Village Voice writers' pay cut while music editor is on vacation

i suppose they can replace most of the feature writers with snarky blogs.

STERLING CLOVER: HELLO

JIFF JAFF: DO YOU HATE SNARKY BLOGS

STERLING CLOVER: NO I LOVE STAR TREK

JIFF JAFF: WHAT ABOUT STARFISH

STERLING CLOVER: I LOVE ALL CHILDREN OF THE SEA, EXCLUDING JELLYFISH WHO WILL STING YOU

JIFF JAFF: DO YOU THINK THE WRITERS DESERVE MORE PAY

STERLING CLOVER: I ONLY WRITE FOR ILX DOT COM

JIFF JAFF: WHAT DO YOU THINK OF VILLAGE VOICE

STERLING CLOVER: I WOULD RATHER BUILD A VILLAGE UNDER THE SEA WITH ALL CREATURES EXCLUDING JELLYFISH.

JIFF JAFF: HOW DO YOU LIKE THIS INTERVIEW SO FAR?

STERLING CLOVER: I ENJOY THIS INTERNET ESPECIALLY ILX DOT COM

JIFF JAFF: DO YOU THINK WRITERS SHOULD LIVE UNDER THE SEA AS WELL?

STERLING CLOVER: I DO

Hmm, what wellspring of stupidity offers this gem? The hypothetical "Chuck Eddy" mentioned can still take $3000 of naps next year. The very real freelancers and their infant children will suck up the pay cut, take real jobs, or vend their offerings elsewhere. The readers suffer in pained eyeballs, the editors suffer in prestige, the writers suffer as always in the belly. Hope the union move wins big.

hey ian, you gonna supervise my phd or what?

GREG TATE: THE VOICE NOW PAYS ME IN STOLEN UNICEF PENNIES

NORMAN MAILER: A MODERN DEMOCRACY IS A TYRANNY WHERE THE BORDERS ARE UNDEFINED

TWINKLETOES: HOW DO YOU GET UR IDEAS?
MERCE CUNNINGHAM: A HEAVY SNOWFALL DISAPPEARS INTO THE SEA. WHAT SILENCE!

Heh. And he succeeded BUT AT WHAT COST?

[picture of schools chancellor getting coffee]

- Posted by Nat at 4:54 pm

IIRC when The Village Voice was owned by R. Murdoch (late 70s) and Leonard Stern (80s) things weren't nearly as precarious. But the Voice's independently owned competition -- Soho Weekly News -- limped along with a fraction of the ads until folding in 1982. Look at NY Press, it's always been a shell of a newspaper. And Time Out must have some major financial resources behind it.

Clearly the current Voice's efforts to expand nationally, absorb New Times etc have been a mixed success financially. I bitch and moan about the Voice but I still pick it up each week and it'll REALLY suck if the management connives a way to shit-can their unionized staff in favor of cheaper and less provacative writers and editors.

hah! Not as long as people keep buying my old rap singles on ebay! I haven't written anything for Chuck in a while. He never has room anymore for stuff i want to write about, and i am really bad at writing 200 word spec reviews that may or may not run in 6 months for some reason. i don't know why this is. some people are born with that gift. But I know chuck is feeling a lot of pressure, so I don't bug him about it. i consider him a friend first and my eddytor second, so anything he does is okay by me. i had a good run! 5 years of wacky hijinx at the voice in LONG-FORM!! some kinda miracle, i tell you. if it weren't for chuck i never would have written a word about music, i don't think. i had no plans to. so, in the end, i'm looking out for him and i don't want him to get screwed around by the powers that be. he doesn't deserve it. nobody at the voice does. they work really hard to put out a quality paper. this kinda shit always sucks.

I'm getting better at it. And yes, this blows. But $75 is still twice what my other major outlet pays me for a review. So...gotta keep on going until I come up with an idea for a best-selling mystery/thriller set in the world of internet music nerds.

(But is it really a "blog" if the Voice is running it? Shouldn't it be referred to as "blog-style cooking," maybe?)

hahaha. Identity politics were practically INVENTED at the Village Voice! The paper would lose its er identity w/o 'em (and yeah that's what I've always disliked/disagreed about the VV myself).

and I do agree Matt Taibi is great, the only good writer ever to appear in the NY Press (save for an ambitious young pornstar-biographer in the early 90s whose name escapes me now). in the more diverse/less rigid Voice of the 70s he would've been a star columnist.

for all my beefs w/the Voice this feels like the latest step in a long slow decline. bummer.

(and jess, instead of hacking on a sit you know nada, why don't you send me some tracks reviews)

Daniel Radosh sez WRONG.

But anyway, I do think the Voice is perpetually floundering as it tries to figure out whom it's writing for and what it's supposed to say. I think ownership has a vision of hip 18 to 34 year olds who are out there somewhere and like something or other, which means that the Voice is following some undefined (and nonexistent) hipness rather than creating it. And really the problem goes back to around 1980, when New York bohemia got dull and stopped being in the vanguard of much of anything. If you're going to be hip, you have to be hip to something. So instead it morphed into just an alternative magazine, servicing a rather staid demographic that other people also know how to service.

But this happens. Magazines get old. What's more disturbing is that nothing else has emerged in its place, something that'll give you insights and style that you can't get elsewhere. (This is why the country music pieces in the Voice are more significant than the hip-hop or rock pieces. The fact that ownership hasn't - yet - told Chuck to stop running country pieces is the one sign of hope for the magazine. And the fact that they've finally started running Web only content is another sign for hope, no matter what you think of the content.)

Well, something has emerged in its place: ILX. ILX has problems and limitations of course, and often stumbles instead of delivering insights (does far better with style), and no one's figured out how to earn a living out of ILX. But unlike the Voice, it hasn't written its limitations into its format.

(In my book I run excerpts from an unintentionally hilarious letter I wrote to Doug Simmons back in October 2002 where I told him that I was being wasted by the Voice and that he should pay me and Mark Sinker to start a chatroom or something on the Voice Website, which they were also wasting.)

("Chatroom" is my generic term for forums, message boards, maillists, newsgroups, etc., since I hate those other terms.)

(And "blog" is the generic term that includes Web columns that you update daily, Nick.)

please, it was a joke. but i'll happily pretend i'm the self-righteous, self-involved prick you two think i am.

sterling, you're saying the same thing i've been saying for a month. it clutters the page.

kogan, i don't have the energy/interest to get into a tiff with one of my favorite writers (you). let's just say you're always right, and i know that. k? as for all this direction of this, direction of that talk, i don't know man, i just push words.

nick: get off my dick! i'm trying to move, man!

It's to make the website as hard to get a grip on and impenetrably geek-like as possible. Since last week, even the logo disappeared, which I'm assuming is temporary because of an inflammation in the redesign corps. Sitemap doesn't even work.

(p.s. editors reading -- i'm serious. i do this shit as good as anyone in the biz.)

-- Frank Kogan (edcasua...), August 15th, 2005.

basically, if ilx goes on strike, it's cigars and brandies all round for messrs clover, harvell and kogan?

Finding a mag that pays on time (like the Voice does) is like finding a Billy Ripkin Fuck Face card.

Rare, special and, most importantly, lets you say "fuck."

Also, I do love me some Riff Raff.

I can cut & paste all I want from one to the other. Bio/promo writing is never signed, I use aliases in the mags, everybody knows and nobody gives a flying fuck. Pretty ironic and doesn't make me like the music industry any more than I ..don't.

how is it ironic? people have been writing for magazines and labels and publicists forever. it's called "making a buck". i don't think there is anything wrong with it. i'm always surprised that most magazines even bother with freelancers. 3 or 4 low-paid staffers could churn out the same crap as 30 freelancers evey month no problem. how many people would know the difference? most magazine reviews look like they were written by publicists already. there should really just be one review for every new album that is handed out to everybody at the beginning of the month and used for all promo/press/etc. it would save everyone a lot of trouble.

i'm just saying, if you are writing reviews for magnet at ten bucks a pop, and joe indierock's publicist offers you 300 bucks to write a bio for him, jeez, i'm not gonna throw rocks at the guy, you know? beer isn't free.

i, myself, have never done it, but if the price was right...i had a publicist ask me to write some bios recently and they asked for my best "indie rates". i didn't know what to say to that. so, i didn't say anything. actually, thst's not true. they sent me cd's of the bands in question and i didn't like them and i told them that and that was the end of it. i did write liner-notes in the past though and i was paid so well i would do it again in a heartbeat! i don't even know if they were ever used.

Nabiscothingy, as I said, I could do it and the artists/labels/magazines wouldn't mind. I do try to artfully produce pieces that serve different purposes.

I don't have qualms about it personally. I'm toiling about in the """underground""" electronic music domain, not working for the proverbial Man really.

It was until the online version came along, and I have to say, City Pages has been ahead of the curve on that...

but will i ever make money at all, does an emerging writing give up?

Buy a book about how to use punctuation marks, for starters?

coming from holland and seeing how the only music magazine here isn't paying it's freelancers at all and not even having something like an alt.press, every hope of making it in the states seems to be shattered forever now

*sobs*

-- Mr Deeds (ilxmember196...), August 17th, 2005 2:41 AM. (Mr Deeds) (later)

No offence, like, but you can FUCK OFF.

you're not talking to me right? cos i might have to smack you in the head

or laugh at us, for giving it away

xpost - navel war lol!

In other words, this screws lots of ppl, but *especially* full time voice employees.

So now the bitching upthread about voice employees is doubly misplaced.

Hmm, what wellspring of stupidity offers this gem? The hypothetical "Chuck Eddy" mentioned can still take $3000 of naps next
year.

I agree, which is why this is sad news to me. I much prefer that to message boards and lists, or underground inarticulate indie lynch mobs.

:O

maybe for Coldplay. I can't imagine Ariel Pink giving you that kind of money for a bio

Never would imagine that's how things are done -- when I worked full time in journalism (not at alt-weeklies) I got paid a flat salary regardless of how much I wrote.

I prefer my indie lynch mobs to be equal parts poet and sociologist.

How can any reader trust you to say what you truly think after you've already proven that, for milk money, you can be paid to write exactly what some editor thinks the readers want you to think?

Which is not to say there's no difference here, since there are some readers who want to be challenged and expanded by what you write; nonetheless, either way your writing is product, and it's aimed at a customer.

Of course, for those of us who live off credit-card debt and sponge off of friends and relatives are independently wealthy, none of this is an issue.

That would be a great follow-up to the Zimbardo experiment.

As for the music coverage: Let's just say the current crop of music brass and contributors at the Voice isn't NT's idea of who should man a good music section. And, yes, that is completely insane. Iconoclasm trumps integrity here, too: They want you in the club covering the scene with the pacifier in your mouth ready to piss off the promoter ... just cuz, ya know? And remember the last time a NT papaer wrote about old Seger or African hip-hop or vault jazz? Of course, you don;t, because they piss on all of it.

Point being, if NT buys Voice, and that's the end of the true progressive, intellectual press as we know it.

Mostly it's artist profiles of rock bands, and these profiles verge on being press releases.

What you get is simultaneously juvenile and stodgy, but that's a good description of the alternative press altogether.

(But Voice and NT merging doesn't necessarily mean NT running Voice.)

The music sections for NT are the lowlight, generally. As you said, it's generally boring, one-source band profiles and a weekly column where the music editor either talks shit or gushes over something others probably don't care about. And btw -- original thought is pretty much verboten in the back of the book.

Oh, and the scary part -- Westword's section is one of the better ones in the NT group.

http://www.sfbg.com/Extra/ntvvm.html

They'll run with anything a reliable source who talked to a source who talked to a source who talked to a source ... you get the idea ... seriously. Also consider that their initial stories on the closing of New Times LA and the Cleveland Scene were bogusly wrong.

Wow, alt-weeklies really do just kinda suck as a whole, don;t they? :-)

But you naturally expect more from weeklies, and they're just as moronic, and are worse really, if you consider they get 500-1,000 words to babble on, lean on cliches and write badly.

Someone with Chris O'Connor's email should let him know about this thread, right?

Well...maybe. I've worked both sides of the fence, and there's an awful lot of mediocrity in both corporate dailies and alt-weeklies. But on balance I'd rather read a New Times or Voice publication, say, than a Gannett or Knight-Ridder newspaper. You might not find much interesting or surprising in the alt-weekly, but you're less likely to be treated like an utter blithering idiot ("OMG IT SNOWED IN DECEMBER" on page one). Corporate dailies tend to infantilize their readership.

The 18-paper thing is scary ... again, it all depends on who the Central Scrutinizer is ... and if it's Lacey, then it's hell on wheels.

new times has, we shall say, a certain inelegance PR-wise, in the way they've handled certain events (the cleveland/LA thing, specifically). it's an odd and occasionally uncomfortable situation that, believe me, its music editors grapple with. it goes without saying that we have no control over any of this. after all, we're cut from the same cloth of twentysomething schlubs with axes hanging over our heads -- as the SFBG notes, we could contract as easily as we could expand. it's all out of our hands -- this gossipy shit gets passed around with the same mixture of dread and feeble hope that the VV crew probably deals with.

what i will say is that despite occasionally suspect appearances, new times music editors have as much autonomy, leeway, and freedom to cast their sections in their own images as i'd suspect any music editor does. there's sharing of content and layout and general ideas, but the final product still lives or dies on that editor's drive and innovation. our marching orders aren't nearly as micro-managed or homogenous as people think, though again, it's understandable sometimes why people assume otherwise.

thus: if you hate the express/westword/SF weekly, feel free to hate the respective editor therein, and not the looming corporate monolith that employs him or her. it doesn't loom quite so largely.

also, thanks for the kind words, and rachel swan (in my wholly biased opinion) is indeed righteous.

I wouldn't say it's quite the same mixture, Rob.

Former New Times employees who have gone on to Village Voice Media jobs have told me that New Times (maybe not your paper, but NT in general) is far more top-down-controlled, more bureaucratic, more into syndicating movie content, and not exactly rife with cover stories addressing national politics. City Pages has managed to stay fairly independent of Village Voice Media in key ways, and I imagine that changing...

The documents suggest that the new company has been set up with the idea of an eventual sale: They state that, for the first three years, the company can only be sold with the consent of six of the nine board members. But over the next two years, five board members could approve a sale, and after five years, three directors could make that decision.

point taken. i don't want to speak for you or your concerns.

in any event, suffice it to say my first stop if this deal pulls through will NOT be a lexus dealership -- my paper's tagged in that article as a money-loser and a potential liability that, as you note, venture capitalists may control eventually. it's presumptuous of me to compare levels of unease, that's true, and i apologize. but there's enough to go around.

i said my piece on music section autonomy. outside of that it's solely my opinion and observation, but here we go:

a) movie critics. nationalized, reviews run simultaneously in several papers, so few local movie critics. guilty as charged, and you can certainly make an argument.

b) national politics cover stories. the SFBG loves to drill both the weekly and the express for not explicitly declaring itself anti-war. with the guardian/weekly brawl specifically, the issue's distorted a bit, since it pits the former's bombastic activism vs. the latter's gleeful nihilism. one feeds the other, and neither is typical, i think.

it's true that our coverage overall is obsessively local, and does very little editorializing, endorsing of candidates, etc. but that leads some to brand us neo-cons turning out backs on the capital-A Alternative mentality, and that's a bit simplistic. the guardian has specific express stories they constantly cite as evidence of our far-right plunge; i'll resist the urge to counter with plenty of far-left pieces. you could do this all day. hopefully, it balances.

c) general bureaucracy. again, my personal experience, working on the ground with our staff writers, is that we're free to pitch whatever, write whatever, because we have a strong-willed editor who backs us. i've not had a story forced upon me nor a story i've pitched forcibly rejected, and neither has anyone i know at any paper. i'm not (completely) naive: i know there's a level above us, and i know our editor hears from it, and occasionally i do too. but the perception is worse than the reality.

again, we succeed (or suck) on our own merits, and i'll leave that conclusion to the experts.

to matos: i can't argue beck/LA specifically one way or the other. you've got a right to be concerned about that (and a whole lotta other shit). all i can offer is my own experience, that i've never seen that happen, to me or anyone, either in the "cover this specifically" or "don't cover this specifically" vein. i'd hope that came from an earlier era -- as for my 2 years + tenure, it's not remotely been the norm.

Needless to say, NT is a weird company. Learned a lot from 'em , but believe me I ain't looking back ...

FYI:the "cover this specifically" or "don't cover this specifically" vein.

This did happen with me; specific to competition for ad dollars in PHX re: clubs and electronic.

or maybe when an organization hires a person to edit a section of a newspaper it should be because they trust that person's judgment enough to let them do their job without interference beyond normal editorial levels. because if they don't trust them, WHY THE FUCK DID THEY HIRE THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Hello and welcome to the world of employment in America.

"I think you all suck."

--scaredycat (don't@hitme.com)

Strangely, this is the only truly bad section of the paper. The film section has a couple of decent critics, they used to have a great sports columnist (now back in Philly, I think - John Gonzalez), one great columnist who trashes the Dallas govt. regularly. The fine arts section isn't anything special, but then again, fine arts in Dallas is nothing special.

Yeah. That was the way of things at the Morning Call in Allentown, now owned by Tribune. Anyone who wrote about music, or pop entertainment in general, was regarded with contempt. The only way I brushed them back was to start doing investigative journalism and secure a Knight Fellowship for a seminar on issues in nuclear proliferation for journalists at UMD's journalism school.

There was a lot of snobbery to it. It's not like the local metro, sewer meeting and police blotter reporters at such digs are great shakes. Put it this way: The pop music writers were better bloviators
and writers of thumbsuckers; the "hard news" reporters were better stenographers to ninnies in local government. Which is better? I sure couldn't tell.

It's called the New York Press, and no, it doesn't work. (I applied for the managing editor's job over there not long ago, hoping to get it just so I could cut Russ Smith's column. Oh, well.)

Be glad you didn't end up there. Wilkes-Barre, I can imagine, was bad, too. But the Call was simply a lot more wretched than it had to be for a newspaper serving a community of that size. Unfortunately, some of my friends are still there, resigned to it.

I have a great job now in NYC and still keep my toes wet in rock-crit. So NT, in a strange way, did me the greatest favor anyone possibly could in buying me a ticket for the Shitcan Express ... :-)

and Matos: YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!!!!

look, i'm not trying to tell anyone, least of all VV people, that they've nothing to worry or bitch about. i just try and hack away at the New Times Douchebag Automaton criticism now and then. speaking solely for myself, i'd hope that in any kind of merger there's some acknowledgement of a paper's history and individual strengths/focuses. the layouts of our papers and the overall NT aura sometimes obscures the fact that they're distinct entities that can't help soak in the personalities of their regions and writers. john nova lomax at the houston press is as distinctive (and distinctively houstonian) a writer as a weekly could ask for. i understand the cookie-cutter backlash, but i can still disagree with it.

not that you need me to tell you this, matos, but keep railing. i'd do the same in your shoes.

o'connor, get away from me with this red sox nonsense. they're then new times of baseball.

Rick, have you ever read either The Stranger or The Seattle Weekly at all? Try using your mouth instead of your ass next time you post something.

I haven't seen that many homies wilding out since at least the video for "Back That Azz Up." Another realization: Baby Williams can probably save three families just with his ice grill alone.

So for the record, upon entering a new ..freelancing relationship with this mag I finally met an editor who minded. Among other things it did convince me to quit this schizophrenic behaviour and abandon the relative security of friendly labels giving me work on a regular basis. Whatever, here I come.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2018/04/06/fbi-raids-backpage-founders-sedona-home-website-down/494538002/

never forget

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