Village Voice Media
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Village Voice Media is a privately held corporation that owns the Village Voice, the nation's oldest (founded in 1955) and largest alternative weekly newspaper, as well as LA Weekly, OC Weekly in Orange County, California, Seattle Weekly, City Pages in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Nashville Scene, Cleveland Scene, Dallas Observer, Westword in Denver, New Times Broward-Palm Beach, Houston Press, The Pitch in Kansas City, Miami New Times, Phoenix New Times, SF Weekly in San Francisco, Riverfront Times in St. Louis, and backpage.com an online classified advertising website.
In 2002, the previous Village Voice Media entered into a noncompetition agreement with New Times Media, another national publisher of alternative weeklies, whereby the two companies agreed to stop publishing New Times LA (a product of New Times Media) and Cleveland Free Times (a product of Village Voice Media), so that the companies would not publish two, competing newspapers in any single city. This agreement and phasing out of the two newspapers, led to an antitrust investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. The investigation resulted in a settlement, requiring the companies to sell off assets and the old newspapers' titles to any potential competitors.[1]
On October 24, 2005, New Times Media announced a deal to acquire Village Voice Media (which, at the date of sale, owned the first 7 papers mentioned in the first paragraph), creating a chain of 17 free weekly newspapers around the country with a combined circulation of 1.8 million and controlling a quarter of the weekly circulation of alternative weekly newspapers in North America. After the deal's completion, New Times took the Village Voice Media name.
In October of 2007, Michael Lacey, the executive editor, and Jim Larkin, chief executive, of Village Voice Media, were arrested in Phoenix, Arizona, on charges that a Village Voice Media pulbication, the Phoenix New Times, had published secret grand jury information. A state special prosecutor is investigating the newspaper's long-running feud with Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, including the publishing of Arpaio's home address, a crime under Arizona law. The special prosecutor's subpoena included a demand for the names of the readers of the New Times's website. It was the information about the subpoena which was deemed by prosecutors to be secret grand jury information.[2]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Savannah Blackwell, "New Times nailed", sfbg.com, January 29, 2003.
- ^ David Carr, "Media Executives Arrested in Phoenix", The New York Times, October 19, 2007.
