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"With its purchase by New Times, the VVM chain will be owned by a smaller, more anti-establishment corporation than it has been in years," blogs The Stranger's editor, mocking the New York Times' suggestion that the deal raises "questions about whether The Voice and its siblings can preserve their anti-establishment roots as part of a growing corporation." The Voice's last three owners -- Savage notes -- have been a collection of investment bankers, pet food magnate and billionaire investor Leonard Stern, and "left-wing rabble-rouser Rupert Murdoch."

Weighing in today on the NT-VVM merger on the Huffington Post, John Dicker says the usual arguments against media consolidation are not apt in this case, since New Times papers "do incredible reporting. Lots of it. All the time. Serious investigative shit that’s hard, if not impossible, to emulate in the blogosphere." In fact, Dicker argues that readers in many other large metro areas "would be well served if their alt weekly were gobbled up by the emerging behemoth." He's worried, though, that New Times will impose its editorial template and shrink the newsholes of the newly acquired papers, and that the company "doesn't host blogs or create interplay between its web and print versions."