Is the Village Voice a Zombie Newspaper?

Nick Gillespie | January 6, 2009

...in that it's already dead?

Over at the excellent Splice Today, alt-media icon Russ Smith questions a recent New Yorker story by Louis Menand about the venerable (and editorially ailing) grandpa of downtown weeklies, the Village Voice (once owned by none other than Rupert Murdoch):

Menand also claims that the mainstream press, aping the weeklies, discovered "youth culture" in the early 70s and hired men and women who understood the prevailing popular culture. In fact, it was the slow learning curve of the daily newspapers that opened up a market for the second wave of weeklies, papers that provided extensive events listings, affordable advertisements for small and independent retailers, free classifieds and intelligent arts criticism. The daily newspapers, contrary to Menand's assertion, never did get the "youth market" right and in city after city produced competing free papers that were laughable imitators of the weeklies.

Whole thing here.

Smith, who created the Baltimore and Washingtion City Papers and the New York Press back in the day, is down on print in general and, as a libertoid Republican, he's down on the GOP these days too. Here he is on the Reason.tv Talk Show yapping on all that and more:

Comments

cuernimus|1.6.09 @ 8:26AM|#

How would one go about killing a zombie newspaper? Fire immediately comes to mind, but is usually a bad idea when it comes to zombies. Instead of shambling hordes of the undead, you get shambling hordes of the undead on fire.
You have to shoot them in the headline? (preemptive apologies)

.|1.6.09 @ 10:23AM|#

cuernimus killed something for sure.

Kalim Kassam|1.6.09 @ 10:38AM|#

Off topic, but seeing Kelly Jane Torrance on the reason.tv talk show inspired a micro-rant.

Why do you Amerikans steal all of our good Canadian free-marketeers? We already have a brain-drain in doctors who prefer not to be paid peanuts or be bureaucrats in our socialist health-care industry. Must you add insult to injury by temping our youth with juicy juicy Koch Fellowships and the like?

Quick, Stephen Harper. Close the border before you lose me as well.

LurkerBold|1.6.09 @ 1:05PM|#

Ho could I expect anything different from Reason? The Village Voice is the greatest thing in print besides Mother Jones.

Ho|1.6.09 @ 1:18PM|#

Leave me out of this.

cuernimus|1.6.09 @ 5:49PM|#

cuernimus killed something for sure.

Excellent. A pun so foul that only trolls dare tread in its wake.

Eric Haskell|1.7.09 @ 9:30PM|#

Hey,Russ Smith is a hot chick.

|1.9.09 @ 2:03AM|#

"So who's the biggest asshole you've interviewed?"

"Well....I wouldn't say that on camera..."

Canadians are so fuckin nice eh?