Battle Breaks Out Among Manhattan's Weeklies

This article is from the archive of our partner .

Players: The Village Voice, a counter-culture icon founded by Greenwich Village beatniks in 1955; The New York Observer, a salmon-hued weekly founded by an Upper East Side financier at the very tail end of the 1980s boom.

The Opening Serve: Kat Stoeffel's New York Observer article "Alt-’s Not Dead! But Are Downtown Alt-Weeklies Headed for Retirement?" details the struggles of rivals (for advertising dollars if not always editorial tone) like The Voice, New York Press and Time Out New York. It looked at The Voice's relentless coverage of the Press's editorial revolving door. "That the story broke in The Village Voice, once the Press’s newsprint nemesis, didn’t merit much attention," she wrote. "Both papers have bigger antagonists these days," like the challenge of the web and the gentrification of Manhattan. Her article ended on a not-very-hopeful note: "Alt-weeklies have to contend not only with a changing media landscape, but with such sweeping demographic shifts as well. As [Press publisher Tom] Allon noted of the sort of New Yorkers who were once the core readers of such titles, 'All those people have moved to Brooklyn.'"

Voice editor Tony Ortega took to Twitter in the morning to take issue with the story. "Funny how a pub that's gone through 4 editors recently yet again brings up that we went though several--five YEARS ago. Sigh," he wrote. Minutes later he questioned the tone of the article: "So the Press is about to close, Time Out was slashed and sold, and the Voice [is] still making money. Funny how the story didn't read that way," and added, "The Observer has been whiplashed by change by change and is hanging by a thread, so I know it's therapeutic to dump on us. Really, I don't mind."

Gawker's John Cook (whose wife Allison Benedikt is the film editor at The Voice) also wondered why The Observer failed to assess its own situation in a conversation of struggling weeklies. "There's a sizable salmon elephant stomping around unheralded in this story," he tweeted this morning, linking to Stoeffel's article. "Oh and the elephant is very, very skinny."

The Return Volley: Nick Rizzo, who has written for The New York Press, jumped to The Observer's defense on Twitter. "As a struggling weekly, the Observer is forbidden from writing about other struggling weeklies? What disclosure should they have?" Cook responded, "If you're gonna take a look at struggling NY weeklies that have been devastated by the web, you ought to look at all of them, no?" Rizzo tweeted back, "That doesn't mean that the Observer should therefore be barred from writing about this. It's an important story," and added, "To be clearer: I wish she had included the Observer, but I know that couldn't happen. Just as you can't go after Gawker." Then Cook ended the conversation. "If I were recounting the history of British new media entrepreneurs who pay for stories, yes, it would seem odd to leave him out," he wrote. "Hair successfully split."

What They Say They're Fighting About: The lack of disclosure from The Observer and whether the paper can deliver an unbiased survey of the business climate for Manhattan weeklies.

What They're Really Fighting About: Which media league The Observer belongs in. The economic fallout of the recession has left New York's media status lines scrambled. Once based out of an Upper East Side townhouse, The Observer didn't see itself as in direct competition with The Voice, which has been long based near Astor Place. But based on his tweets, Ortega clearly sees The Observer as his main competitor. While defenders like Rizzo still believe the salmon paper sits outside the downtown scrum.

Who's Winning Now: Ortega, Cook and anyone who's not The New York Observer. While the article was meant to detail the decline of Manhattan's alt-weeklies, it seems more damage was done to The Observer. The Village Voice, as Stoeffel mentions and Ortega claims, is doing reasonably well and comes off relatively unscathed save for a blurb about thinness and a reliance on Musto.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

About the Author

A new study shows that families act on insufficient information when it comes to figuring out where to enroll their children.

A person trying to choose their next set of wheels might see that car A made it farther than car B in a road test and assume it gets better gas mileage. But that’s only true if the two tanks are filled with the same substance. Putting high-octane gas in one and water in the other, for example, provides little useful information about which car makes the most of its fuel. A new working paper titled “Do Parents Value School Effectiveness?” suggests that parents similarly opt for schools with the most impressive graduates rather than figuring out which ones actually teach best. The study joins a body of research looking critically at what it means for a school to be successful.

Take the work of Erin Pahlke, for example. The assistant professor of psychology at Whitman College saw research showing that girls who attend school only with other girls tend to do better in math and science. The trick, she said, is that those studies didn’t analyze “differences in the students coming into the schools.” As it turns out, those who end up in same-sex schools tend to be wealthier, start out with more skills, and have parents who are more proactive than students who attend co-ed institutions. In a 2014 meta-analysis, Pahlke and her colleagues reviewed the studies and found when examining schools with the same type of students and same level of resources—rather than “comparing [those at] the public co-ed school to [their counterparts at] the fancy private school that’s single-sex down the road”—there isn’t any difference in how the students perform academically. Single-sex schooling also hasn’t been shown to offer a bump in girls’ attitudes toward math and science or change how they think about themselves. In other words, it often looks like single-sex schools are doing a better job educating kids, but they aren't. It's just that their graduates are people who were going to do well at any school. They’re running on high-octane gas.