Turmoil at the Voice

The LA Weekly shares owners with the Village Voice and must be closely observing the tremors shivering the timbers of the New York weekly. As the New York Times summarizes Monday, the Voice recently fired executive editor Richard Goldstein and online editor Matt Haber and laid off six editorial staffers. Don Forst, the former L.A. Herald Examiner editor who runs the Voice, says there is a fundamental change underway:

"The restructuring situation is tied into our efforts going from a weekly product to, with the Web, daily journalism electronically, in which we're putting stuff up on a daily basis, sometimes on an hourly basis," he said. "The restructuring is putting new resources there, to the Web site, while at the same time maintaining the paper."

Staff at the Weekly had to pick up on that and wonder if changes are coming here too. The Weekly began last year to post occasional stories on the website ahead of the print paper, the majority of them from Hollywood columnist Nikki Finke. But the Weekly's desk has been slow to post scoops when it has them, and the paper seems anything but eager to embrace the news-breaking and audience-building powers of the Web. With what's going on at headquarters in New York, I wonder if it's only a matter of time. Also: The NYT stresses, again, that the recent resignation of Voice media columnist Cynthia Cotts was unrelated to the staff restructuring. Forst says she will be replaced.

11:30 PM Sunday, August 8 2004 • Link
More by tag: Newspapers
Email or share:
© 2003-2008   •  About LA Observed  •  Contact the editor
LA Biz Observed
5:08 PM Sun | The bond market super-seer says that the government rescue plan for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is a "positive step."
9:18 AM Sun | The two mortgage financing giants have been placed into government conservatorship.
Featured bloggers at LA Observed
TJ Sullivan | American humorists — The new journalists.
Deanne Stillman | George Bush compares the "angry left" with the North Vietnamese, but it's the angry right that made McCain cry uncle.
Nancy Rommelmann | This is one time I think the candidate should step down to spend more time with her family. A cursory...
Phil Wallace | USC and UCLA both start their football seasons with impressive wins over southern opponents.
Sponsors
Jewish Journal logo
California Wellness Foundation
Playa Vista ad
Premium Blogads

 
Books, Blogs & Events

Get RSS Feeds
of LA Observed
LA Observed publishes several Real Simple Syndication feeds for easy scanning of headlines. If you wish to subscribe to a feed, most popular RSS readers will do it for you. You can also enter the web address from the XML button below or click on a specific feed. For more help with RSS, try here or here.




Add to Google