After playing the Village Voice's Siren Music Festival with his band, Jazz Beard Jr., R. James Bagget says he was shocked at Amy Phillips' "sarcastic tone and lack of genuine enthusiasm" in her preview of the event that was published in the Voice. "(I)t is profoundly ironic that one of the Voice's main competitors (Time Out) ran a much larger and more laudatory preview," he writes in his letter-to-the-editor.
In its summer issue, Columbia Journalism Review tenders "laurels" to three AAN members – The Village Voice, the Nashville Scene, and Tampa’s Weekly Planet – for “good old-fashioned criticism of the big boys in town.” The journalism-mag crowns the beneficiaries with a left-handed compliment: “Who says the alternative press has sold its birthright for a mess of personal ads and restaurant reviews?”
Norah Vincent, a lesbian columnist for The Village Voice and other publications, seriously ticks off much of the gay and lesbian community, The New York Times reports. Vincent, whose views are way right of center, says many in the gay community “dislike anyone they see as disagreeing with them.” Voice Editor Don Forst defends his decision to run her column: “She gets people to read her. And if she introduces thoughts that they haven't had, that's terrific."
Peter Noel says he was kicked out of the Hip-Hop Summit, an event Def Jam founder Russell Simmons helped organize at the New York Hilton. Noel tells the Daily News' Mitchell Fink that he was barred from the meeting because Simmons didn't want him there. "When Russell found out I was a part of (a media panel on mainstream press hip-hop coverage) he went off." Simmons says nothing could be further from the truth.
Michele Laven takes the position of president and chief operating officer of NT Media ("New Times"), Jim Larkin, CEO of the company, announced today.
The Village Voice was a hothouse of left-wing factional politics that became an advertising-money machine. So why won't anyone give David Schneiderman credit for it?
