There’s something a bit strange about reporting news broken by a guest blogger at my own site, but Soho Press publicity director Kathy Daneman – the aforementioned guest blogger – reports that she received an email “from beloved Village Voice book review editor Ed Park, and he has not survived their latest round of layoffs, which is more than a huge misfortune for us all.” No question about it. The Voice’s literary supplement was an interesting mix of quality reviews, quirky choices and incisive commentary, and the Voice, like so many newspapers, has fallen into the trap of thinking that arts & books coverage is expendable.
The New York Times has the official story here, where Motoko Rich quotes Park as saying he was “shocked and insulted” by the firings, which he found out from a telephone call Wednesday. But, he said, “I could see that this was coming,” in part because of talk of centralized arts coverage. He added that Village Voice management had an “attitude of disdain for what I thought were the strong points of The Voice. It was a swaggering attitude that their chain of papers were so good and The Voice was an embarrassment and we have to get up to their level somehow.” And Jenny Davidson, whose work appeared many times at the Voice, also comments.
The news comes on the heels of the massive gutting that took place at the Dallas Morning News, where 80 staffers – including book critic Jerome Weeks and books editor Charles Ealy – were given buyouts as part of an initiative to cut, cut, cut. It’s a troubling trend that was supposed to have stabilized, but obviously not. And if print outlets are going to shrink, then online outlets should, one hopes, pick up the slack that much more forcefully. But will venture capitalists realize that even a small investment in arts coverage will pay off bigtime in the long-term future?