinking this is “really telling” of?

~~~
anoncoward111
I think it's telling that this paper failed to connect with my generation. I
am a prime candidate to be a reader of this paper and its high quality
writing. It never was put in front of me like YT or HN was. Now it's dead

~~~
paulcole
I'm the same generation as you. But I'm not very educated, have never lived in
New York, and am familiar with the Village Voice and most of the writers
mentioned in the article.

Weird.

~~~
linkmotif
[edit]

~~~
paulcole
You’re replying to the wrong person.

