Maverick, Amok
The Village loses its 'Voice'
By Mick Farren
"Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers."
-Jimmy Breslin
ichael Lacey likes to do his own wet work. Legends abound in alternative publishing about how the executive editor of New Times - now Village Voice Media - conducts his own purges with an aggression that makes Donald Trump look Buddhist. Here in Los Angeles, stories are still told about how, after purchasing the old weekly Los Angeles Reader on his way to creating the failed New Times Los Angeles in the mid 1990s, Lacey stormed into the Reader offices with cowboy-boot belligerence, fired just about everyone in sight, and referred to certain editors as "cocksuckers" for daring to investigate his company. In a CityBeat cover story dated October 27, 2005, reporter Donnell Alexander noted how, in those days, "the misadventure in Los Angeles was thought to be touched with psychosis."
The Reader is now decade-old history, but the Lacey psychosis is still alive and well, and currently rampaging through The Village Voice in New York. In the same October article, Alexander confirmed that "Phoenix-based NT Media takes control of The Village Voice, which in 1994 bought L.A. Weekly." The price tag on the merger was a reported $400 million. Since then, media speculation has been rife as to what Lacey might do with the Voice and L.A. Weekly, his newest and most expensive toys. His track record has been to demand a conformity so inflexible that it rivals the Borg in Star Trek. Lacey doesn't merely acquire newspapers, he demands their assimilation into the New Times hive mind.
On October 6, 2005, I noted in this column that, with a possible 18 papers coming under his control, Lacey offered "a market-driven string of free weeklies, with cookie-cutter design, centralized editorial, voiceless writing, and definitely no old-time Hunter Thompson shenanigans." I went on to predict "New Times has demonstrated the kind of arrogance that would cause it to gut the venerable Voice and the advertising-fat L.A. Weekly and force them to conform to the formula." In the intervening months, nothing has caused me to revise this. The current Voice revamping exceeds my worst fears, as Lacey huffed and puffed recently to The New York Observer: "All journalists should check their ego at the door. Humility never hurt anyone." I like to be smart, prescient, and right, but to predict what can only be the demise of a 50-year media institution leaves a sour taste.
The Village Voice was launched in the fall of 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer, out of a two-bedroom Greenwich Village walk-up. Its contributors have included Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Katherine Anne Porter, James Baldwin, e.e. cummings, Nat Hentoff, Tom Stoppard, Allen Ginsberg, Murray Kempton, I.F. Stone, and Pete Hamill, and it has won three Pulitzers. The half-century of the Voice has not been without ups and downs. Some eras were classic, and in others the paper became drearily predictable. When I wrote for The Voice in the 1980s, the political correctness could be stifling on a bad day.
I don't believe a newspaper must be perpetually preserved simply because it was famous long ago. Even the Voice must keep swimming forward or die, but what it doesn't need is Michael Lacey setting the course. The stories coming out of the Cooper Square offices are of a massive and repressive overhaul. James Ridgeway's political column has been killed, and Ridgeway fired. Sydney Schanberg's "Press Clips" is gone, and Schanberg has quit. The film budget has been axed by more than 60 percent, the Observer reports, and some reviews are now retreads from other New Times papers. The fact-checking department has been fired, and five copy editors laid off. Last month, Lacey killed Ward Harkavy's "Bush Beat." No Bush bashing at the Voice under Lacey's rule. In fact, no commentary or opinion will be tolerated at all. Disgruntled staffers even claim that the New Times style book, now being rigorously enforced, bans words like "meta" and "subversive."
The overall impression is of a hell ship with a madman at the helm. Last week, music editor Chuck Eddy was fired, Robert Christgau (the Dean of Rock Critics) hinted that he might be the next to go (although he is still there as of this writing), and no one dares guess how Lacey will handle acid-tongued gossip maven Michael Musto. The axing of Eddy made a total of 17 staffers who have quit or been fired - close to a third of the entire editorial masthead. But don't just look at the numbers, notice the names. Eddy is a respected rock critic. Ridgeway has a mighty rep as a Washington observer. And Schanberg? Hell, he's Sydney Schanberg of The Killing Fields fame, for chrissakes! He blew the whistle on Nixon's bombing of Cambodia and dodged Khmer Rouge bullets. At 72, he has a Pulitzer and absolutely nothing to prove to Mike Lacey.
On the syndicated radio show Democracy Now!, Schanberg described the encounter that triggered his resignation: "[Lacey] was insulting to the staff. He figuratively or in effect called them stenographers. He really had this huge one-ton or two-ton chip on his shoulder. And I think he walked in thinking that the people in the room didn't welcome him and didn't like him and, you know, hated him. And he was totally insecure. And he gave the impression that he didn't understand the Voice, and he didn't understand New York, and he didn't want to. He didn't like it, even though he was born here. I mean, he was born in Brooklyn."
This insecurity and unwillingness to learn may be Lacey's ultimate undoing. As with his other papers, Lacey's edict at the Voice is to concentrate on local politics, local corruption, and local human interest. He fails to grasp that a city like New York (or Los Angeles, for that matter) is too big for his narrow thinking. New York is Wall Street and Broadway, the home of the United Nations and the international art market, the city that gave the world punk rock and the Beat generation, and even its mobsters enjoy international fame. On September 11, 2001, it became the grim primary target for global terrorism.
Karen Durbin, Voice editor from 1994 to 1996, confirmed the city's unique nature for the Observer: "It makes my blood boil. The paper always did national and international coverage. It was part of who we were, and part of who our readers are." Staff writer Tom Robbins expressed similar sentiments: "New Yorkers care more about what's going on in the Bush administration than they do what's going on in the Bloomberg administration."
New York is also a sophisticated town with a wide choice of print. People who pick up their papers at the same newsstand as Woody Allen or Robert De Niro do not want to read movie reviews hacked out in Phoenix or Denver. Lacey's behavior at The Village Voiceis close to archetypal. He may be Brooklyn-born, but he made his bones in Arizona, and now exhibits every trait of the hick who thinks the Big Apple is his for the taking. In most scenarios, the hick either wises up or becomes one more broken bulb on the Great White Way, and I wonder how long Lacey's investment bankers will hold him up if his changes at the Voice don't turn a fast profit.
Meanwhile, out here on the West Coast, the constant question is why the same long knives aren't out at the L.A. Weekly. Is Lacey satisfied with our town's notoriously dull but profitable publication? Then informed rumor offered an answer: The bloodletting won't start at the Weekly until later in the summer. That's when Lacey will be through with the Voice. As I said at the start, Mike Lacey likes to do his own wet work.
Published: 04/27/2006
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