Is the Village Voice a Zombie Newspaper?
…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.
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:
