They never made it online in a meaningful way. Not once have I had a must read link to their website. There are news websites that even if you hate the paper will lure you back due to content, for instance the New York Times will get stories on here, one will visit even if one hates the bloated paywall. But the Village Voice? It never made it onto most people's surfing radar.
The Village Voice, a New York Icon, Closes
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: The Village Voice, a New York Icon, Closes
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Weird.
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Re: The Village Voice, a New York Icon, Closes
#53Re: The Village Voice, a New York Icon, Closes
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
No, the award for excellence, period.
Re: The Village Voice, a New York Icon, Closes
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
You're getting into some really sketchy territory though.
For it to be a sign, it has to be consistent. The vast majority has to follow the rule. Exceptions need to be rare.
Otherwise, it's pretty much just anti-survivor bias. Yes, all failed magazines did these things, but doing that thing doesn't mean your magazine is failing if all magazines do it. Or if enough successful magazines do it.
14 years is a long time. It would be like saying water is deadly because everyone alive who has ever drank it has died or will die in about 100 years or so. Or everybody who has ever gotten divorced was married at one point. So marriage is a sure sign of an inevitable divorce.
Re: The Village Voice, a New York Icon, Closes
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's all about the moment you're standing in the phone store and there's two phones in front of you, one from "LG" and the other from "Hyvver7" and like 99% of other people you're probably going to get the "LG" phone even if the Hyvver7 phone has a similar price and seems to work just as well after poking at it for a few minutes. The reason you know the name "LG" isn't because you somehow heard the name through a com…
Except most of the phones in Walmart were Iphones, Motos and Samsungs, and I bought the LG regardless of brand because it was the lowest priced phone that was snappy and responsive
You do realize that branding does affect your perception of things as well?
It being the most "snappy" and "responsive" of the phones in the price range may just be your brain responding positively to the most known brand in that price range. A brand recognition that LG does pay a good deal for.
I mean, it boils down to the old "Pepsi Challenge". In the blind, people will prefer Pepsi over Coca-Cola most of the time. But if people know which is which before hand, Coca-Cola is chosen more often as being "better". (Although Pepsi is sweeter than Coca-Cola on average and people respond to sugar, which is what led to "New Coke").
Same things happen with fast food. Taking the exact same food and putting it in familiar branded packaging and people respond more favorably to it. Everything from chicken nuggets to carrot sticks.
And the converse happens. People who have convinced themselves of certain things, can have their perception of an item influenced in particular ways. Say those people who abhor fast food and only buy farm-fresh, local, organic, blah because it "tastes better". You can cut up a McDonald's chicken nugget, present it pleasantly as a local organic whatever and have people compare it to another nugget you present as a McDonald's nugget and people will sit there and tell you how they can taste the difference.
So yes, you might have bought the LG because you felt it was the snappiest phone at that price, but you only felt that way because of advertising.
Re: The Village Voice, a New York Icon, Closes
#57I 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…
Serious question: What are you thinking this is “really telling” of?
He's generalizing from self.
Which is odd considering his high education having attained a Massachusetts in the 30th best school in the nation. You'd think he'd know better than to do that.
Regardless of whether or not he would fall within Village Voice's demographic, the fact that he was never aware of it is telling of nothing. Nothing is ever going to capture 100% of their target demographic. And thanks to wide breadth of the totality of human experiences the world has to offer, that he was not aware of it says nothing except that it never crossed his sphere of awareness.
I mean, I'm not aware of a lot of things myself. Barely aware of a ton. Like I might vaguely remember hearing something possibly about it maybe. Kind of acquainted with some. I'll know the name but not exactly what it is, or kind of know what it is, but not the name. Etc, etc. I don't have time to be intimately familiar with everything. No one does.
Re: The Village Voice, a New York Icon, Closes
#58They never made it online in a meaningful way. Not once have I had a must read link to their website. There are news websites that even if you hate the paper will lure you back due to content, for instance the New York Times will get stories on here, one will visit even if one hates the bloated paywall. But the Village Voice? It never made it onto most people's surfing radar.
They were Craigslist before Craigslist - classifieds were the heart their business model and the money stopped flowing hard and fast. Once that happened they had no means of funding ‘must read’ articles. They kept the lights on with the collapsing print display ad business until that gave out.
The irony of a former longtime Voice editor now teaching at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism is straight out of the pages of another dead paper: The Onion.
Re: The Village Voice, a New York Icon, Closes
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wouldn't have died maybe if it did an OK job of connecting with people born after say 1977
Tell me about your experience in publishing. How many publications have you run?
When I read this again, it sounds much more aggressive than I intended. I really wasn't trying to be a dick, I just wanted to figure out where anoncoward was coming from and what kind of experience he/she had to enable such strong opinions.
I have published indie monthlies and I'd chalk the Voice's demise up to things like a serious decline in classifieds revenue, trouble getting visibility once they were online only, and the kind of advertising/printing problems that only an indie weekly could experience.
If the sub thirty crowd is that powerful, I'd genuinely love to know.
Re: The Village Voice, a New York Icon, Closes
#60> Some staff members will stay on to make the paper’s print archive digitally accessible...
Good for the owner that at least they were willing to spend a tiny bit more to make this part happen.