Kevin Hoffman

Six months after City Pages and other Village Voice Media papers cut all comics, including his, liberal cartoonist Tom Tomorrow yesterday wrote that he felt like his career had been “kneecapped” and that he could’ve “spent the next six months moping and feeling sorry for myself.” Instead, he’s got good news to report, which he characterizes as “one of the great adventures of my professional life.”

Amid budget woes that have pinched City Pages’ online budgets, area blogs are test-driving new ideas — from a new foodie site by a laid-off City Pages restaurant critic to a tech-blogger’s pay-per-post microfinancing plan to “Content Partnerships” at City Pages’ 2008 local blog of the year.

In its humble return, this edition of the intermittent Media Monitor catalogues: Ed Kohler’s latest analysis of City Pages (charged with rampant photo-swiping), a look at how a local Black History Month supermarket promotion has gone national, an acknowledgment of the power of “Brautweets,” and more.

When City Pages editor Kevin Hoffman told me recently that the paper’s Blotter blog saw traffic jump from 25,000 pageviews in October to 235,000 in December, he credited City Pages’ diverse content. But the spike struck technology blogger Ed Kohler as strange. In a new blog post today, he asks, “How does one manage to grow a blog’s traffic by 7X over two months?” The answer seems to be that City Pages and its fellow Village Voice Media papers seem to be gaming the popular social media site Digg. But it’s not just Digg: they’ve tried it with Stumbleupon, Reddit, Newsvine and others.

The too-familiar story of media cutbacks hits close to home for progressive readers this time. A month after laying off famed writer Nat Hentoff at its flagship paper, Village Voice Media, owner of a chain of altweeklies including City Pages, has suspended publication of all its syndicated cartoons. That means readers from Seattle to Ft. Lauderdale to the Twin Cities will have to go without Tom Tomorrow’s “This Modern World.”

Let me be the first to admit: Media stories about other folks in the media tend to be self-aggrandizing, self-referential, and just plain self-absorbed. This isn’t to say that I don’t think there are important media stories to be had out there. The corporatization of media makes it more important than ever that the public [...]

Reached by email Thursday afternoon, former City Pages music editor Sarah Askari confirmed that she was axed from the position. Referring to the Pioneer Press writer who broke the story of her exit, she wrote, “Ross [Raihala] didn’t write out plainly that I was fired, but I was.” As for future plans, she added only, [...]