The Village Voice, the iconoclastic alternative weekly, has been sold to a group of investors. The investors include a private equity fund associated with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, the New York Times reported yesterday. (Now, that's green investing). The paper will be part of a new media company owning eight weeklies across the U.S.
The consortium will take its name from the irreverent tabloid. Even as its circulation numbers and advertising revenue have increased in recent years, the paper's influence is thought to have declined. The takeover is seen as friendly by many of the paper's staffers, including one of its longest-running columnists, free-speech advocate and jazz historian Nat Hentoff, who told The Times that the sale will provoke "relief." The paper's current publisher, David Schneiderman, will head the consortium. Schneiderman was editor of the Voice in 1981, when it won one of its two Pulitzer Prizes, and is not expected to change the paper's direction. In other words, the cranky columnists at the front and the ads for phone and personal "entertainment" at the back will still all be there.
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