![]() The National Association of Attorneys General has issued a letter signed by the top prosecutors of 48 states asking Village Voice Media to drop. Pressure is mounting on the political side, too. Already, it has cost the Voice a major investor and some advertisers for its newspapers and websites. The campaign was strong enough to make Craig Newmark walk away from nearly $45 million in revenue. The considerable moral campaign against for its alleged role in trafficking minors can't be a help. Expansions increased revenue in the last half of the last year, but apparently this is just not as big a business as it was two years ago. Combine that with the fact that reportedly accounts for a full 70 percent of the total business in the United States, and the incredibly lucrative business actually looks a lot less promising. It appears that only captured about half that in 2011. That year, Craig's List was on track to earn $44.6 million in revenue from those ads. Village Voice Media needs, but that doesn't mean it's clear whether the website will continue to earn the company what it does now.Ĭonsider the fact that most of 's business arrived after the popular city classifieds website Craig's List dropped out of the adult-services classifieds business in the fall of 2010. (It's not clear what the company will actually end up paying, or when.) That's revenue the company needs to stay in business. That's especially true after the company's crushing 2010 loss in a California appeals court on an antitrust judgment the verdict compelled the company, with legal fees and interest, to fork over an estimated $22 million. But the business is controlled by Village Voice Media, and for them, unloading is not an option.Īccording to AIM Group, a media consultancy, earned $23.9 million in revenue in the 12 months ending in December 2011. The reasons for this are much bigger than The Village Voice itself. Yes, it was outside the offices of The Village Voice that local protesters, including a son of Voice co-founder Norman Mailer, congregated to protest the continued operation of. Goldman's shame had chiseled away one chunk of V.V.M.'s financial security.īut that's the thing: V.V.M., which owns and operates more than a dozen alternative weekly newspapers in cities across the country in addition to, isn't that secure anyway. Kristof subsequently investigated the ownership of, and when he began asking questions of Goldman Sachs about their ownership stake in Village Voice Media, they abruptly unloaded their $30 million, 16-percent share in the company. But Kristof's column became a sort of crusade for the paper, and it had legs. Kristof's column came late in the game: Interest groups and nonprofits that fight sex trafficking had been complaining about for some time. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's January 25 column, " How Pimps Use the Web to Sell Girls," established pretty convincingly that the erotic-services advertising website owned by Village Voice Media was used to promote prostitution, and often violent and usurious forms of the practice. (To a greater or lesser degree, these have all also been subtly different from each other but our topic here is New York.) It's a subtlety that makes a difference, and that has been the source of much of the internal tension at the paper, at which tumult has been a rule since its founding, but which has become a particularly nasty place to be these last seven years. ![]() In fact, the purposes and character of the Voice have always been subtly different from the purposes and characters of "alt" papers like the Twin Cities' City Pages, Chicago's Chicago Reader, the City Papers of Washington and Baltimore, and the New Times papers of Phoenix and Miami. ![]() It's often said, carelessly I think, that the Voice is the grandfather paper of the "alternative newsweekly" tradition in American journalism. ![]() ![]() It's the marquee title in the company's stable of newspapers-the buyers, New Times Media, even changed their name to emphasize the Voice brand. The Voice has always been a problem child for its owner, Village Voice Media, which acquired the paper and several others it owned and operated back in 2005. ![]()
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