Media Mindfulness

VS.
Some stories lend themselves to great headlines (”Cocaine cola a real buzz” for instance), but the demise of the Village Voice tends to not offer much humor (except in the Twainian sense of “news of my death is greatly exagerated”). I have mixed feelings. For those of you outside the Manhattan echo chamber, the Voice’s storied tradition of radical politics and culture was absorbed by a national chain of weekly urban “independents,” New Times Media based in Phoenix. The company also owns the LA Weekly, Seattle Weekly and SF Weekly among others. Many are alarmed by the firing of long-time investigative reporter, James Ridgeway. Add to the mix resignations, articles with bogus anecdotes, a shift in priorities and the international trend of media consolidation, and you get one pissed off crowd of readers. Plus New Yorkers are a tough audience to please. Go to a Yankees game and you will know what I mean.

Unfortunately, I think the Voice lost its relevance a long time ago. As much as I appreciate Ridgeway’s reporting, frankly I can get that point of view and information from reading The Nation (which I do regularly). Before the New York Press was taken over by a bunch of frat kids in love with alcohol, porn related storylines and their own snark, I enjoyed it much more than the Voice because at least my views would be challenged on a regular basis by Russ Smith or others. You could predict exactly the POV of the Voice on any issue, making it only its live music ads, film listings, astrology and political cartoons of any interest. Has anyone the nerve to tell the editors that no one can understand a bloody sentence written by its music writers? I don’t fucking care how many clauses with made-up adjectives and metaphors as deep as an outhouse pit you can squeeze into a paragraph-long sentence. What does the damn album sound like? English anyone?

Finally, what the changes confirm is the obvious: the “Village,” i.e. the late-great epicenter of international literati it once was, has gone the way of the rest of Manhattan and has become a mere shadow of its former self, a theme park of Bohemia and feeding tube for the Post-Ironic Village of Damned: Williamsburg. The Voice started as a community paper, and for too long it was a publication without a community. At this point it seems to me that the weekly could use some fresh blood. And so what if it is “foreign’” owned (Arizona might as well be another country), so is the rest of New York. Whether we like it or not, the City belongs to the world.

Of course I don’t like the fact that traditional media (such as weeklies, papers, radio and TV) continue to be conglomeratized, but rather than lament the passing of one mode of communication, let’s celebrate a new one: blogs like this and other networked-based communications. As a media producer and consumer, I have never experienced more exciting times (OK, the punk scene in the early-80s is hard to beat). Each age has its own signature, and the one-to-many model is dying fast. Welcome to the Age of Many-to-Many.

Besides, there are still some excellent local papers worth supporting. I’ll only mention the one I read religiously: The Brooklyn Rail. There are too many to mention here, but suffice to say, this is one reader who is not disturbed by changes at the Voice, as long as those creepy kids with psycho eyes from Village of the Damned stay on their own planet: Phoenix.