New Times Media: About as "Alternative" as Maroon 5
Rumors of a merger of Village Voice Media and New Times Media (owner of the Dallas Observer) abound. New Times would have controlling interest in the combined company.
As the San Francisco Bay Guardian reports: “Such a purchase would involve tens of millions of dollars, putting the New Times chain even more under the control and pressure of venture capitalists. Under the terms of the deal, Alta Communications, the Boston-based venture capital firm that is a major New Times investor, and three Village Voice Media investors (Goldman, Sachs and Co; Weiss, Peck and Greer; and Trimaran Capital Partners) would all have seats on the merged company’s nine-member board. These investors are obsessed not with quality alternative journalism but with making big bucks as fast as possible. And the merger documents suggest that they will want to sell the entire outfit in a few years — perhaps to some giant media corporation.”
New Times was launched in Phoenix by “students at Arizona State University irate over the Vietnam-era shootings at Kent State University,” according to the New Times corporate Web site. That kind of anti-mainstream sentiment is light years away from the New Times of 2005; it’s as mainstream as Gannett. It’s just too cool to admit it.
As a Phoenician, I still get a huge kick out of the fact that the largest alt-weekly is the legacy of a Goldwater state. But, as conservative as the state is, and as much of a corporation New Times is, it does not take away that they are the only true investigative journalists in Phoenix.
That’s the truly sad part.
Many dailies don’t focus on investigative journalism anymore because of the time and expense involved, concerns about advertisers and potential legal liabilities, so I do credit New Times with creating a business model that is built around stirring up the muck.
That said, I think it’s somewhat disingenuous to position yourself as an iconoclast when you’ve got suits from Goldman Sachs, et al, on your board.