Tony Ortega. (Photo: Twitter)

The Village Voice’s EIC Tony Ortega announced in a blog post today that he is leaving the troubled alt-weekly to “pursue a book proposal about Scientology in its time of crisis.” Mr. Ortega attributed his departure to a desire to turn his “465 blog posts about Scientology” into a book that prompted him to make the jump, but sources with knowledge of the situation tell The Observer Mr. Ortega's exit from the Voice was not his decision. 

Though writing about Scientology may be Mr. Ortega’s life preserver, a former staffer told us his relentless pursuit of scoops on the controversial church may have been a distraction during his final months at the paper.

“He was increasingly obsessed with Scientology and had neglected almost all of his editorial duties at the paper," the ex-staffer said. "Sometimes he wouldn't even edit features.”

The former staffer also said Mr. Ortega began to worry about his future when writer James King joined the staff in January from the Phoenix New Times, which is headquartered in the same building as Village Voice Media's corporate management. Mr. King was known among staffers as a favorite son of VVM Executive Editor Mike Lacey and the chain's bosses in Phoenix, a fact that made Mr. Ortega uneasy.

According to the ex-staffer we spoke with, Mr. Ortega went out of his way to establish a good relation with Mr. King

“Since James's arrival, it's been clear that Tony is afraid and saw that James had been sent in by corporate to keep an eye on him, and maybe even serve as his replacement. Hence Tony's willingness to pretty much lick King's asshole--he was hoping, it seemed, that this would be reciprocated positively by corporate," the former staffer said. "Tony always went out of his way to privilege King and treat him glowingly.”

Another source familiar with the beleaguered paper told us Mr. Ortega’s fears increased after a late August visit from the executive managing editor of Village Voice Media, Christine Brennan, a.k.a. “The Wicked Witch of Westword.” Ms. Brennan, who got her start at Westword, the chain’s Denver weekly, earned her nickname after gaining a reputation as a harbinger of doom within the chain who appeared whenever management was set to execute cutbacks at one of their papers.

The Voice’s music critic, Maura Johnston, also announced she is leaving the paper today in a note on her Facebook page.

"today is my last day at the voice. thanks to everyone who wrote for me, made music worth writing about, and read the section. i'm very proud of the work i've done," Ms. Johnston wrote.

So far, the Village Voice Media has made no announcements about a replacement for Mr. Ortega. We reached out to Mr. Ortega, Ms. Johnston and Village Voice Media. As of this writing, we have yet to receive a response.

These latest departures come after a rough summer over at the Voice. In August, four editorial staffers were laid off. The paper has also increasingly been dealing with legal and political drama due to its online adult classifieds operation, Backpage.com, which has been a crucial source of revenue for Village Voice Media in recent years.

For anyone who wants to wish Mr. Ortega well in his next chapter, a source familiar with the paper told us he will be having departure drinks at The Scratcher at 5 p.m. tonight.

When Craigslist shuttered its "Adult Services" section last year, no one was naïve enough to think the move would mean the end of prostitution, but did anyone predict it could save alt-weeklies?

Backpage, which is a fraction of the size of Craigslist, is the only popular classifieds site left willing to host the paid escort and body-rub ads that are often thinly veiled fronts for prostitution. In the month after Craigslist closed its erotic services sections under pressure from Congress and state attorneys general, Backpage enjoyed a half-million-visitor bump in traffic, according to Quantcast, and became the No. 1 publisher of escort ads on the Internet. The Aim Group, a media consulting firm, estimated that in January, Backpage brought in $2.1 million in revenue from erotic services ads alone.

 According to Aim Group founding principal Peter Zollman, Backpage, which did not respond to requests for comment from The Observer, has not contested the reports. "We think that's because we're underestimating it by so much,"--- Mr. Zollman said. "If they wanted to challenge it, they'd have to tell us how much they really make."

Mr. Zollman said Village Voice Media (VVM) has only been in contact with his office once, via its attorney, who argued that escort ads placed on Backpage are permitted under the Federal Communications Decency Act. The Aim Group claims to be agnostic on the matter of prostitution, and has even criticized attorneys general who try to shut down the sites, but it's easy to understand why VVM might feel defensive. The Backpage windfall has come along at a crucial time, helping the company to plug a leak from a large legal judgment and keep itself afloat.

For more than two decades, Village Voice Media executive editor Mike Lacey employed a simple, often devastatingly successful strategy for gaining control of the country's alternative weekly business: acquire the local paper, cut editorial costs (lay off critics, reporters and, reportedly, entire fact-checking departments), pump the paper full of nationally syndicated content and splash an occasional local investigative piece on the cover. It was working like a charm until 2004, when the San Francisco Bay-Guardian sued VVM's SF Weekly for manipulating ad prices in an attempt to drive the rival paper out of business. According to court transcripts, Mr. Lacey told the staff on his first day as owner of SF Weekly that this was precisely his intention.

Despite facing legendary antitrust lawyers in a state notorious for its aversion to monopolistic practices, Mr. Lacey spent years appealing the court's award of $16 million, which grew to $21 million with interest, until the California Supreme Court threw out VVM's petition. During the proceedings, the company revealed that it owed creditors $80 million and claimed it could not afford to pay the award. Lawyers for the Bay-Guardian threatened to force bankruptcy.

In January 2011, VVM and SF Weekly settled the issue privately. Though the terms of the agreement were not disclosed, between the settlement and what one attorney familiar with the case said were legal fees of at least $5 million to fight the case, VVM was likely left with an eight-figure hole burned in its pocket.

Since last spring, the company's efforts to patch that hole up have included the unthinkable (laying off legendary Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett in January); the surprising (selling off Kansas City Pitch to Tennessee publisher South Comm, Inc., in mid-March); and the long overdue: shutting down an experiment with a pair of sex blogs that were never publicly launched despite being published for nearly a year.

"It didn't quite work," new media director Bill Jensen told The Observer of the Naked City blogs, "and when we get down to doing budgets for the next year, we'd rather take that money along the lines of our core product."

As with all print media outlets, VVM´s "core product" is changing. Early this year VVM named a new group publisher, Joshua Fromson, formerly of SF Weekly, specifically for his agility with that property's digital product. He moved to New York and got started earlier this month, helping to launch a national "Best Of" app, which pairs GPS with the city guide content from the papers' various "Best Of" issues.

According to Mr. Jensen, VVM is better equipped than most media companies to weather the financial transition from print- to Web-advertising models, simply because alt-weeklies were never spoiled by full-page, four-color national campaigns. (It should be noted, however, that many local advertising markets have proven more volatile than the market for national ads.)

 "We've always had boots on the street," he elaborated. "We were going after the small, cool bar on the corner and partnering up with them to have small, inexpensive ads at a high volume."

He added that the complaint that editorial budget cuts have turned alt-weeklies into empty advertising vehicles is beside the point. "The ad is content," Mr. Jensen maintained. "People are looking at the ads as much as the stories. It's always been that way."

By the same token, some readers have noted in recent months that certain stories published by VVM read disconcertingly like ads, pushing agendas that serve the parent company's interests. For example, the City Pages article "Women's Funding Network Sex Trafficking Report Is Junk Science," which ran in all 13 VVM papers last month, criticizes the methodology of a small part of a report by sociological research firm the Schapiro Group, hired by the nonprofit to study underage prostitution. Author Nick Pinto used a candid quote from one of the advocacy group's directors on the strategic use of statistics to assert that the nonprofit willfully lied to lawmakers. "And it was all done to score free publicity and a wealth of public funding," he wrote.

Escort ads aren't the only growth area VVM has found in recent years. Medical marijuana dispensaries have also become vital sources of revenue for alternative weeklies. As Scott Tobias, president and chief operating officer of VVM, told The New York Times, "This is certainly one of the fastest growing industries we've ever seen come in." Which is why it raised some eyebrows that VVM hired a dedicated marijuana columnist, who at one point wrote an open letter to the state of Arizona chastising it for, among other things, blocking out-of-state medical marijuana cardholders from patronizing Arizona dispensaries, a potential advertiser in the Phoenix New Times.

Last week, The Village Voice ran a cover story, "Heroin.com," about the drug trade on Craigslist. The story included a disclaimer that seemed to indicate some sensitivity to the criticism that VVM is benefiting from illegal activity. "Using the same keyword searches that turned up numerous drug ads on Craigslist's New York City pages, we found only a single ad, in several variations, offering illicit drugs on local pages at Backpage.com," the editor and author wrote. "The Backpage ad was repeatedly flagged and taken down, and reappeared over several weeks."

As Backpage grows in popularity, more news stories have emerged suggesting that the kinds of abuses that led lawmakers to demand Craigslist shutter its erotic-services section are increasingly occurring on the site. In September a former child prostitute sued VVM for knowingly publishing advertisements of her, and later that month 21 attorneys general called on the company to follow Craigslist's lead and ban escort ads. VVM declined, but offered to continue cooperating with law enforcement officials on cases originating on the site.

The pseudonymous crime blogger Trench Reynolds aggregates news stories about crimes involving Backpage, in part because the stories often fail to get much attention beyond local papers. (And so far they have not been reported by VVM properties.) In April alone, he's found three stories involving underage persons sold or solicited through the site.

"Backpage says they review, but they haven't to my knowledge," Mr. Reynolds told The Observer. "Whatever steps they say they're taking, it doesn't seem to me like they're doing anything at all."

Note: An earlier version of this story said that the disclosure within the Village Voice's "Heroin.com" was anonymously written, it was in fact written by editor Tony Ortega and reporter Joe Coscarelli.

kstoeffel@observer.com

Among other things, it'll improve your vocabulary for insulting rival journalists.  

My favorite: "bull-goose loony."  

And creative ways of fantasizing about assaulting rival journalists.  

My favorite: strangulation by ponytail.

Enjoy!

The company owns a sprawling network of altweeklies including The Village Voice here in New York.

Here's a question: Given Village Voice Media's less-than-stellar reputation in journalistic circles--a result of its focus on cost-cutting, and the firings of a host of iconic veteran alt-weekly writers, particularly at the flagship Voice--could this news, in which VVM executives are seen to be taking a stand on behalf of press freedom, be exactly what the company needs? Just asking.

Mr. Blum’s bosses—in town from the Sun Belt and the West, where they built the New Times alternative-weekly chain—succeeded in dining in the sanctum of $55 truffled mac-and-cheese and anti-publicity publicity.

But in other respects, the alt-cowboys are still coming at the Manhattan media world from the outside. On March 2, Village Voice Media fired Mr. Blum, a New York native who had been in the job for six months. Three days later, the company announced that the new editor in chief of The Voice would be Tony Ortega, an 11-year veteran of the company, who edits the Broward-Palm Beach New Times.

Mr. Ortega, 43, is The Voice’s fifth editor in chief since the October 2005 announcement of a merger between newspaper chains controlled by New Times and The Voice. Under the deal, which was consummated in January 2006, New Times management took control of the whole operation, but assumed the hallowed, half-century-old Voice name.

More than a year later, the new Village Voice Media still hasn’t gotten a handle on running the actual Village Voice: a fractious paper in a stagnant niche in the country’s most competitive print-media market. And the gap between the paper and its distant but hands-on owners keeps swallowing editors.

“My job as editor in chief of The Village Voice was not all spent putting out the newspaper, but also keeping people happy thousands of miles away,” Mr. Blum said on March 3, shortly after his firing was announced.

Mr. Blum had New York bona fides: He’d worked as a reporter, critic and editor for The Wall Street Journal, New York magazine and The New York Sun. But he had never run a weekly newspaper, and specifically not one of the highly regimented New Times products. He was chosen after the previous editor-designate, Erik Wemple of Washington City Paper, backed out shortly after arrival.

Mr. Blum said he had felt that he didn’t have the confidence of Village Voice Media and its executive editor, Mike Lacey. He received frequent e-mails and phone calls about running the paper.

The final phone call from Mr. Lacey came March 2, telling him that he was out. Two days earlier, there had been a bitter, hour-and-a-half-long editorial meeting at which issues of race and class dominated. A familiar topic had come up: Who is The Voice’s target audience?

There had been plenty of other discussion sessions in Mr. Blum’s time at The Voice. Several staffers said his editorial meetings tended to deal in abstract, pedagogical explorations of the types of stories he wanted, rather than pitches and assignments.

And staffers said Mr. Blum had seemed more at ease with recent hires, plucked from Columbia’s journalism school—where he has worked as an adjunct—than with the strong-willed Voice lifers.

“He was comfortable in the professor role,” a Voice staffer said. “I don’t know if he was comfortable in the editor role.”

Another staffer said that Mr. Blum seemed to favor rambling, specific human-interest stories over shorter, newsier pieces.

(Mr. Blum did resurrect the dormant “Press Clips” column, after a long search for a writer that included a few conversations with this reporter.)

The paper’s news space took a hit this past fall when Mr. Blum killed the front-of-the-book “City State” section, to the chagrin of the veterans.

“In one form or another, we’ve had an upfront local-politics section for as long as I’ve been there,” said reporter Wayne Barrett, who started at The Voice in January of 1978.

Mr. Barrett said he “certainly did disagree with the decision which David made to eliminate the section.”

With the front reduced, writers wondered where stories would go at all. Editorial space was a source of contention—particularly when an investigative piece by Mr. Barrett on corruption in the State Supreme Court was relegated to inside the paper, while a new sex columnist got the cover. Several staffers said that the piece was passed over because the head office in Phoenix wanted the sex-themed cover art.

Mr. Blum said that New Times papers had a tradition of giving art directors “freedom to put something on the cover that is the most easily illustrated, rather than the story that is the most significant.”

The news hole at the front, Mr. Blum said, was due to be restored March 7, with the launch of a section called “Eight Million Stories.”

“I wanted to replace the ‘City State’ section … with an upfront news section that had less of a focus on politics and government, but covered the city as a whole,” Mr. Blum said. “It seemed to me that ‘City State’ was too often filled with stories for the daily newspapers and not a weekly.”

“The thing that mystifies me about New Times, and Lacey told me himself, is that he and his partner had coveted The Voice for years,” Mr. Barrett said. “They liked the name, but I don’t know what they liked about the paper before they bought it.”

Mr. Lacey didn’t return multiple phone calls and e-mails seeking comment.

Staffers were more impressed by Mr. Blum when he bucked the home office in handling the yearly music critics’ poll, “Pazz & Jop.” Music critic Robert Christgau, who had run the poll for 33 years, was fired in August 2006, along with seven other old-line staffers. That prompted Gawker Media’s Idolator Web site to start a competing poll called “Jackin’ Pop.”

Bill Jensen, Village Voice Media’s director of new media, wrote an introductory essay for the first post-Christgau “Pazz & Jop” poll, in which he denounced aging music critics and attacked the Idolator project: “So who gives a shit about a three-month old blog doing a poll of its own?”

Mr. Blum refused to publish Mr. Jensen’s piece, substituting a mild-mannered in-house essay. Leaked to Idolator, the combative original—its kicker, to doubters of The Voice’s pop credentials, was: “Dewey Defeats Truman, motherfuckers”—became a blog-world laughingstock.

“They felt strongly that we weren’t being aggressive enough in attacking our competitors,” Mr. Blum said.

It was Mr. Jensen who announced to the staff that Mr. Blum had been fired and that he was taking over as interim editor.

Two days later, on a Sunday, Mr. Lacey phoned Mr. Ortega to offer him the job. Mr. Ortega had left work during the afternoon on Friday and hadn’t checked the Internet since, and was unaware that Mr. Blum had been fired.

Mr. Ortega said he had informally chatted with Andy Van De Voorde, the company’s executive associate editor, in 2005 about possibly moving to New York if anything ever came up.

“I had given them the impression that I was interested, but I figured I was one of 50,” Mr. Ortega said by phone shortly after midnight on March 6. He had been out celebrating with his Florida staff.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Ortega said, he had talked to Mr. Van De Voorde again, and had expressed an interest in the vacant editor’s position at the chain’s OC Weekly. “I thought you were interested in New York,” Mr. Van De Voorde said, by Mr. Ortega’s account.

At that point, there was still no opening.

Reached after the announcement of Mr. Ortega’s hiring, Mr. Blum said he was delighted by the choice. “He really is one of the brightest and smartest editors of the bunch,” Mr. Blum said. “He puts out a great paper, and he has excellent credentials.”

“He has the added advantage of long experience working with Mike Lacey,” Mr. Blum said. “That’s a plus. I don’t mean that as a criticism of Lacey, but it’s a benefit to have a working relationship.”

Mr. Ortega and Mr. Blum spent time together in October 2006 at a retreat in New Orleans for the editors of all 17 Village Voice Media weeklies. There was a bus tour of the Katrina-ravaged Ninth Ward, a few editorial discussions, and plenty of eating and drinking.

“I had a really good time talking to David,” Mr. Ortega said. “We went out drinking. I could tell that David was trying to figure us out.”

Now The Voice has an editor who intimately understands the New Times tradition. “I’m sure lots of people wonder, ‘Why would you want to add yourself to the body count?’” Mr. Ortega said.

“I come from the perspective of someone who has been with this company, and things have worked out very well,” he added.

Libby Case Ends at High Noon

In the end, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby was found guilty of lying about the circumstances surrounding the leaking of a C.I.A. agent’s name to the press in response to an op-ed piece by former ambassador Joseph Wilson, the agent’s husband, who had written that the White House used discredited information in claiming that Saddam Hussein was shopping for uranium—a claim that was central to the argument that Saddam had an active and ongoing program to make nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, which the White House said posed such a direct and imminent threat to the United States that it was necessary to invade Iraq.

Somewhere at the end of that long and branching chain of causation: guilty.

“Almost four years ago, I wrote a piece for Time.com called ‘A War on Wilson?’, about how the administration was taking on this newfound critic of the just-completed march on Baghdad,” said Portfolio magazine politics editor Matthew Cooper, the former Time reporter, who was subpoenaed and threatened with jail in the leak investigation. “The piece still holds up.”

“Am I glad to have this thing behind me?” Mr. Cooper said. “Of course.”

“I’m so glad this case is over,” said Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which had advocated in defense of reporters and newspapers subpoenaed about the identity of their confidential sources.

Ms. Dalglish also said: “I don’t think ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ really impacted the media.”

Judith Miller, the former New York Times reporter who was jailed for weeks while protecting Mr. Libby’s anonymity as her source, said, “There’s still an appeals process, and I will have nothing to say at this point.”

“I think there is a significant chance he will get pardoned just before Bush goes out of office,” said Robert Bennett, the prominent D.C. defense lawyer who represented Ms. Miller.

Readers who clicked to refresh the New York Times Web page between the announcement that a verdict had been reached and the reporting of the results could fill the anxious minutes by reading the adjoining A.P. story: “2 Suicide Bombers Kill 93 in Iraq.”

Mr. Wilson’s original Times op-ed has been much parsed and contested during the past three years, mostly in the sections describing the relationship—implicit? explicit? exaggerated?—between the office of the Vice President and the C.I.A. and his orders to travel to Africa. The office of the Vice President was where Mr. Libby worked.

Less study has been devoted to the ending of Mr. Wilson’s piece.

“More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already,” Mr. Wilson wrote then. “We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.”

—By Tom Scocca with reporting by Michael Calderone and Anna Schneider-Mayerson