Letting Sigman go was "tough"

In mid-January, David Schneiderman, CEO of Village Voice Media, asked Michael Sigman, president/publisher of LA Weekly/OC Weekly, to leave, a decision he describes as “tough.”

“I want to move the paper into a larger media world in terms of advertising,” Schneiderman tells AAN News. “There’s no reason why a paper like the LA Weekly shouldn’t be competing for dollars with dailies, TV, radio, and cable, and I want someone in there who has that different perspective. It’s not a change for the paper. It’s really a way of looking at us in a broader sense.”

Schneiderman says firing Sigman was difficult.

“We’ve worked together for a long time, and it’s not fun, and it’s a tough thing, but I think we are parting in a pretty good way,” he said.

Schneiderman says the decision was not driven by the investment banks that are now the majority owners of VVM.

“My job is to grow the business whether we have investors, a single owner, or whether I owned it,” Schneiderman says. “My goal is to bring in as much revenue as possible so that I can keep putting money back into editorial and grow the editorial quality. That’s what the goal is. People tend to think that so much is driven by investors. Nothing is driven by investors.”

John Ferri is a freelance writer based in Tacoma, Wash.