I think it's really telling that even though I consume content voraciously and am a highly educated 26 year old making a decent wage, I have never heard of literally any of these writers and Pulitzer Prize winners. I only know ee cummings in passing, because my high school English textbook told me he was famous for using non-standard punctuation and capitalization. I'm sad that an alt-news source has died. I would ha…
>even though I consume content voraciously and am a highly educated 26 year old making a decent wage, I have never heard of literally any of these writers and Pulitzer Prize winners.
Well, consuming e.g. Medium posts or Lambda the Ultimate discussions is not the same as consuming the kind of content that gets Pulitzers.
I consume content voraciously What kind of "content" are you "consuming"?
Hours and hours of youtube and HN per day. All non-fiction and all different topics. I work a very boring job so I will read nearly anything. I also read a ton of ebooks, some even fiction but mostly non-fiction. Things like Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, or Jason Fung's books on fasting.
>Hours and hours of youtube and HN per day. All non-fiction and all different topics.
And how do you expect to read Pulitzer winning journalism among these?
Serious question: What are you thinking this is “really telling” of?
I think it's telling that this paper failed to connect with my generation. I am a prime candidate to be a reader of this paper and its high quality writing. It never was put in front of me like YT or HN was. Now it's dead
I'm the same generation as you. But I'm not very educated, have never lived in New York, and am familiar with the Village Voice and most of the writers mentioned in the article.
"didn't even have the budget to syndicate horoscopes" A clear sign, and only 14y later they closed.
> A clear sign, and only 14y later they closed. For someone who knows the industry, such a sign is not as irrelevant as it appears - nor is closing down a sudden affair. Unlike SV startups which can fold in 1-2 years, news outlets are surprisingly resilient in their dying. It's a long process of decay with several milestones along the way... As someone that has worked in the print business, and am familiar with the h…
I think it's really telling that even though I consume content voraciously and am a highly educated 26 year old making a decent wage, I have never heard of literally any of these writers and Pulitzer Prize winners. I only know ee cummings in passing, because my high school English textbook told me he was famous for using non-standard punctuation and capitalization. I'm sad that an alt-news source has died. I would ha…
I wouldn't have paid for it. It was a free newspaper and website. It was like The Onion . No one paid to read it. Repeat: no one. It existed to appeal to people, and get ads in front of them. Just like The Onion . At which point, whether the ads worked or not ( and just like everywhere else on the internet, people resist and try to ignore ads, and that resistance is a known quantity ) advertisers paid to get in front…
"No one paid to read it. Repeat: no one."
I was a paid subscriber to the Village Voice for a year or so when I was living in Minneapolis. 2008/2009, I think ?
So while the cover price was indeed zero, there were indeed people paying to read it.
Related, don't miss the Reason feature on Larkin and Lacey. They purchased the Village Voice in 2005 and had a solution for the classifieds problem, Backpage.com.
Unfortunately, they ran afoul of some young politicians/prosecutors who needed to make a mark to get into national politics (Hello, Senator Harris), and some old political families they burned, and are now languishing without money to pay for attorneys before their 2020 trial.
Hours and hours of youtube and HN per day. All non-fiction and all different topics. I work a very boring job so I will read nearly anything. I also read a ton of ebooks, some even fiction but mostly non-fiction. Things like Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, or Jason Fung's books on fasting.
> Hours and hours of youtube and HN per day. All non-fiction and all different topics. And how do you expect to read Pulitzer winning journalism among these?
The award for excellence in a dying medium? I’d expect the new mediums to create new awards.
I wouldn't have paid for it. It was a free newspaper and website. It was like The Onion . No one paid to read it. Repeat: no one. It existed to appeal to people, and get ads in front of them. Just like The Onion . At which point, whether the ads worked or not ( and just like everywhere else on the internet, people resist and try to ignore ads, and that resistance is a known quantity ) advertisers paid to get in front…
It died because it failed to connect with the younger generations. Additionally, advertisers pay for conversion, not eyeballs. If they aren't noticing an uptick in prospects or revenue, they stop advertising with their current campaigns
Truth, but of interest is the part of "if they aren't noticing". I think that the (mostly positive) trend of using more data-driven decision making processes, has caused a lot more advertisers to (very slowly) realize that a lot of the advertising they were paying for wasn't doing anything. The decline in print advertising didn't happen in isolation: billboards, radio, TV, even youtube advertising has had declines recently. I think this is part of a generational change in the management of companies that pay for most of the advertising, where instead of going with a gut instinct about what works and what doesn't, they require evidence that it works, and often it doesn't. This would have killed a lot of the advertising income regardless of anything else.
Removing something as useless as horoscopes was a sign they were going down hill? I would think that would be a sign the content was improving.
It's indicative that they didn't even have the budget to syndicate horoscopes . Does that make a little bit more sense?
You are right. For more on the demise of the big city alt-Weekly, see the linked excerpt from a 2009 summary by Marc Cooper, who used to be an editor of the LA Weekly. This was also taken over by Mike Lacey, and as Cooper recounts, they tried to cost-cut their way to profitability.