‘Standardized, Apolitical, Sun-Baked’: Boston Paper on City Pages’ New Owner

When the merger of the Village Voice and New Times, a chain of alternative weeklies based in Arizona,  was announced in late 2005, it set off big changes at Voice-owned papers across the country. At the New York flagship itself, some of its best known names were let go, including political writer James Ridgeway and Robert Christgau, the music critic who founded the paper’s 34-year institution, the Pazz & Jop poll. Locally, it has meant the departures of City Pages’ editor Steve Perry, columnist Jim Walsh and reporter Britt Robson. In a story published Wednesday, the Boston alternative weekly The Phoenix wrote that’s all part of New Times’ plan. In the article, Adam Reilly wrote of the merger and its aftermath, asserting that it’s well known that the company’s management is working to get its newly acquired papers to toe a line that matches their “standardized, apolitical, Sun-baked vision” of what alternative journalism should be.

But what’s striking, he wrote, “is how quickly and decisively defenders of the old left-leaning decentralized VVM ethos have been routed.” While Perry wouldn’t comment for the piece, Britt Robson did, extensively. He said he has nothing against new editor Kevin Hoffman, who, at 30 years of age, has far less experience in both journalism and the Twin Cities than much of the paper’s editorial staff, than with the philosophy his hiring exposes. His beef is with the fact that a manager based in Denver picked a guy in Cleveland to run a paper that provides a vital news service to Minneapolis and St. Paul.

When New Times’ Andy Van De Voorde introduced Hoffman to the employees who had no advance knowledge of his hiring, recalled Robson, “he did it by saying, ‘This guy was kicking our ass for the competition, so we figured it was a good idea to hire him to go kick other people’s asses.’ That’s emblematic of how they do things. It’s this kind of cheapskate-tough-guy swagger.”

Whether Robson’s fears — or the predictions that City Pages, like other New Times papers, will be defanged of its political bite — come to pass will be discovered slowly as each Hoffman-edited issue comes off the printing press.