William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, will publish Jenna Miscavige Hill’s “Beyond Belief: My Secret Life inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape” in January. As the title suggests, the memoir is about growing up in—and leaving—the religion and will include “strange and disturbing” details about the church and a “first hand” account of Scientology’s “upper ranks.”

Writing about Scientology is practically becoming its own industry. Maybe one that’s not as profitable as the religion itself, but an industry nonetheless.

Village Voice Media is undergoing a makeover after some corporate maneuvering over the weekend. Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, the current owners of the alt-weekly newspaper chain, are selling it to the company’s current management. What basically amounts to a restructuring of the beleaguered company means that the newspapers are separating from Backpage.com, the controversial classified site that has been tied to sex trafficking and prostitution.

The chain’s 13 newspapers and related websites are being bought by a newly-created holding company, Voice Media Group. The company’s former COO Scott Tobias and former executive editor Christine Brennan will run Voice Media Company. Mr. Lacey and Mr. Larkin will continue to run Backpage.com.

“The Voice Media Group will be focusing on core products — hard-hitting coverage, music, food, arts and culture,” Mr. Tobias told paidContent, adding there would no changes for day to day staff.

The financial details of the restructuring were not disclosed, nor was the identity of the backer. It is unclear whether Mr. Lacey and Mr. Larkin, who owned a majority stake in the company, are retaining a role behind the scenes. The move is widely seen as a way to distance and insulate the editorial side from the criticism, legal challenges and advertising boycotts that have been a result of the chain’s connection to Backpage.com.

Corporate advertisers like Pfizer, American Airlines, Best Buy, AT&T, Ikea, H&M, IHOP, Macy's and the Miami Dolphins professional football team have all pulled their advertising from the newspaper chain in response to pressure on the companies to distance themselves from the classified site.

The company’s headquarters will move from Phoenix to Denver. The chain's flagship paper will remain on Cooper Square (for now, at least).

Staff changes have been happening at the chain's papers all year. Earlier this month, Editor-in-Chief Tony Ortega announced he was leaving the paper (although whether he had a choice is a matter of speculation). The company's flagship paper has been plagued by a steady stream of layoffs and firings for months now.

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.

The Village Voice

Casual readers might think the alt-weekly champion of New York’s little guys and The Times’ in-house humanitarian would be bound by ideology. But as a result of two articles Mr. Kristof wrote this year about Voice sister company Backpage.com, he has become the subject of what he calls a “disingenuous” attack published on the The Village Voice website.

In a pair of columns, Mr. Kristof criticized the online classifieds site for maintaining an adult services section, which—like Craigslist’s before it—serves as a virtual agora for prostitutes and their handlers. The more recent piece, published March 17, included a first-person account from “Alissa,” who was sold into sex on Backpage.com starting at age 16.

“Nicholas D. Kristof was wrong about the most devastating 'fact' in his Sunday, March 18th, column in The New York Times," the Village Voice wrote four days later. “According to Alissa's court testimony, she was 16 in 2003. Backpage.com did not exist anywhere in America in 2003.”

“Had Kristof followed any of The New York Times' standards of journalism,” it went on, “he would have known this.”

Mr. Kristof told Off the Record that he had followed the Gray Lady’s standards: “Alissa” turned 16 in the final days of 2003 and remained 16 throughout most of 2004, when, Mr. Kristof was able to verify, Backpage.com was operating in 11 cities, including two—Miami and Ft. Lauderdale—where Alissa said she was sold on Backpage.com specfically.

Mr. Kristof said he was dismayed by how misleading the Voice piece was but, having seen the paper go after other Backpage.com critics like CNN’s Amber Lyon and celebrity activist Ashton Kutcher, he was not surprised by the response.

“That’s why Alissa did not want her real name used,” Mr. Kristof explained. “She was afraid of The Village Voice.”

For a little over a year, The Village Voice has been using editorial space to launch somewhat biased fact-checks on groups and individuals who attempt to report on sex trafficking in the U.S. One article called research produced by the Women’s Funding Network “junk science;” another belittled Mr. Kutcher’s nonprofit organization, Real Men Don’t Buy Girls, with the headline “Real Men Get Their Facts Straight.” The stories are usually printed onto the covers of all 13 papers in the Village Voice Media conglomerate.

The article about Mr. Kristof is unbylined but was reported, at least in part, by Voice editor-in-chief Tony Ortega. Mr. Ortega did not return Off the Record’s request for comment.

At the same time, state attorneys general, clergy members and parents have voiced opposition to Backpage.com with letters to the company, full page ads in The New York Times and online petitions—including one led by John Buffalo Mailer, son of Voice co-founder Norman. After Mr. Kristof’s first column appeared in the Times, Film Forum pulled its advertising. On Friday, 19 U.S. Senators, including Marco Rubio and Richard Blumenthal, wrote to Village Voice Media demanding they close the adult services section of Backpage.com.

Although he has been reporting on sex trafficking for years, even Mr. Kristof was reluctant to take a swing at the Voice, and not just because he admires the paper’s police tapes reporting. (He called the stories “a public service.”)

“It’s a really hard time for newspapers of all kinds,” he said. “This is the Voice's business model and I hate to undermine it. But for anybody who loves journalism: How can you fund that journalism with sex trafficking?”

The question is, can they afford to? Backpage.com rakes in $22 M. annually from prostitution advertising, according to media analysts at AIM. Backpage.com reportedly accounts for one-seventh of VVM’s revenue overall.

“It’s crazy that an alternative newspaper that was supposed to represent truth and honesty should be engaging in a an egregious kind of capitalism that no Fortune 500 company would engage in,” Mr. Kristof said. “No Fortune 500 company would run these kinds of ads. So, now you get a counterculture newspaper that is suspicious of capitalism doing just that.”

VVM contends that because Backpage.com screens posts and cooperates with authorities, online trafficking is actually safer than if the sites were shut down and trafficking returned to the street. Prostitution will always occur, the thinking goes, and therefore it should happen in a space where it can be monitored.

“I think it’s a good debate to have and I think that’s fine,” Mr. Kristof said. “I’m uncomfortable with the idea of the company defending its commercial interests by dispatching its reporters to dig up dirt on a company’s critics, which is what to me seems like, over time, the Voice has done.”

“I’m a grown up. I dish it out. People can criticize me,” he added, “but Alissa is in a difficult situation.”

Mr. Hoberman, a 19-year veteran of the alternative weekly (24-year if you count his days as a freelancer), had this to say to Joe Coscarelli at Daily Intel [who, like the writer of this post, is also a former Village Voice staff writer.]:

I've seen a lot of people lose their jobs there in the last five years," said Hoberman, referring to the period after the legendary publication was sold to the newspaper chain New Times (now Village Voice Media). "I would be disingenuous to say I hadn't considered the possibility that this would happen to me eventually," he added. "I was shocked, but not surprised."

Notably, Mr. Hoberman was one of the chief stewards during the Village Voice writers' union contract negotiations last summer, which almost resulted in a strike, eventually averted at the eleventh hour.

Other Voice staffers past and present are making their displeasure very publicly known.

• Village Voice staff writer Camille Dodero: "send help."
• Village Voice staff writer Steven Thrasher: "Was I ever more professionally inspired then when #Hoberman was rallying the troops for our union fight?"
• Village Voice film editor Allison Benedikt: "Every layoff at the Voice hurts, but this one by far hurts the most, professionally and personally."
• Former Village Voice nightlife columnist Tricia Romano: "why call it the village voice anymore?"
• Former Voice web editor Francesca Stabile (who left the paper not a month ago): "Respect to Jim Hoberman, and may a much better publication earn the right to print his wonderful work."

Others on the periphery—whose comments are being seconded through a series of retweets by Voice staffers—are taking much more insidery shots at the paper: "If only Hobes had written more about Scientology" noted The L Magazine film section's Twitter, in a direct shot across the bow to Voice editor-in-chief Tony Ortega's extensive posting on the religion for the paper's website. For his part, Mr. Ortega has issued the same statement to both Daily Intel and Capital New York, who initially reported the news, emailing:

"The Voice is committed to providing comprehensive film coverage, and will continue to publish our many fine film writers, both in print and online."

What he neglected to note here is that J. Hoberman—the widely acclaimed critic and Voice union shop labor leader who helped establish the Voice's reputation for excellent film criticism—just won't be one of them anymore. Ms. Benedikt may have articulated the sentiment best, concluding: "OK going to drink alcohol now. #hoberman"

That said, former Village Voice intern, staff writer, editor, and Hoberman protege Zach Baron (now reviewing film for The Daily) may have summed up the state of the once-storied alternative weekly's legacy best, in the form of the bylines of Voice legacy writers, all of whom have been laid off since Village Voice Media took over the paper.

Around that time, New York profiled the heads of Village Voice Media with a November, 2005 piece entitled "The Voice From Beyond The Grave" asking if the paper—a "former shell of itself"—could find new life.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

"All of us were in various stages of inebriation (from nothing to Jim Beam-ing), all of us were living life," Mr. Arellano later wrote. "If the guy said it to my face, I'da kick[ed] his ass! ... Carr, Sifton, and Ortega made similar threats. We headed to the Marriot's bar for a nightcapper and laughed with the knowledge our nerdish ways have rewarded us with lives of leisure, while that assaulting asshole could only look forward to trimming his precious goatee."

Awards were announced on Saturday during the convention's annual AltWeekly Awards Lunch. (Full disclosure: this reporter worked at the event, helping put together its daily newsletter.) Winners included Village Voice music editor Rob Harvilla for music criticism and Nikki Finke, the LA Weekly staff writer and Deadline Hollywood Daily blogger. Convention attendees included The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh and New York Press managing editor Jerry Portwood.

This week's edition of the paper contains a 1,200-word obit that starts at the bottom of a page dominated by a large cartoon. The cover, which highlights a story about the dangers of getting hit by a bus in New York, makes no mention of Mailer. But the paper did run a two-page spread on longtime Voice photographer Fred McDarrah who passed away last week--which it did flag on the cover.

Voice editor Tony Ortega said that he decided "to go slow" on Mailer coverage since McDarrah passed away.

"Mailer definitely founded this newspaper, but he had a short relationship with it," Mr. Ortega told The Observer this afternoon. "Fred was at this paper for over 30 years and was on the masthead till the day he passed away. We didn't want to overshadow Fred."

"We're gonna do Mailer next week," he continued. "There was no shortage of Mailer pieces this week."

He said Tom Robbins and Tony Millionaire will both have pieces in next week's paper.

Here's the full list:

Deanna Martin, deputy copy chief (quit Tuesday)
Tricia Romano, reporter (reported to have quit last Friday; sources tell The Observer she was fired)
Keisha Franklin, associate listings editor (quit late last week)
Adamma Ince, deputy managing editor (quit last Thursday)
Maggie Shnayerson, spokeswoman (quit Sept. 12)
Laura Conaway, executive director (fired in August)
Mara Altman, reporter (fired in June)
Kristen Lombardi, reporter (fired in May)
Keach Hagey, media reporter (fired in May)
Emma Span, sports columnist (fired in March)

Ms. Kolben's departure leaves just one woman at the top of the masthead, film editor Allison Benedikt.

Other women still working at the Voice include reporters Lynn Yaeger, Chloé Hilliard, and Maria Luisa Tucker; photo editor Staci Schwartz; listings editors Angela Ashman, and Elisabeth Thompson; web editors Nina Lalli and Camille Dodero; and Mr. Ortega's assistant, Lori Payne.

UPDATE: Sources say associate listings editor Keisha Franklin gave notice last week, right after Ms. Ince did.

Well, although he says it ain’t so, last week’s cover story about the health risks facing WTC rescue workers sure does make it seem like Mr. Ortega is at it again.

Compare and contrast: here’s last week’s cover and here’s one that ran on Nov. 28. Kind of similar! Also the articles are about the same thing.

The similarity appears to owe something to the paper’s recent large-scale staff turnover. According to Mr. Ortega, last week’s cover was designed by new art director Chris Sauvé. Mr. Ortega said Mr. Sauvé had not seen the old one—“Frankly,” he added, “I don’t know if I’ve seen it myself.”

The accompanying stories both deal with the same topic, but beyond that, they really couldn’t be any more different: the earlier story, written by reporter Kristen Lombardi and published during the brief tenure of editor David Blum, was all about how exposure to the rubble was giving Ground Zero rescue workers cancer (it was called “Death by Dust”).

Last week’s article, by Graham Rayman—entitled “Clearing the Air About 9/11’s Toxic Dust and Cancer”—argues that research on the topic is murky, and that “even in the best of circumstances, it is extraordinarily difficult to prove that a specific source has caused cancer.”

Mr. Rayman’s article does not refer to the Voice’s earlier story directly, but reads nevertheless like an unequivocal attempt at refuting its claims.

Why would the Voice want to discredit its own reporting—especially considering Ms. Lombardi’s piece was just recently awarded first place in the investigative reporting category for 2006 by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies?

Thing is, by the time Ms. Lombardi received that award in June, Mr. Ortega had fired her. And so, one wonders whether he farmed out last week’s story to Mr. Rayman as a way of placing distance between his Village Voice and the old one.

Mr. Ortega denied that charge. “There was no conscious effort to ‘tie’ this cover to anything," he wrote in an e-mail. "New editor, new writer, and a new look at an evolving story. Call it weird if you like.”

Mr. Ortega explained that he’d noticed “a lot of reporting in various publications, including the Voice, making claims about what sorts of diseases could be connected to the 9/11 clean-up effort.

“With another anniversary coming up, I asked Graham to take a new look at those claims, and examine the quality of the evidence, not just the numbers of people claiming to be sick."

Mr. Ortega went on: “The piece he wrote does contradict what has been written by other journalists, and what the Voice has written in the past. But that’s the nature of journalism—we’re always gathering new evidence and trying to make sense of what we find.”

New York Press owner Tom Allon, who recently made Mr. Blum editor-in-chief and is apparently eager to start a crosstown newspaper war with the city’s other free weekly, sees it differently: “I’ve never heard of a publication winning first place in a journalism competition for a story they try to debunk six months later. What are they gonna ‘revisit’ next?”

The ladies’ nipples were hidden behind goofy black rectangles; across the bottom of the page was a cheeky, red-letter deck saying, “Looking for a good read?”

The cover was Mr. Ortega’s idea. In a phone interview today, he said he intended it as a playful response to criticism the Voice had been fielding recently for continuing to run ads for escort services and massage parlors in its classified section.

“The subject of our adult ads has been brought up lately in the local press,” Mr. Ortega said later, in an e-mail. “I thought the best response from the newsroom was to poke some fun at ourselves.”

That message went unspoken, however, as the cover was not accompanied by an article inside the paper or addressed in any way. Mr. Ortega said he considered running an editor’s note, but decided against it because he didn’t want to belabor the point.

“This was a mild stunt, not a heavy editorial,” he said.

Manhattan Media CEO Tom Allon, the primary force behind the decision to cut sex-themed ads from the New York Press, said he thought the stunt was too oblique.

“It was an inside joke,” he said. “The punchline was only clear to a small sliver of their readership.”

Mr. Allon said he was nevertheless flattered by the attention.

“Clearly it was a nod to us and to our decision. I was flattered that they thought that a decision we made warranted a Voice cover.”

He added: “It was sort of a sad statement, that this is the only population they have reading their publication—that population being people who look at pornography ads. There’s nothing wrong with that readership but it’s not the readership we’re going for."

According to several staff members, reaction within the Voice ranged from confusion to outrage.

“People didn’t think it made sense,” said one staff member. “There was no explanation for it.”

One long-time editorial employee said the racy cover felt somewhat “off” because the Village Voice’s staff had become so densely populated by heterosexual males since it was taken over by New Times Media in 2005.

“There are no gay people at the Voice anymore,” the employee said. “It used to be all gay people! Suddenly I work with a lot of straight white dudes. They’re all really nice and I like them a lot, but it’s a different vibe. It just has a different tenor when you have a cover like this.”

The employee said that several staff members had expressed dismay at the cover, and that Mr. Ortega brought up the issue at an editorial meeting Monday. “He got really defensive,” the employee said. “He said if you’re going to be offended by something like this, then you shouldn’t work here.”