That's what a source told Boston Phoenix media critic Mark Jurkowitz after Village Voice Media's new Executive Editor Michael Lacey met with "about 30 staffers" in New York on Feb. 1. "This industry has been afflicted by this kind of shut-in mentality," Lacey told Jurkowitz. "Are people prepared to receive the message? There were a lot of people [at that meeting] who didn't like what I said." One of them was media columnist Sydney Schanberg, who said Lacey's "language was adversarial and pugnacious. ... He played the bully. I respond terribly to bullies." Voice columnist Nat Hentoff didn't respond well either, especially when Lacey criticized one of his columns and complained about "reporting that was stenography." But Hentoff decided not to resign because he's waiting to see how Lacey treats his work. Jurkowitz also covered the recent resignation of the editorial staff at the New York Press and interpreted the "turmoil" at both papers as "a sure indicator that the alt-weekly business ... is struggling for relevance in an increasingly fragmented marketplace."
Harry Siegel, one of four editorial staffers who resigned from New York Press last week, participated in a discussion of the Muhammad cartoons with Mike Luckovich, an editorial cartoonist, and Jim Warren, deputy managing editor of The Chicago Tribune (which did not run the cartoons). Siegel called the cartoons "very amateurish and very vile" before arguing that "it seems Orwellian to talk about this at such length without showing the images." Siegel also tangled briefly with Warren, who asserted that "characterizing the cartoons in great detail" was sufficient to cover the story.
The public reaction to the alt-weekly's Feb. 2 issue, which contained a recipe for methamphetamine, dominates this week's issue. In the cover story, Jim Mullin, the paper's new editor, apologizes for provoking community outrage and laments lost readers, distribution points and advertising. Mullin, who was editor of the Miami New Times for 18 years before joining the San Luis Obispo paper, says the meth story "strained to the breaking point a trust that had steadily developed over two decades." He says the paper chose not to use a "scolding" tone in order to avoid alienating young readers, but the "use of sarcasm, designed to hold reader interest, alienated some who believed the subject was too serious to be treated flippantly." This week's issue also includes dozens of angry letters, including those sent by the city's mayor and chief of police.
The impetus behind the walkout was apparently a refusal by the newspaper's publishers to print the Danish cartoons that caricature Muhammad and have caused protests and riots in several countries. In an e-mail to the New York Observer, editor in chief Harry Siegel explained that "the editorial group -- consisting of myself, managing editor Tim Marchman, arts editor Jonathan Leaf and one-man city hall bureau Azi Paybarah ... have no desire to be free speech martyrs, but it would have been nakedly hypocritical to avoid the same cartoons we'd criticized others for not running." Siegel went on to say that he had long dreamed of running the Press, thought that the staff had "come quite a ways in only a few months towards restoring the paper's tarnished editorial reputation and credibility," and hoped "that under new ownership and leadership it can again be an invaluable read for all good Gothamites."
AAN members are among the media outlets that have become targets of form e-mails generated by RightMarch.com. The messages forcefully state, "in solidarity with the people of free Europe and in support of the concept of freedom of the press, you need to PUBLISH the Danish cartoons." Alt-weekly editors, however, suggest that their only response will be to use the "delete" button.
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