NEW YORK and PHOENIX, Nov. 28 /PRNewswire/ — Village Voice Media and New Times Media, the nation’s leading alternative media companies, today announced that the United States Department of Justice has closed its investigation and cleared the merger of the two companies. The merger is expected to close in the first quarter of 2006.

Following the close of the merger, the new entity, to be called Village Voice Media, will have a weekly audited circulation of 1.8 million papers and 4.3 million readers. Village Voice Media will have papers and Web sites in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Denver, Houston, Dallas, Miami, Seattle, St. Louis, Orange County, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Kansas City, Nashville, the East Bay including Oakland and Berkeley, and the Ft. Lauderdale/West Palm Beach area.

Village Voice Media newspapers include The Village Voice, LA Weekly, Seattle Weekly, City Pages (Minneapolis-St. Paul), OC Weekly (Orange County, CA), Nashville Scene. The aggressive and independent reporting style of these papers has established their reputation for groundbreaking investigation of scandals in city politics and foreshadowing of important political and cultural trends in their respective cities. The New York paper has received three Pulitzer Prizes and the George Polk Award, as well as Front Page Awards and Deadline Club Awards, and its daily-updated Web site has twice been recognized as one of the nation’s premier online sites, receiving the National Press Foundation’s Online Journalism Award and the Editor and Publisher Eppy Award for best U.S. weekly newspaper online.

New Times, which has grown to become the nation’s largest publisher of alternative weeklies with eleven newspapers, was founded in 1970 by Michael Lacey, New Times’ executive editor, and others at Arizona State University. From the beginning, New Times emphasized strong writing and solid reporting of local issues along with cutting-edge cultural coverage, and its papers have routinely bested the nation’s leading dailies in national and regional writing contests, winning top awards from Investigative Reporters and Editors, the George Polk Awards, and many others. In particular, the chain has posted multiple winners and national finalists in the Livingston Awards, the nation’s top contest recognizing journalistic excellence from younger writers.