In a Dec. 31 memo to all Village Voice Media staffers, CEO Jim Larkin and executive editor Michael Lacey say "this year we have found it necessary to make staff reductions and have placed all staff openings on hold." The memo also details "additional measures" being taken by the company to weather the current economy storm. All VVM senior managers and officers (including Larkin and Lacey) are taking 15 percent pay cuts, all publishers and editors are taking 10 percent pay cuts, and VVM is suspending its match into the company's 401(k) plan. MORE: Westword loses three editorial staffers, The Pitch lays off several, City Pages parts ways with two, and New Times Broward-Palm Beach eliminates several positions.
In the tenth installment of this year's "How I Got That Story" series, former City Pages staff writer Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl talks about her award-winning entries for Food Writing. She tells Angelica Herrera she started writing about food because she "needed the protein," though she's gone on to win numerous awards for her food writing. Moskowitz Grumdahl talks about her process for reviewing a restaurant, what she thinks the impact of a bad review can be, and the perks of being a food critic. "I was renovating my house once and realized I hadn't had a stove for four years," she says. "You don't have to wake up early -- and you get free lunch and dinner, and sometimes even brunch."
In a piece for Minneapolis Observer Quarterly, Craig Cox weaves a review of David Carr's The Night of the Gun with personal anecdotes about Carr (a former editor for the now-defunct Twin Cities Reader, City Pages' crosstown rival) and the Twin Cities alt-weekly scene of the 1980s. "Once you were accepted into the club as a freelancer or -- dream of dreams -- a staffer at one of the two local alternative weeklies, you were plugged into the local pop culture scene in a way no one else was," Cox writes. "You didn't have to be high or narcissistic back then to feel good about working six days a week, every week (as we did at City Pages) for three or four hundred bucks. It was kind of an exclusive fraternity."
Columbia Journalism Review assistant editor Jane Kim claims in a blog post that "one thing that was sorely lacking from the past two weeks of convention spotlighting was good alt weekly coverage." She then uses a couple of blog features from convention host-city papers Westword and City Pages to prove the "sad results" of "consolidation of the alt weeklies under VVM." In the comments section, Westword editor Patricia Calhoun argues that staff cartoonist Kenny Be, whose "Delegating Denver" series provided grist for Kim's critique, is "the town's best political columnist," adding that "to quote lines without the context of the artwork is hardly fair" when criticizing a cartoon. AAN executive director Richard Karpel, meanwhile, points out that both papers broke significant convention-related news prior to the conventions, and that several dozen other alt-weeklies had folks on the ground during the confabs. "It seems clear from the tone of this piece that Kim went in with a set of preconceived ideas -- the all-too-easy meme that corporate ownership leads to homogenization -- and wasn't going to let the facts get in her way at 4:42 p.m. on a Friday," City Pages' editor-in-chief Kevin Hoffman adds. Lastly, Village Voice Media executive associate editor Andy Van De Voorde takes Kim to task for "focusing on 'the various shades of Banana Republic grey' worn by the Palins" in her own work during the conventions, while City Pages reporters were arrested, roughed up, and pepper-sprayed as "a direct result of their decision to actually go out and cover news."
Updating their reporting every few minutes by telephone last night, City Pages' Jeff Shaw and Andy Mannix say they were "assaulted by the cops" while trying to cover a RNC protest march. Here's the play-by-play, from Shaw: "The police said we needed to leave, we showed them our press credentials. I said I was a reporter and that it was a public street. An officer struck me and knocked me backwards over a curb. I tried to get up, and three or four officers shoved me to the ground. Andy was maced." Meanwhile, The Stranger's Brendan Kiley was pepper-sprayed earlier this week at the RNC. "I've hurt myself in a lot of different ways," he reports, "but nothing hurts like pepper spray. The pain is fleeting, but it is crippling." Lastly, Sam Stoker, who attended the AAN/Medill Academy for Alternative Journalism this summer, was arrested twice this week while covering RNC protests for In These Times. He's been tapped by LEO Weekly to write a first-person account, which he's agreed to make free to AAN members to reprint. For more on Stoker's piece, contact LEO's Stephen George at sgeorge (at) leoweekly.com.
The Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists awarded City Pages top honors in eight categories last week, including newsroom-wide wins for Best Website and Best Special Section. The paper also finished first in the Business Feature; Photojournalism: Pictoral; Short News Feature; Sports Feature; Sports Spot News; and Use of Multimedia categories.
"These days, compliments about City Pages are as rare as pro-R.T. Rybak stories during [Steve] Perry's 13-year tenure as editor," Brauer writes on MinnPost.com. But he thinks that despite the paper's "obvious problems" in the Village Voice Media era, the piling-on is unfair. "The beat-down has become so relentless that the good things aren't being acknowledged," he writes. The most recent staffer to depart, reporter Paul Demko, agrees. "I see people here doing a lot of good work and hard work and -- whatever the failings of the paper -- that also needs to be acknowledged," he tells Brauer. "It pisses me off when I think about some jackass on [the local blog] MnSpeak talking about how worthless the paper is." In the rest of the nearly-3,000 word piece, Brauer looks at everything from the recent City Pages stories that have generated the most web traffic to what he sees as the paper's remaining weaknesses.
The five-time AltWeekly Award winner and recipient of numerous James Beard Awards is taking her food column to Minnesota Monthly starting in January, according to MinnPost. "It makes me sad to the bottom of my toes," Grumdahl says. "I've been a City Pages writer since I was a whippersnapper; it was my first job out of Carleton. That said, I couldn't be more excited about Minnesota Monthly. I'm interested in longer-form things, I have a couple of books in the works, and Minnesota Monthly is interested in having national platform and voice." MinnPost thinks the loss of "a certifiable brand that pulls in big advertising bucks as local chefs court her legions of drooling foodies" will hurt ad revenue in City Pages' restaurant section.
MinnPost.com, which is slated to launch later this year, will be a not-for-profit internet-based daily "paper" run by former Star Tribune editor and publisher Joel Kramer. Corey Anderson, formerly online managing editor at City Pages, will be web editor, and three former staffers will be contributors: David Brauer, Beth Hawkins, and Mike Mosedale.
Steve Perry, who left the paper earlier this year, tells the Minnesota Monitor that his new project is "a professional journalism site, but it's just as importantly conceived to be a community-and-conversations site." Though he won't reveal the site's name yet, it's set to launch in October or November. He says he's pulling inspiration from sites as diverse as The Stranger's, the Gothamist chain of city sites, and the Gawker Media sites. "I love the idea of building a forum that wantonly blurs the lines between 'professional' and 'amateur' voices wherever appropriate," Perry says. "After we started blogging extensively at City Pages, I was struck by how much I learned from the comments and correspondence it generated."
