Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas announced this afternoon that he was dismissing the case against Village Voice Media executives Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey, who were arrested last night after publishing a story revealing that their Phoenix New Times was a target of a grand jury probe. Thomas said that the case had been grossly mishandled, according to the Arizona Republic. "It has become clear to me the investigation has gone in a direction I would not have authorized," Thomas says. The grand jury had been convened to investigate charges that the New Times violated the law when it posted Sheriff Joe Arpaio's home address on its website in 2004.
Graham Rayman's cover story last week, "Clearing the Air About 9/11's Toxic Dust and Cancer," doesn't refer directly to last year's Kristen Lombardi story on the same subject, but it "reads nevertheless like an unequivocal attempt at refuting its claims," according to the New York Observer. Lombardi's piece, which won a first-place AltWeekly Award for investigative reporting, stipulated that exposure to the Ground Zero rubble was giving rescue workers cancer, while Rayman's piece argues that research on the topic is murky. The Observer asks editor Tony Ortega, who fired Lombardi in May, if Rayman's story was a way of distancing his Village Voice from the version published under previous editor David Blum. "There was no conscious effort to 'tie' this cover to anything," he says. "New editor, new writer, and a new look at an evolving story. Call it weird if you like." He added: "The piece he wrote does contradict what has been written by other journalists, and what the Voice has written in the past. But that's the nature of journalism -- we're always gathering new evidence and trying to make sense of what we find."
When the New York Press was sold to Manhattan Media in early August, the new CEO announced the paper would stop running "explicit" ads. The National Organization for Women and some op-ed writers took that opportunity to put more pressure on the Voice and New York magazine to also stop running the ads. The Voice "fired back by defiantly running eight naked ladies on the cover" a few weeks ago, the New York Observer reports. Editor Tony Ortega tells the Observer that the cheeky cover was his idea. "The subject of our adult ads has been brought up lately in the local press," Ortega says. "I thought the best response from the newsroom was to poke some fun at ourselves." Manhattan Media CEO Tom Allon tells the Observer that, while he thinks "the punchline was only clear to a small sliver of their readership," he's glad to have stirred up the attention. "Clearly it was a nod to us and to our decision," he says. "I was flattered that they thought that a decision we made warranted a Voice cover."
Manhattan Media has named Blum editor-in-chief of New York Press as well as editorial director of the company's community newspaper group, the New York Times reports. When he starts the job Sept. 5, Blum's first task "will be to compete more vigorously with The Voice," where he served as editor for six months ending this March. "I want to make The Press as fresh and unpredictable as possible," he says. "I tried to do that at The Village Voice, but I didn't have enough time at The Voice to achieve the goals that I had at the paper. But here I will." In his interview with the Times, Blum also takes the opportunity to take a shot at his new competition and former employer for its out-of-town ownership. "I am excited to be working with a publisher and an owner who lives in New York, who knows the city extremely well," he says. "I think that will be a big plus for The Press -- and for me."
The editor tells MediaBistro he's most proud of bringing "a newsier focus to the front of the book" and the addition of a metro column by Tom Robbins. Though the early '07 storyline painted the Voice as a newspaper rife with inner turmoil and conflict, Ortega says that wasn't what he saw when he arrived. "I didn't find tumult so much as a group of people wanting to end the distractions and simply put out a newspaper," he says. "Those first few weeks were busy, but almost right away we were focused on the things that matter, like developing good stories." He also says that he -- like others at the AAN Convention last month -- remains "cautiously optimistic" about the future of the alt-weekly. "The dailies, after all, are being told by consultants to go free, increase local coverage, and write with some attitude -- all things we're already doing," he says.
In a letter to AAN News, ex-OC Weekly editor Will Swaim maintains that The Nation's "[Jon] Wiener did a fine job" conveying the paper's "loss ... of independence" under Village Voice Media, but claims that Wiener got at least one thing wrong. "[The article reports that] I told Jon Wiener that OC Weekly's film coverage was run out of Denver. I didn't say that," writes Swaim, now the publisher of Long Beach alt-weekly The District. MORE: In a letter to The Nation published on the OC Weekly blog, Gustavo Arellano says that "many of the overarching conclusions" reached by Wiener in the piece "are ludicrous."
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