By Tim Redmond
Wow, this is nasty. But real. Marc Cooper, longtime alternative press reporter and columnist, dissects (with a nice, sharp scalpel) the decline of the LA Weekly under the chain now known as Village Voice Media, nee New Times Newspapers.
His nut:
Weekly readers were informed, quite simply by its out-of-town owners, that they have been wrong, wrong, wrong for the last 30 years. They might think they like opinion and commentary and national news and sober and thorough investigative reporting, and all with a progressive tinge. But they’ve been wrong. Dead wrong. Instead, they want a smart-alecky, sophomoric, barely edited, thinned out, often reactionary sensationalist stew that displays little or no editorial rhyme nor reason. Yeah! That’s the formula.
Sound familiar?
(Oh, and by the way: Here’s the last column from Nat Hentoff, who these same chain owners just fired at the VIllage Voice.)