Village Voice Media

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.”

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.”

As Barack Obama picks up two key newspaper endorsements, news photographers debate if or how to run that embarrassing John McCain debate photo. And Nielsen’s top-30 news sites list shows City Pages’ owner as the only traffic dud for September — and an Alaska paper making a huge jump into the top sites list.

Egomelting: Minneapolis-based ad giant Fallon, as a reaction to the ad industry’s awards fetish, is asking staffers to donate their coveted Gold Lions, Silver Pencils and Clios to be melted down and made into a sign bearing its new slogan, “You are Fallon.” The gist: Clients matter more than ego-pumping creative prizes. So far 89 [...]

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 [...]

File under: No news is good news: MediaNews, the Denver-based chain that owns the Pioneer Press, has devised a way to deal with tanking financial figures: stop publicly reporting them. The privately held company decided to stop filing reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission, effectively hiding juicy facts like earnings, the salary of CEO [...]

Rhodes hits, ahem, the road: Randy Rhodes is no longer with Air America Radio, but there are conflicting stories about why. On an AAR-funded trip to San Francisco a few weeks back, Rhodes called Hillary Clinton a “fucking whore” in a stand-up act. According to the liberal radio network, Rhodes was suspended and later left [...]

After losing a lawsuit in which it was accused of selling ads below cost to drive a competitor out of business, SF Weekly and its parent, Village Voice Media, aren’t happy. In a column this week, the paper’s Matt Smith (not to be confused with Matt Smith, current managing editor of VVM-owned City Pages)  characterizes [...]